Your Lead Times are Killing Your Close Rates
The enemy of custom manufacturing today is speed. The enemy is not visible like press brakes or flatbed scanners. It is not making you wait in the shadows like a computer glitch or a supply chain disruption. It is your own quotation process. When you cannot turn a quote around in hours, you are letting your revenue walk out the door without you even realising it. You are turning away customers by infuriating them with missed promises. You are losing deals to competitors that simply have the nerve to respond first.
Imagine that I told you right now that your quotation process is costing you money. For many CAD designers and custom manufacturers, that will be a shocking statement.
You deal in RFQs, specs, and delivery dates. Quoting and closing sales are the lifeblood of your business. How could this invisible revenue leak go unnoticed?
Here’s the hard truth:
86% of manufacturers have lost business because their quoting process is too slow or manual. The average manufacturer is losing 5% of annual revenue to quotation delays and errors – £2 million per year in a mid-size manufacturing company. Some companies are losing 15% of revenue [3]. Manufacturing margins average 27%. If 5% of that flows out the door for insufficient quotation processes, that is a massive competitive vulnerability that most companies are ignoring.
But most manufacturers have not made fundamental changes to their quoting process in years. You are still chasing approval signatures via email chains, digging around for supplier data locked in spreadsheets, and manually entering CAD details into estimating software. Every moment that process takes is slicing into your win rate, your customer retention rate, and your company growth.
You do not have a technology problem to solve “someday.” You have an unsolved business problem that is costing you business today.
The Winner Takes All
It’s difficult to overstate how pivotal speed is in today’s manufacturing sales environment, so let’s start with the biggest surprise in modern sales data:
35–50% of all deals go to the vendor that responds first. Not the best vendor. Not the cheapest. The first.
Did you really think sales came down to offering the best price or lead time? To some degree, but not nearly as much as they once did. Speed has displaced price in winning competitive sales, and being first-to-quote is the most critical advantage in the sales process.
In today’s manufacturing environment, the buyer will shortlist the first three quotes they receive. It’s how most buying happens. The buyer has just spent time entering a CAD file into their system, outlining the specs in a quote request, and filling out their form. They now have the choice of three or four quotes (with three being the average number of vendors a typical RFQ invites). The first quote is no longer special, but it establishes an expectation. The buyer will compare every other quote to that first one. That quote becomes the baseline. The buyer has anchored the pricing and lead time expectation in their head.
So what if you are the second quote they see? Now you are defending your price and lead time against an incumbent. You are no longer making the sale, you are no longer in the game, you are merely preventing your competitor from winning the sale.
That sounds like a losing position in which to find yourself every time. Do you see where I am going with this? Speed is no longer just about taking time out of your process for the sake of efficiency. Speed is no longer just about the customer experience and customer retention. Speed is about not losing by default.
The current state of RFQ response times is a failure of extreme proportions for manufacturers. The current average manufacturing sales cycle is 130 days from initial contact to close . Manufacturing buyers have an average of 24–48 hours to make a quote decision . Manufacturing proposal times (also known as the “proposal stage” within the sales cycle) average 45 days . If you want to call it something different, your customers call it “speed.” That’s where you live. In that sales/proposal phase. And in that phase, speed kills.
In that 45-day average manufacturing proposal stage, vendors take on average 2 days to quote. 2 days! From 130 days it goes down to 2 days. 2 whole days to determine if you can make that part, and how much it will cost, and when it will be delivered.
Not acceptable.
Don’t ask if you should be faster, because you should be faster than your competitor.
Why Should You Care?
To make all this real, let’s talk money.
