Top 5 Salesforce Quoting Challenges (and How VARs Can Overcome Them)

Salesforce is the backbone of many reseller and VAR businesses. It is powerful, flexible, and designed to scale with your sales process. But when it comes to quoting inside Salesforce, things often get messy. What should be a simple process of generating a professional and accurate quote becomes slow, error prone, and frustrating.

In this post, we will walk through the five biggest challenges VARs face when quoting in Salesforce and show you how automation can turn these obstacles into opportunities.

1. Complex Vendor and RFQ Workflows

For VARs, quoting is rarely as simple as pulling a price from a catalog. You are often juggling multiple vendors, RFQs (Requests for Quotes), and custom pricing agreements. Salesforce was not built with this complexity in mind, which leads to:

• Manual back and forth with vendors

• Lost RFQ PDFs buried in inboxes

• Delays that frustrate customers

The Fix: Quoting automation centralizes RFQs, vendor pricing, and approvals inside Salesforce. Instead of switching between systems, reps can request and manage vendor quotes directly in one place.

2. Pricing Inconsistencies and Margin Leakage

When quotes are built manually, small pricing errors slip through and those add up. Discounting mistakes, outdated price lists, or missed vendor incentives can erode margins.

The Fix: Automated quoting tools sync with real time vendor catalogs and enforce margin guardrails. Reps get alerts if discounts cut too deep, ensuring profitability on every deal.

3. Slow Approvals and Collaboration Challenges

Sales teams often need multiple layers of approval before sending a quote. In Salesforce, this usually means long email chains, version confusion, and frustrated reps waiting for sign off.

The Fix: Workflow automation routes quotes to the right stakeholders instantly. Approvals happen within Salesforce, with full visibility and clear records. This speeds up turnaround time without sacrificing control.

4. Limited Automation for Multi Vendor Quotes

Salesforce CPQ is powerful, but it was not built with VARs in mind. Multi vendor deals often require stitching together data from several sources, leaving reps copy pasting line items into a patchwork style quote.

The Fix: Quote automation software designed for VARs integrates multi vendor catalogs and pricing into one unified interface. Quotes that used to take hours can now be built in minutes.

5. Lack of Reporting and Forecasting Insights

When quoting data lives in spreadsheets, emails, or disconnected systems, you lose visibility. Leadership cannot easily see pipeline health, quote velocity, or forecast accuracy.

The Fix: Automating quotes within Salesforce ensures that all your quoting data flows into reports and dashboards. You get a clear picture of revenue projections, quote activity, and team performance without extra data entry.

Turning Quoting Challenges into Opportunities

For VARs, quoting in Salesforce does not have to be a headache. By automating RFQs, pricing, approvals, and multi vendor workflows, you not only save time and reduce errors but also gain insights that help you sell smarter.

At Quote.ly, we built our quoting automation software specifically for VARs and resellers on Salesforce. The result is faster quotes, stronger margins, and happier customers.

Ready to streamline your quoting process? Schedule a demo and see how Quote.ly can transform your Salesforce quoting.