Streamlining Sales Through a Prototype Quoting Platform

Challenge
Our additive manufacturing team faced two recurring challenges: quoting was time-consuming—especially for multi-part prototype orders—and small-dollar jobs often weren't covering costs, particularly when a print failed. Additionally, we had no way to accept payment upfront, which meant weeks-long delays in collecting revenue.

Approach
I led the development and rollout of a prototype sales model and an entirely HubSpot-native quote system to address these issues. This involved:

• Designing a pricing model based on print platform capacity rather than per-part costs

• Leveraging HubSpot’s Line Items and Snippets to auto-populate quotes with pricing, part details, and standard terms

• Enabling e-signatures and integrated payment via Stripe to secure pre-payment before initiating a print
  
  

To align departments and ensure cross-functional adoption, I hosted bi-weekly working sessions with:

• Finance, to analyze 5 years of historical print data and prove the model’s profitability

• Customer Service, to ensure ERP and quality system compatibility

• Operations, to define lead times and capacity thresholds

• Sales, to train the team on quote creation and how to frame the new offering
  

Results

• Reduced quote turnaround from 2 days to under 1 hour

• Enabled payment collection before printing, eliminating post-order invoicing delay

• Improved customer experience with a clear, modern, and fast buying process

• Increased internal alignment and sales team efficiency

• Successfully transitioned the model from pilot to permanent adoption
  
  

Key Insight
By analyzing over 9,000 rows of legacy data and clearly defining the prototype model as a non-recurring engineering (NRE) service, we were able to de-risk failed prints and set the stage for smoother transitions into production. Customers appreciated the simplicity and clarity—and we built a foundation that scales with our business.