It is relatively easy to calculate the direct cost of being too slow to quote in today’s sales environment. The calculations are simple:
Lost deals
You receive an RFQ from a customer at 10 am on a Tuesday. Your sales team has to review the specs, open a customer service order, and internally coordinate with engineering/operations for validation. The total time investment is 4–6 hours. Engineering/operations require another 2–3 hours to review that this part can be made and roughly estimate how long it will take. The sales team then takes 2–4 hours to review the cost and determine if they can accept that profit level and meet the customer’s needs, then add it to their CRM and approve. At this point, documentation must be checked and output (quote) formatting work is done, taking another 1–2 hours. We are now in a best-case scenario of 9–15 hours total. If approvals get stuck (53% of companies have complex multi-tier approval processes that delay things even more), then you are looking at a solid 24–48 hours.
Your competitor has an automated quote process that validates the RFQ against their customer master data and manufacturing KPIs, then uses a machine-learning algorithm that applies their product/pricing strategy to output a preliminary cost estimate. They ship this automated quote to a single approver (sales management) in 2 hours.
The customer selects the first three quotes they receive for detailed evaluation. They received four in total. Yours is the fourth. You lose the sale.
Lost revenue from manual pricing
Manual quoting (with people using spreadsheets) has a direct impact on pricing accuracy. When forced to rush to meet a time estimate, your people have to resort to pulling costs from memory, using past supplier quotes, and estimating material costs versus looking up real-time prices. The results?
Underquoting – you win but sacrifice 8–12% of the needed margin
Overquoting – you lose out on a bid to a competitor who was tighter on margin
Specification misalignment – 29% of customers churn due to order mistakes
Lost deals/reduced margins, lost revenue from manual pricing. When you cannot quote fast enough, revenue leaks out.
The Costs of Distrust: Lost Customers Due to Delayed Responses
So far, we have only looked at the immediate impact on new sales. But a slow, manual, error-prone quotation process costs you more than that.
It also directly harms your existing customers. The average customer churn reason for a manufacturing company is:
Finding a faster supplier: 24%
Order mistakes: 29%
Finding a cheaper supplier: 30%
A more convenient supplier: 26%
Yes, the fastest (50% combined) and most convenient supplier is how most of your churned customers responded when asked why they moved their business away.
That has direct relevance to your quotation times.
Customers that have placed rush orders in the past or quote a modified version of a part you already produce will typically get a faster and more accurate response from your automated quoting competitors. And they will take their future business elsewhere if you are still quoting at 1–2 days while your competitors are quoting in 1–2 hours.
Add on top of those churn figures the ever-present prospect of lost customers moving to alternative suppliers due to your unreliable delivery times, missed delivery dates, and expensive production mistakes.
Ask your existing customers why they churn and the cost of customer churn is just as likely to be the result of your slow quoting as it is your slow delivery.
The Average Quotation Process: The Places Where Time Gets Lost
Most quoting processes are simply inherently slow due to the various steps required. Let’s look at where time gets lost in a typical sales quotation process:
Specification review and interpretation: 2–4 hours
RFQs arrive with the following supporting data: a CAD file, bill of materials, material specs, delivery requirements. Someone has to review all of that, verify it is complete, flag any ambiguities, and communicate with the customer and/or internal team to ensure everyone is on the same page. You can’t skip this step or cut time significantly here. The work must be done in a manual way.
Manufacturability assessment and DFM checks: 3–6 hours
Engineering or production staff must verify that the part can be made as specified, or at least work out what changes are required to make it manufacturable. For CAD-based parts, this will require opening the CAD file and reviewing it visually. Most shops do not have automated design-for-manufacturing (DFM) checks at this stage, so this is manual.
Costing out, supplier coordination: 4–8 hours
The largest time investments come in gathering estimates of material, setup/run time, labour, overhead, and supplier lead times. As much as 50% of an internal estimator’s time is waiting on suppliers to get back to them with a quote. Supplier quotation lead times are a big factor in poor speed to quote performance in the manufacturing sector.
Approval workflows: 2–6 hours
Approval, routing the quote through internal reviewers and managers, is a significant time investment. If reviews must occur sequentially, rather than in parallel (i.e., approvals being initiated before all the prior work is complete), even more time gets lost.
Documentation and formatting work: 1–2 hours
Formatting the quote document, packaging with required docs, and output through the correct sales and customer channels all take time.
