Most businesses that sell custom products - pergolas, fencing, kitchens, cladding, anything built to spec - run into the same wall. A client lands on the website, fills in “I’m interested in a quote for a pergola”, and you get an email with no dimensions, no material preference, nothing. You call back. They don’t pick up. You leave a message. They reply two days later. By then they’ve already gone with someone else.

It’s not a motivation problem. It’s a system problem.

A form that collects the right data

The issue with a generic “describe your enquiry” field is that clients don’t know what’s relevant. One person writes three paragraphs, another writes “pergola 4x3”. Neither gives you enough to price anything.

The fix is a form that leads the client through the questions. Not one long page with ten fields - most people close that. Five short steps, one or two questions each.

For a company that installs pergolas and outdoor structures, it looks roughly like this:

Step 1: What are you looking for? Pergola / Canopy / Wooden decking / Fence / Carport

Step 2: Approximate dimensions - length and width in metres (a slider, not a free text field)

Step 3: Material - timber, WPC, or aluminium. A short note explaining the differences helps here since most clients have no idea.

Step 4: Extras - roof type (polycarbonate / glass), LED lighting, electric blinds, side glazing.

Step 5: Postcode, name, phone, email.

When they submit that, you have dimensions, material, add-ons, and location. Everything you need to quote.

You don’t need custom development for this. Typeform handles it without any coding, has conditional logic (glazing options only appear if they picked pergola, not fencing) and gets high completion rates because it’s one thing at a time. Tally is a free alternative and surprisingly capable. A custom-built form only makes sense when your logic is genuinely complex or Typeform gets too expensive at your volume.

What happens after they submit

This is the part most businesses don’t have. When the form is submitted, the data goes automatically into n8n - an automation tool we regularly set up for clients. n8n passes that data to an AI model along with your pricing sheet and your quote template.

The AI drafts the quote. Not a generic one - it writes out exactly what the client selected. “Based on your dimensions of 5x3m and your choice of WPC with LED lighting, we recommend…” and then prices that come from your actual rate card, not thin air.

The whole thing takes about 30 seconds.

Before the quote reaches the client, you get a Slack message or email with the draft and a confirm button. The AI does 90% of the work but you stay in the loop - you either say “looks good” or tweak a detail. When you confirm, the quote goes to the client as a PDF, the contact gets added to your CRM at the right pipeline stage, and a follow-up reminder is set for three days out.

When they say yes

Clients typically confirm a quote by replying to the email, clicking a link, or signing in DocuSign. When that happens, the system creates an invoice in your accounting tool - Stripe, Zoho Invoice, whatever you use - and sends it to the client. Payment reminders are scheduled automatically and your team gets notified that the project is starting.

No manual entry. No “I’ll send the invoice when I get home.”

Why speed matters here

With enquiries for physical products - pergolas, fences, bathrooms - the client is usually comparing two or three suppliers at the same time. Whoever sends a concrete quote first has a noticeably better shot at the job. Not necessarily the cheapest option, but the one that looks organised and took them seriously.

A quote in ten minutes instead of two days says that without having to spell it out.

How implementation works

Before suggesting any tools, we look at what the business already uses. If you’re on HubSpot, we plug into that. If you invoice through an existing accounting system, we connect to it. There’s no need to replace things that are already working.

Where nothing fits, we recommend the fastest path to a working flow - not necessarily the most feature-rich option. The goal is a system that actually runs, not the longest possible list of integrations. Setup typically takes one to three days, depending on how complex the pricing is and how many edge cases the business logic needs to handle.

If you want to see how this would work for your business specifically, get in touch. We’ll walk you through an example and figure out together whether it makes sense.