The quote took three days. The customer wanted to know where the van was.

Pricing lived in a spreadsheet, and so did the mistakes

Producing a quote took 2 to 3 days. The sales team gathered product and pricing information, assembled it by hand, and sent it out, and because the pricing lived in spreadsheets, some of what went out was wrong.

A pricing error is expensive in a way a slow quote is not. It is discovered downstream, usually by the customer, and correcting it costs the margin, the rework and a measure of credibility all at once.

The silence did not end when the order was placed:

• Customers had no delivery visibility. Once an order was in, the next reliable signal was arrival, so any question about progress became a phone call to someone who also had to go and find out.
• Quoting and logistics were separate worlds. Nothing carried context from the quote through to the delivery it turned into.
• Every quote was rebuilt from scratch, which is what made both the duration and the error rate scale with volume.

Two problems, one gap: nothing connected the sale to the shipment

It would be reasonable to treat quoting speed and delivery visibility as separate projects. They share a cause. The order was the handover point between two processes that did not talk, so the quote had to be rebuilt by hand at one end and the customer went dark at the other.

Fixing the quote alone would have produced a fast quote into the same silence. So the scope ran the whole way: quotation, order, and the last mile as one connected journey.

CPQ for the quote, and a tracker the customer can open

Sales Cloud carries sales and quote management, with CPQ Cloud generating the quote itself: pricing and validation applied by the system rather than assembled in a spreadsheet, which is what took the cycle from 2–3 days to about 90 minutes and removed the error source rather than double-checking it.

Experience Cloud gives customers a delivery tracking experience: shipment location and delivery status, available without asking. Intelligent transport assignment coordinates the last mile, and Outlook integration keeps the sales correspondence connected to the record rather than sitting in an inbox.

The quote-to-order cycle halved, costly errors fell 40%, and customer satisfaction rose 35%. The business can now see quote status, active shipments, last-mile position and on-time delivery performance: the two ends of the journey in one view.