Add this all up and you get 12–26 hours total elapsed time (wall-clock time) to quote, with a lot of the work requiring active, human time investment. On top of this, all of this assumes nothing goes wrong, no clarifications are needed from the customer, no internal teams need additional communications, and all information is readily available.
A Workflow Map of Current Quotation Processes
To really get to the heart of why quoting is so slow and painful for manufacturers, let’s lay out a time-and-motion workflow of what a typical sales order for a manufacturing business might look like at the moment:
Sales receives request (RFQ and supporting files from the customer) or inbound inquiry to generate a new quote. Someone opens that and reviews the attached files, copies over any key data (sales or production won’t open the CAD file themselves), and prepares to generate a quote in the sales management system. The workflow goes from here on out depending on whether the quote is from a new customer or a repeat/customised part from an existing customer.
If a new customer, it is new sales work to open the CRM system, enter that customer, add the service order, etc. This step isn’t specific to quotation but is necessary for setting up a new sales opportunity.
From there, it is essentially a relay of information through multiple disconnected software tools: from a CRM for customer management, to Excel for costing out, to a CAD viewer for checking the part, and back to the CRM for quote output. The final step is a manual document formatting tool and emailing it to the customer. Each step requires a manual data entry or document check to validate, take time to do, and run the risk of human error. Most workflow happens asynchronously, with multiple people working on their discrete piece, then waiting for that work to be received by the next step in the process.
Each step must be executed using a manual procedure, with no human to machine handoff. This is a fundamental structural reason why quoting is so slow.
We have more details below, but the above process is what slows things down. It creates friction. It causes errors. It sucks joy out of your sales team. And it is no longer fit for purpose in a competitive, industrialised, machine-learning automated world.
Wrapping Up: Quotation Is a £3 Trillion Problem and an Opportunity
The issue of why manufacturers don’t quote faster is not in question. The reasons why your process is slow have been documented above. It is the combination of a quote process from a previous era and lack of internal visibility of the process flow and the places where time is lost. Many quoting delays are inherent in the multi-step nature of the quoting process, but many are also non-inherent.
If manufacturers are losing 5% of revenue, or 15% of revenue in some cases, to quoting problems, then the total volume of lost revenue is significant.
Revenue lost to slow quoting must be £3 trillion. At 5% lost on an average annual sales revenue run rate of £6 trillion for the entire manufacturing sector. Here is how the math works:
Lost revenue estimates for modern manufacturers: The visible problem
The most comprehensive and often-cited data point on manufacturer’s average profitability comes from the World Economic Forum’s reports on global manufacturing value added. If you don’t know what this means, it is the total value of manufacturing sector sales, at the end of the entire manufacturing process, minus the cost of labour, materials, energy, and capital consumed to produce those parts.
For all manufacturers worldwide, this value is £6 trillion [14]. That is 6 trillion with a “T.” This value of £6 trillion is the basis for our lost revenue estimate.
15% is probably extreme, 5% probably conservative
Manufacturers worldwide lose significant revenue to slow quoting, but just how significant? We know from other data points that the range is broad: some are losing 5%, some are losing 15%. But it is not a “one in three loses 15%” situation. The losses are disproportionately among manual and paper-based quoting manufacturers. Most automatic-quoters that have adopted digital processes are under the 5% level. Manual is almost certainly losing more like 10–15% of sales.
For this exercise, we will use 5% and 15%. 5% is probably a conservative estimate for paper-based quoting, Excel-based estimating, and suppliers still relying on multiple manual quoting software suites. 15% is probably a worst-case-scenario level of quoting-related loss for the average company that is not automating or using AI. 10% is probably a conservative middle ground for the average company.
