Discover how CueQuote's smart suggestions analyze your past proposals to recommend missing items, flag repricing opportunities, and identify catalog gaps — turning every quote into a faster, more profitable one.
Every experienced AV project manager carries a mental checklist — the items that always get forgotten on the first draft, the equipment that should have been priced higher last season, the new products that clients keep requesting but that never made it into the catalog. This institutional knowledge lives in people's heads, and when those people are busy, on vacation, or no longer with the company, the knowledge walks out the door. Smart suggestions in CueQuote formalize this expertise by analyzing your proposal history and surfacing actionable recommendations before you hit send.
The smart suggestions feature is built around three distinct tabs, each addressing a different aspect of proposal quality. The first tab — Missing Items — compares your current proposal against patterns from your past quotes for similar event types. If you are building a proposal for a corporate conference and you have historically included confidence monitors, a presentation clicker, and a backup laptop for every conference you have quoted, but the current proposal is missing the backup laptop, the system flags it. This is not a generic checklist; it is a recommendation drawn from your own quoting behavior. The AI learns what you typically include for each event type and alerts you when the current proposal deviates from your established patterns.
The Missing Items tab is particularly valuable for junior team members or new hires who do not yet have the institutional knowledge that senior staff take for granted. A project manager with ten years of experience instinctively adds cable management, power distribution, and a tech table to every stage setup. A newer team member might forget one or two of these items, leading to either an incomplete proposal or a last-minute scramble on event day. Smart suggestions act as a safety net that catches these omissions before the proposal reaches the client, ensuring consistent quality regardless of who on your team builds the quote.
The second tab — Repricing — addresses one of the most common margin leaks in AV rental companies: outdated pricing. Equipment costs change, market rates shift, and the rental rate you set eighteen months ago for a specific LED wall panel may no longer reflect current market conditions. The repricing tab compares your catalog rates against the prices you have actually been quoting in recent proposals. If you have been consistently overriding a catalog price — quoting a line array at four hundred fifty euros per day when your catalog says three hundred seventy-five — the system suggests updating the catalog to match your real-world pricing. This keeps your catalog accurate and ensures that AI-generated proposals start with rates that reflect your current market positioning.
Repricing suggestions also work in reverse. If market rates have increased but your catalog has not kept pace, you may be leaving money on the table on every proposal. The system identifies items where your quoted rates are significantly below industry benchmarks or below what competitors in your market are charging. While CueQuote does not have access to competitor pricing, it does detect patterns where your rates have remained flat while your proposal frequency for those items has increased — a signal that demand is strong and a rate increase would likely be accepted by clients.
The third tab — Catalog Gaps — identifies equipment that appears frequently in your proposals but does not exist in your catalog. This happens more often than most companies realize. A project manager adds a custom line item to a proposal — say, a haze machine or a specific type of cable adapter — and it works for that one quote. But because it was never added to the catalog, the next proposal that needs the same item requires another manual addition. Over time, these one-off items accumulate, and your catalog becomes an incomplete representation of what you actually rent. The Catalog Gaps tab surfaces these recurring manual additions and suggests creating proper catalog entries for them, complete with suggested pricing based on what you have been charging.
The practical impact of smart suggestions compounds over time. Each proposal you create feeds the system with more data about your quoting patterns, making future suggestions more accurate and relevant. After fifty proposals, the system has a solid understanding of your typical equipment configurations for different event types. After two hundred, it can detect nuanced patterns — like the fact that you always add an extra wireless microphone for panel discussions but not for keynote-only events, or that outdoor events always include weather protection covers that indoor events do not. This learning curve means the feature becomes more valuable the longer you use it.
For AV companies managing multiple team members, smart suggestions also serve as a quality assurance layer. When every proposal passes through the same suggestion engine, the output quality becomes more consistent across the team. A proposal built by your most experienced project manager and one built by your newest hire will both benefit from the same pattern-based recommendations, reducing the variance in proposal quality that clients might otherwise notice.
The workflow integration is designed to be non-intrusive. Smart suggestions appear as a panel alongside the proposal editor — you can review them, accept relevant ones with a single click, or dismiss suggestions that do not apply to the current project. The system does not force changes; it offers informed recommendations that you can act on or ignore based on your judgment. This balance between automation and human control is what makes the feature practical for daily use rather than a novelty that gets turned off after the first week.
Ultimately, smart suggestions represent a shift from reactive to proactive proposal building. Instead of catching mistakes after a client questions a missing item, you catch them before the proposal is sent. Instead of discovering outdated pricing when a quarterly review reveals shrinking margins, you update rates as the system flags them. Instead of realizing your catalog is incomplete when a new team member cannot find an item they need, you fill gaps as they are identified. This proactive approach saves time, protects margins, and elevates the overall quality of every proposal your company produces.