How Activate Design Shortened Their Quoting Cycle and Won New Work
A digital agency that moved from spreadsheets to instant ballpark quotes — without changing how they price.
Get credible quotes out the same day instead of days later
AI drafts based on real historic pricing, not generic templates
Turn 60–90 minute quotes into a few minutes of review and refinement
Customer Background
Activate Design is a Christchurch-based digital agency delivering custom websites, print, and marketing materials for a broad mix of clients. The team fields a constant stream of enquiries, many of them early conversations — "What would a project like this cost?" — where a rough but trustworthy ballpark quote is the first step towards winning the relationship.
The Pain — Why Quoting Was Too Slow
Quoting wasn't technically difficult. The process worked. It was simply too slow for the volume and tempo of enquiries they were handling.
The team used design tools and spreadsheets to build quotes — tools that worked well, but meant every new quote started from scratch.
60–90 minutes to build even simple quotes, from first line item to final layout
Repeated copy/paste from past jobs and spreadsheets to get a starting point
Leads cooling off while they waited for a quote, especially for low-certainty opportunities
The real bottleneck wasn't the tools — it was momentum. When quoting took too long, conversations stalled and some leads simply went quiet. They wanted to respond early and confidently, without committing an hour to every quote.
The Turning Point
Activate Design didn't need a new pricing model. They needed a faster way to apply the knowledge they already had, without digging through folders of past quotes.
They adopted QuoteScope and started with a simple idea:
Describe the job in plain English. Let the AI do the heavy lifting of looking through past quotes and proposing the pricing.
No onboarding workshop. No template redesign. Just prompt → draft → quick review.
Once they provided some historic quote data, the AI's drafts began to reflect their real pricing patterns. The team focused on checking and refining — not rebuilding from scratch.
After a few runs, the quotes stopped feeling "experimental". They started feeling familiar and safe to send.
“Quotescope has significantly sped our sales process, allowing us to use a simple prompt to generate a professional, accurate proposal. The time saved is substantial, allowing me to focus more on customer engagement and less on manual document creation.
Its built-in visibility feature is also fantastic — knowing exactly when a customer has viewed the quote means we can time our follow-ups, eliminating guesswork.”
The Workflow Today
For new enquiries, the quoting process now looks like this:
- 1. Write a short description of the job — like emailing a colleague.
- 2. Let the AI look through past quotes and generate a draft in seconds.
- 3. Review the draft and make small edits where needed.
- 4. Send.
The AI does the heavy lifting of searching through historical pricing patterns. The team spends their time on judgment and refinement — not on copy/paste and file hunting.
One of their early AI-generated quotes was accepted by a client with minimal discussion. That was the moment the team stopped thinking "test" and started thinking "standard practice".
Outcomes That Matter
Early quotes are now same-day instead of "when we get a spare moment"
Accuracy increased because pricing reflects historic patterns, not guesswork
Time spent quoting is dramatically lower, especially for exploratory enquiries
Less manual digging through old files — pricing knowledge is now surfaced when it's needed
View tracking enables perfectly timed follow-ups by showing exactly when quotes are opened
Final refinements — adjusting line items, grouping, or wording — happen in the editor manually or with AI assistance. That work only begins once the draft quote already exists.