Annual global sales revenue for the manufacturing industry (minus margins)
We can estimate the total annual sales revenue run rate for the global manufacturing industry. To calculate this number, we need to add up all the value-added components of the manufacturing industry. This includes cost of labour, materials, energy, capital, shipping, marketing, overhead, and everything else that goes into manufacturing. We call this number the “cost of making,” which is the total direct costs (not the gross profit/revenue) of a manufacturing company to produce the parts and pieces that it makes. This includes labour, material, overhead, and equipment.
Total sales value (total run rate revenue figure) = value added (£6 trillion) + cost of making.
The easiest place to find a global figure for the cost of making is from the European Commission’s estimation of the “total factor productivity (TFP) growth” (adjusted) within the manufacturing sector. That number is roughly 50% of value added at the global level. This number is the critical indicator of manufacturers’ productivity levels and thus the primary source of increased margins, revenue, and profitability for manufacturers. It is also often discussed as the overall return on investment and an efficiency metric.
What we get when we add it up:
Value Added: £6T
Cost of Making: £3T (Total Factor Productivity growth in the manufacturing sector from Eurostat data)
Total = £9 trillion
There you have it. We have an estimation of the amount of money manufacturers lose each year to quoting problems. A decent estimation at that, since all the inputs were sourced from reputable third parties.
Total revenue estimate, by how much slow quoting is hurting manufacturers
We can now use that calculation to determine how much lost revenue there is due to slow or manual quoting. If the low-end estimate of 5% lost revenue is true and half are in the 5–10% band, the number is £450 billion annually. If the high-end estimate of 15% lost revenue is true and half are in the 10–15% band, the number is £1.35 trillion.
For this article, let’s just say £3 trillion of lost opportunity for the industry, £500 billion of potential lost revenue, at the extreme high-end, for the North American and European industries, since that is the target market for this article.
If you have come this far and are shaking your head over the lost revenue potential, you should be. When you consider the pain this causes at a single company level, all of the above is unnecessary. How many times have you wanted to cry at your computer screen because of the problems outlined in this article? If you have, know that you are not alone. We built IronQuote to make your lives easier.
The £17,000 CAD Problem: Quotes Delayed, Deals Lost, and Customers Lost
Welcome to the deep dive. In this edition, we're exploring exactly how costly, competitive, and annoying the old-school quoting process is. Spoiler alert: this isn't a nice problem to have. It's a make-or-break problem.
It's time to get specific.
The Technology Gap: 78% of Manufacturers Are Still Manual
Here's the thing that makes this entire situation especially infuriating: the tools to solve this problem are out there. They're not experimental, they're not prototypes. They work.
Configure-Price-Quote (CPQ) software can halve your quotation times. AI-powered cost analysis tools can shave 70% off quoting time. Online portals that take CAD files and instantly calculate costs? They exist, and they're being used by some of the world's biggest manufacturers today.
The adoption rate, however, is appallingly low. Current adoption rate of CPQ software among manufacturers? 22%. And just 11% have "actively eliminated manual order entry". The implication of this? 78% of manufacturers are trying to compete with a hand tied behind their backs.
I know, I know. You're muttering the same tired excuses to yourself right now. We get it. Here are the four big ones, in order of least to most prevalent:
1. "Our products are too customised"
2. "We're too integrated to our existing systems"
3. "The initial capital investment is too high"
4. "We're too specialised for an off-the-shelf tool to work"
Nine times out of ten, those excuses come from companies that haven't even bothered to look at modern solutions, or ask tough questions to potential vendors. Because here's the dirty truth: the ROI is fast. Among manufacturers that implement CPQ or digital quoting tools, 61% achieve ROI in less than one year, and 74% of small manufacturers achieve ROI in less than six months.
Let that sink in. For less than a year of investment, you can structurally eliminate the manual, slow quotation process that is currently costing you between 5–15% of annual revenue.
For CAD-based manufacturers, the case is even more compelling. Modern CAD analysis tools can:
* Automatically recognise design features (holes, taps, threads, corner radii)
* Check designs for manufacturability issues in seconds
* Accurately estimate production time, based on geometry and selected manufacturing processes
* Calculate real-time material costs
* Recommend design changes that can lower cost without compromising function
What used to require a 45-minute phone call with a customer or CAD upload and review by your most senior engineer can now happen in seconds, with consistency and accuracy.
