Sales calculators blog thumnail
22. August 2022

Drive sales with interactive price quote calculators 

Imagine this: your sales team uses a complex pricing model to create detailed price quotes for prospective clients. The model is built in Excel and it’s huge. Every adjustment of an individual quote or modification to the pricing structure requires labor intensive calculations and sending Excel sheets back and forth – the team does so constantly.

What’s more, your team needs to send professional-looking quotes out to clients and/or internally to other departments, so they create and email PDFs for each — often multiple times. It’s a time-consuming and error-prone process. Sound familiar?

What if we told you that GRID can make this process much simpler?

With GRID, your spreadsheet data actually acts as an engine, able to power the customizable calculators, reports and dynamic models that teams like yours need.

Working with a GRID-built interactive calculator means a vastly simplified process of communicating complex models, so that instead of going back to the drawing board every time you create a new quote, you’ll be able to smoothly walk your clients through a custom price quote right in your sales meeting.

Quickly relating costs and benefits to clients in a tangible way will help your team close the deal, asap.

The beauty of a GRID-built price quote calculator

  • Easy to update & maintain. Any changes you make to spreadsheets stored in cloud drives will update your GRID calculator automatically. Uploaded spreadsheets and connected databases will do the same via a simple manual refresh.

  • Interactivity. Need to help prospective clients better understand the details of their quote? Interactive calculators are the ultimate tool for exploring financial possibilities, making it easy for your sales team to show clear value to clients.

  • Shareable & secure. Ready to send a quote to your clients, or collaborate with a colleague in another department? Just click Share to grant access or send the document via link. GRID docs have a variety of privacy settings to ensure that confidential information stays that way.

Let’s make this happen. Build, customize, and share!

In this section, we’ll walk you through this interactive Price quote calculator template. Just copy and customize it to get some useful hands-on GRID practice. Let’s dive in!

Price quote calculator gif
  1. Prep your spreadsheets. In the example template, we have two sheets connected: one for the model and one for the price list.

  2. Connect or upload your spreadsheets. Alternatively, you can select another data source for your new GRID document, like an Airtable or Notion database.

Add column elements

3. Take some time to play around with layout options and look at how we’ve set up the template. We’ve used Column elements with 1 to 4 columns throughout, but you can add or remove columns to your liking using the Edit icon.

Note: Pro users can set specific background colors for documents with an enhanced variety of color and font options, available under the Appearance tab in Document settings.

4. At this point, you can add interactive features into your columns. Choose from checkboxes, input fields, formula outputs and more — depending on how you’d like people to interact with the calculator. You’ll find a list of GRID elements under the Insert menu [+].

5. For the example template we used:

  • Input fields to collect customer information & date of quote.

  • Dropdown selections for order quantities and product categories.

  • Formula outputs to display values for Unit price, billing information etc.

  • Checkboxes to determine visibility of individual columns and the final quote.

  • We also used tables to show a clear breakdown of costs.

  • Finally, select data for each of your elements. You can practice using the sample data in the template, or replace it with data from another source.

Insert interactive elements

Interacting with the data in the template demonstrates how each variable affects the final quote. It’s easy to reset all document inputs when you’re done exploring – especially when you need to create and share multiple quotes based on the same pricing structure.

We hope you’re inspired to build your own variety of interactive calculators and internal tools. Need more inspiration? Grab one of these templates and make them your own.

GRID helps you save time and effort, and look more professional while you’re at it.

If you’re looking for assistance on this or any other topic, stop by our Help center for answers, tutorials, and friendly GRID team members who are ready to chat.

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