OC HUG Recap: Smarter Quoting in HubSpot, From Native Quotes to Advanced CPQ

At the June 4 Orange County HubSpot User Group, our first in-person meeting since the group relaunched, the topic was quoting: how far HubSpot's built-in tools will take you, and when it's time for a dedicated CPQ (configure, price, quote) tool. Ryan Huff, CEO of Quotivity, set out to "demystify CPQ," and Jenny Seo, a Senior Product Manager on HubSpot's Billing Platform team, demoed HubSpot's full quote-to-cash flow.

Watch the full session

Missed the meeting, or want to rewatch the demos? Here's the full recording from June 4.

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Meet the speakers

Ryan Huff is an Orange County native who has been a HubSpot customer since 2020 and a partner since 2022, after 10 years in the Salesforce ecosystem with Cirrus Insight. He leads Quotivity, a HubSpot-native CPQ that launched inside hapily and spun off as its own company. Ryan and John go back to 2010, when Ryan worked as a subcontractor on John's first CRM project.

Jenny Seo is a Senior Product Manager at HubSpot on the Billing Platform team, where she leads the Connected CPQ, Billing and Payments project.

What CPQ actually means

• Configure: select the right products, options and bundles for a deal.
• Price: apply the right pricing, including discounts, volume tiers and customer-specific rates.
• Quote: generate a professional, accurate quote document for the customer.

In the sales process, CPQ sits between qualifying a deal and negotiating the contract. Many companies evaluating it for the first time are replacing a quoting spreadsheet that has grown more complicated over the years. The goal: faster, more accurate quotes and less back-and-forth.

Signs you need CPQ

• Your reps build quotes in spreadsheets.
• Pricing mistakes reach customers.
• Approvals are ad hoc or inconsistent.
• Your products have complex options, bundles or variants.
• Quote turnaround takes days, not hours.
• Revenue reporting is poor because every quote is one-off.

The quoting landscape in HubSpot

• Legacy quotes: HubSpot's original quoting engine. It's no longer available to portals created after September 3, 2025, but existing customers and companies using third-party apps can still use it.
• HubSpot CPQ: built for simpler use cases, such as flat-list quotes with straightforward pricing and basic approvals.
• Native add-ons like Quotivity: built inside HubSpot with the same data model and user experience. A fit for mid-market teams that need advanced rules, bundles and governance without a separate sales tool.
• External CPQ like DealHub: standalone, enterprise-grade CPQ outside the HubSpot interface. A fit for enterprise SaaS companies that need standalone billing and heavy contract management.

What HubSpot CPQ includes

• Quote builder: drag-and-drop templates, with sections you can lock for governance.
• AI-assisted creation: Breeze drafts cover letters, summaries and line-item adjustments.
• Approval workflows: rules that trigger on discount percentage, deal value or specific products.
• Flexible pricing: volume, graduated and stair-step tiers.
• Quote-to-deal sync: a signed quote updates the deal's line items automatically.
• E-signature and payments: an interactive web quote with built-in signing and HubSpot Payments.
• Closing Agent: an AI chatbot embedded in the quote that answers buyer questions in real time.

HubSpot CPQ lives in Commerce Hub, and its advanced features require a Commerce seat.

When you outgrow native quoting

Ryan's case for an advanced, HubSpot-native CPQ like Quotivity centers on companies with complicated pricing or very large product catalogs, such as manufacturers and technology companies. It adds:

• Complex pricing: price books, volume tiers, pricing tables, product variants and calculated pricing.
• Configurable products: dynamic bundles with logic-based options.
• Quote automation: conditional logic and property sets.
• Governance: approvals and strict policy enforcement.
• Native reporting: works with your existing HubSpot dashboards.

Because it's built on HubSpot's own Products, Deals and Quotes, there's no migration and no separate CRM login for reps.

From Ryan's demo

• Price books for different customer segments, alongside volume pricing, percentage adjustments and calculated pricing formulas.
• Guardrails for reps: approval workflows that kick in based on discount level.
• Configurable bundles: Ryan used a MacBook Pro to show how options and add-ons build into one configured product.
• Quote templates that use HubSpot Content Hub for design flexibility.

From Jenny's demo: quote to cash in HubSpot

Jenny walked through the end-to-end flow in what HubSpot was about to rename Revenue Hub, and announced two releases: Contracts going generally available on June 8, and Connected CPQ, Billing and Payments entering public beta on June 16.

• Building the quote: line items pre-populate from the deal, the quote can collect a PO number, and sales tax is calculated automatically.
• Flexible billing: mix one-time and recurring items on the same quote, each with its own billing schedule.
• Payment collection: choose automatic or manual payment collection.
• The buyer's side: customers accept the quote and pay in one experience.
• Contracts: each contract tracks its billing schedule and progress, total contract value, billing history and projected future invoices.
• Changes mid-contract: a change quote handles upgrades or adjustments with prorated amounts.
• Renewals: renewing creates a new contract and carries over the existing recurring line items.

One question from the room, about tax exemption for resale customers, went back to the HubSpot team for an answer.

How to choose

Start with the pain, not the product. If your quotes are simple and your pricing is flat, HubSpot's native quoting, contracts and billing may be all you need, and the quote-to-cash flow Jenny showed covers a lot of ground. If reps are rebuilding quotes in spreadsheets, approvals happen in Slack threads, or your catalog has bundles and variants, look at a native CPQ that keeps the work inside HubSpot. If you need standalone billing and heavy contract management outside HubSpot, an external enterprise CPQ may fit better.

Join the next OC HUG

The Orange County HubSpot User Group meets monthly, alternating virtual sessions with in-person meetings in Irvine, with guest speakers from HubSpot and its partners. The focus is business problems, not just features, so bring your questions and topic ideas. Get in touch with John Hulina to join, and be sure to join the group itself on the HubSpot User Groups site, not just the event, so you hear about every meeting.