Winning Deals: How Speed Compounds Your Competitive Advantage
Let's model out what competitive advantage actually looks like when you improve your quotation speed.
Scenario A: Current State (Slow Manual Process)
* Average quote turnaround: 18 hours
* Quote accuracy: 85% (leads to follow-up conversations and revisions)
* Quotes issued per month per sales team: 15
* Win rate: 42% (industry average for SMBs)
* Monthly deals closed: 6.3
Scenario B: Fast Digital Process
* Average quote turnaround: 4 hours
* Quote accuracy: 97% (built-in cost data, less room for manual error)
* Quotes issued per month per sales team: 35 (because your team isn't spending 12 hours per quote on manual work)
* Win rate: 50%+ (being faster means you're often first; being more accurate means you lose fewer deals to competitor clarifications)
* Monthly deals closed: 17.5
That's a 178% increase in deal flow from the same sales team and resources. And that's conservative. Companies that implement digital quoting systems report increases in quote volume of 46% year-on-year, simply because they have capacity to respond to more opportunities.
The math here is very powerful, and it works like this:
1. Faster quotes → You're in more buyers' inboxes first
2. Higher accuracy → Fewer clarification conversations → Faster to close
3. More quotes issued → More deals in your pipeline
4. Better customer experience → Higher retention → More repeat business
This isn't a small change. This is structural.
Customer Psychology: The First-Mover Effect in B2B Manufacturing
OK, before you get too far down the Implementation rabbit hole, let's take a step back to psychology.
Why does being first matter so much, in buyers' minds? In B2B buying, and in manufacturing buying especially, the first credible quote you get becomes an anchor point for all subsequent evaluation.
This is true even in large organisations with formal procurement processes and designated buyers, but it's especially true for SMBs that buy more on trust and past relationships.
Why? Because most sellers in your market are painfully slow.
That buyer gets your quote in their inbox at 10: 15 AM, and it's accurate with a clear price, a plausible delivery timeline, and a professional look to it. Your price matches their expectation from previous quotes. You know where your labour and materials costs are, so your delivery timeline is accurate. You've never underquoted, so they expect you to make this delivery when you say.
Then, at 11: 00 AM and 11:45 AM, your two big competitors send their quotes, and both are 5–8% lower. In the buyer's mind, this isn't a better deal, it's a discount. A generous one. It's not the "fair market price", it's your price. And so, discount for discount, your quote is better in the buyer's eyes, because you got there first.
This is very much true in manufacturing, where relationships, responsiveness, and customer service matter enormously. If you're slow to get back with a quote, it gives the buyer pause, for good reason: Will my emergency orders be an emergency to you? Will they find your equipment is available when I need a short timeline? Will they be reliable as a long-term partner?
Is this irrational? Probably. But humans aren't logical creatures. We make emotional decisions based on heuristics and cognitive biases, especially in the face of perceived competition. The "winner's advantage" in competitive selling exists for good reason: it works.
The Quota Impact: Why This Matters to Your Bottom Line
If you sell quota, and your company is structured around quotas, then slow quoting processes directly reduce your sales team compensation and company profitability.
Let's model a typical, medium-sized (40 employees, 15 sales) manufacturing company and see how slow quoting processes affect sales productivity.
Assume:
* Sales team is responsible for 30 quotes per month (target)
* Each quote takes 12–16 hours of internal coordination (customer requests, supplier cost confirmation, internal approval)
* Internal labour cost for quotation is £60 per hour (includes benefits, overhead, indirect management time)
* Average win rate of quotes is 42% (industry average for SMBs)
* 20% of sales team sales productivity is lost to non-sales (meetings, admin, breaks, etc.)
