Field Service Quoting: Generate Quotes On Site and Win More Jobs

You drive to the customer’s house. You walk the site, take notes, answer their questions, and tell them you’ll send a quote through tomorrow. You drive to the next job. By the time you get back to the office, you’ve got three more quotes to write, two callbacks, and a pile of paperwork. That quote from this morning? It gets written two days later — if the customer is lucky.

Meanwhile, the customer has called two other companies. One of them quoted on the spot. Guess who gets the job?

The gap between the site visit and the delivered quote is where field service companies lose work they should be winning. Not because their pricing is wrong or their service is poor, but because they’re slow. And in most cases, the delay is entirely unnecessary.

Why Speed Wins Jobs

There’s a well-documented pattern in field service sales: the first company to deliver a professional quote wins the job a disproportionate amount of the time. Not always, and not regardless of price — but all else being equal, speed creates a powerful advantage.

The reason is psychological as much as practical. When you quote on site, the customer is standing in front of the problem. They can see the broken unit, the outdated wiring, the cracked pipe. The urgency is real and present. Two days later, they’ve adjusted to the inconvenience. The urgency has faded. They’re comparing your quote against competitors with fresh eyes and no emotional connection to your visit.

On-site quoting also signals professionalism. A company that can generate a clean, detailed quote on a phone or tablet — complete with line items, photos, and terms — looks more organised and capable than one that scribbles notes on a pad and promises to “get something to you by end of week.”

What On-Site Quoting Actually Requires

Quoting on site doesn’t mean making up numbers on the spot. It means having a system that does the heavy lifting so your tech or estimator can assemble a professional quote in minutes rather than hours.

Pre-Loaded Pricing

Your system should contain your current price book — labour rates, common parts, standard job packages, materials markups. When the tech selects “Install split system — 2.5kW,” the price, description, and estimated duration should auto-populate. Variations and options are added from a predefined list, not typed from memory.

This eliminates the two biggest sources of quoting errors: pricing from memory (which leads to undercutting yourself) and forgetting to include items (which leads to either absorbing costs or awkward conversations with customers after the fact).

Photo Documentation

A picture of the current installation, the proposed mounting location, the switchboard, or the access route does two things. It gives the customer confidence that you’ve properly assessed the job. And it gives your team a visual record that eliminates the “what did the site look like again?” problem when the job is scheduled weeks later.

Your quoting tool should let the tech attach photos directly to the quote — both for internal reference and as part of the customer-facing document. A quote that includes a photo of the existing unit with a clear description of the replacement builds far more trust than a generic line item.

Customer Signatures

Getting a signature on site doesn’t just mean the customer agrees to the price. It means they’ve committed. A signed quote has a dramatically higher conversion rate than an unsigned one sitting in someone’s inbox — because the act of signing creates psychological commitment and eliminates the “I’ll think about it” delay.

Your tool should capture a digital signature on the phone or tablet screen, attached to the quote document. This also creates a clean record for dispute avoidance later — the customer agreed to this scope at this price on this date.

Instant Delivery

The moment the customer signs, the quote should arrive in their inbox as a professional PDF. No waiting for the office to “send it through.” No formatting issues. No delays. The customer has the document before your tech has reached the van.

For customers who want to think about it, instant delivery means your quote is the first one in their inbox — often before competitors have even visited the site.

Good-Better-Best: Offering Options On Site

One of the most effective sales techniques in field service is presenting tiered options. Instead of a single quote, you offer three: a basic option that solves the immediate problem, a mid-range option with added value, and a premium option that addresses everything.

On-site quoting makes this practical. With pre-configured packages in your system, your tech can present three options on the tablet screen, walk the customer through the differences, and let them choose. This is nearly impossible to do with a “we’ll send you a quote” approach — by the time you’ve written up three options back at the office, the moment has passed.

The good-better-best approach typically increases average job value by 15-30%, because customers self-select into the option that matches their budget and priorities. Many choose the middle option who would have only been quoted the basic if you’d presented a single price.

Handling Complex Quotes

Not every job can be quoted on the spot. Large commercial projects, multi-stage installations, and jobs requiring engineering input or council approvals need more time. That’s fine — on-site quoting doesn’t mean every quote happens in the field.

But even for complex jobs, you can capture significant value on site. A preliminary estimate with a defined scope gives the customer a ballpark and demonstrates seriousness. A detailed site assessment with photos, measurements, and notes — captured digitally during the visit — means the estimator back at the office has everything they need to build the formal quote without a return visit or a phone call asking “what was the ceiling height again?”

The goal is to eliminate wasted effort and unnecessary delays, not to force every quote into a five-minute window on a phone screen.

Where Off-the-Shelf Tools Help (and Where They Don’t)

Platforms like ServiceM8, Tradify, Jobber, and Fergus all offer mobile quoting features. For straightforward residential work — standard job types with predictable pricing — they handle on-site quoting well. If you’re currently quoting from the office days after the visit, any of these platforms will improve your conversion rate.

Where they fall short is pricing complexity. Businesses with customer-specific pricing, volume discounts, contract rates that differ from ad-hoc rates, or pricing that depends on variables the tech assesses on site (like distance from switchboard, height of installation, or asbestos presence) need business logic that generic platforms can’t model.

Getting Started

You don’t need to overhaul everything to start quoting on site. Here’s the practical path:

Week one: Load your pricing for your five most common job types into a mobile-accessible system. This might be a field service platform, a custom tool, or even a well-structured PDF template on a tablet. Get one or two techs quoting on site for these simple, predictable jobs.

Week two: Add photo capture and digital signatures to the workflow. Measure how many quotes are delivered on site versus falling back to the office.

Week three: Build good-better-best templates for your top job types. Track whether average job value increases when techs present options.

Month two: Measure conversion rates for on-site quotes versus office-generated quotes. The difference will make the case for rolling it out across the team.

The maths is straightforward. If you do 20 site visits per week and your current conversion rate is 40%, you’re winning 8 jobs. If on-site quoting lifts that to 55%, you’re winning 11 jobs from the same number of visits. Three extra jobs per week at your average job value — that’s the ROI, and it starts the week you begin quoting on site.