How long should an MSP quote take to create?

Under 30 minutes for a standard deal. If you're spending hours building quotes, you either lack templates or you're over-customizing. Both kill velocity.

How do I quote a prospect with no existing IT documentation?

Charge a discovery fee. $500-2,000 to assess their environment before quoting ongoing services. This filters tire-kickers and gives you real data to price accurately.

How do I handle price objections from prospects?

Don't discount. Descope. If they can't afford full stack, offer a smaller package. Discounting trains them to negotiate every renewal and attracts price-sensitive clients who churn.

5 Major MSP Quoting Challenges & Modern Solutions

Quoting IT projects shouldn't feel like a root canal.

But for most Managed Service Providers (MSPs), building accurate, scalable quotes is still frustrating, manual, and time-consuming. In this post, we break down the biggest MSP quoting challenges, where things break down, and how to modernize the process — without duct-taping spreadsheets to legacy tools.

1. Copy-Pasting Scopes of Work from Old Projects

Most MSPs rely on tribal knowledge or Word docs from previous projects. This leads to inconsistent formatting, missed requirements, pricing errors, and "Frankenscopes" with leftover irrelevant content.

The fix is a quoting system that stores reusable templates, tracks what works, and automatically pulls in environment-specific variables. Bonus points if it lets you start from an AI draft.

2. No Context From the Client Environment

Most quoting tools are static. They don't know what the client already owns, their current firewall, endpoint, or backup tools, or whether they need onboarding, config, or migration help.

Integrate your quoting system with Liongard, IT Glue, or internal documentation. Scopable's model, for example, pulls in contextual client data to quote correctly the first time.

3. Quoting Takes Too Long

A typical MSP project quote takes 2-6 hours across sales/CSM notes, SOW writing, pricing lookups, and approval cycles. That delay costs you deals. Sales cycles drag. Team morale drops.

Automate scoping with question-driven flows and smart defaults. Your quoting tool should write 80% of the SOW for you, not the other way around.

4. Disconnected Pricing and Costing

Quoting tools often don't know your current labor rates, vendor pricing, or cost/margin by role or SKU. That leads to under-quoting, especially when engineers or sales reps are rushing.

Use a quoting engine with rule-based pricing, margin controls, and service SKU logic — so techs quote correctly even if they aren't financial wizards.

5. No Visibility Into What's Working

You send quotes. Some get approved. Some disappear. But you don't know which templates convert best, what your average margin is, or who's quoting what.

Modern quoting platforms include analytics: quote volume and velocity, win/loss tracking, rep performance, and template usage. Use that data to iterate and improve — not just send and hope.

Enter Scopable

Scopable is a comprehensive Customer Experience & vCIO Platform built for MSPs. We solve these quoting challenges and more by combining deep integrations with PSA, RMM, M365, and more for context-aware scoping, automated gap analysis comparing clients to your "Golden Standard," strategic roadmapping and QBR presentation generation, AI-assisted SOW writing with real-time environment data, smart pricing with margin controls, and beautiful, client-friendly proposals.

No more disconnected tools. No more quoting from scratch. No more missed revenue.

Want to learn more about how we're different? Check out our comparison with ConnectWise Sell alternatives or read about why we built Scopable. For more on protecting margins, see our guide on Quote It Right: 5 Steps to Protect MSP Margins.

Challenges in MSP Quoting (And How to Fix Them)