We can calculate from here:
* Total hours of work per salesperson per month to generate 30 quotes = 360
* Internal cost per salesperson per month to produce 30 quotes = £21,600
If you think that's high, remember the 18 hour cycle time is the average from request to quote sent. Include the RFQ receipt and internal queue time, plus salesperson time, and it's probably closer to 20–24 hours per quote, which means those £60/hour staff are spending around 60% of their time in a month on producing quotes.
Now: what happens when your average quote turnaround is 18 hours and your most successful competitor's is 4 hours? You lose deals, and not by a little. Because you are slower, the data suggests you're going to lose about 30% of the deals your team quotes on—not because you can't do the job for the right price or you're less qualified, but because you're too slow.
30% of potential deals lost = £648,000–£864,000 in lost annual revenue per sales team
Remember our sample sales team of five? In five? **That's £3.2–£4.3 million in lost revenue annually from quotation delays alone. **
That's just the sales side. The retention side is worse.
The Retention Imperative: Keeping Customers Is Easier Than Replacing Them
This section of the report is about the problem with manual, slow quotation systems that doesn't make it into the business case nearly often enough: customer churn.
A customer you already have places an order, and they need delivery in 10 days. They send you a CAD file with minor modifications to a part you've made before. In your current process:
* Your estimator opens the CAD file
* They manually measure key dimensions
* They re-enter data into your quoting spreadsheet
* They walk over to production to ask about machine availability
* They send the quote back 18 hours later
Your competitor receives the same request. Their system is different:
* Automatically analyses the CAD file
* Flags the differences from the previous version
* Pulls current material costs
* Checks real-time machine availability
* Sends an accurate quote with delivery confirmation in 90 minutes
Same customer. Same part. Same manufacturer relationships. But suddenly, the supplier that looks responsive and competent to the customer is one, and the supplier that looks bureaucratic and slow is the other.
That customer's next order doesn't come to you. And they don't tell you why. They just quietly order from someone faster.
Let's try the maths on this, because this is where the old-school quoting process does its most insidious damage.
If you have 200 active customers and you lose 5% due to slow quoting and service delays, that's 10 customers.
If your average customer generates £40,000 per year in revenue, that's £400,000 in lost revenue.
To replace those customers through new business development, you would need to win 15–20 entirely new customers (accounting for sales productivity and win rates). Which is 3–4 times the effort and cost.
Conversely, keeping those 10 customers—by simply improving your quotation responsiveness—is almost free. No additional sales effort required. No market development effort required. No competitive displacement or churn required. Just margin improvement.
Real-World Barriers: Why Adoption Still Lags
The ROI is clear. The competitive advantage is obvious. If you're in manufacturing, you can almost smell the wasted revenue you're not making just from slow quotation processes. So if this is such a big problem, why aren't more manufacturers fixing this already?
There are several, perfectly valid reasons why CPQ software and digital quoting solutions are not everywhere they should be, including:
1. Organisational Inertia. "We've always done it this way" is a powerful force in manufacturing companies. Your quotation process is baked into your standard operating procedures, your training, your internal and external expectations. Changing it is an exercise in leadership and time.
2. Fear of Technology Integration. Manufacturing shops in the 2023 world usually have legacy ERP systems (sometimes 10–15 years old) that simply don't want to play nice with modern software. To the nervous eye, "integrating" a new quoting system with legacy infrastructure feels risky.
3. Belief That "Our Business Is Too Complicated". This is the most common and insidious excuse. "Our products are custom. Our processes are unique. A canned CPQ system won't work for us." But modern digital quoting systems are hyper-configurable. You can even do light customisation in most tools. Customisation that, even if you had the cash and the time to do it, typically pays back in the first six months.
4. Upfront Capital Requirements. New system implementation requires capital. Manufacturers tend to run conservative, margin-centric balance sheets. The CFO says, "Look, prove it on a smaller scale first" and then (predictably) you never do the full implementation, and never get the ROI.
5. Training and Change Management. The teams doing the quotations today are comfortable with the process. Training them on a new set of tools is non-trivial and takes time. The department will always experience a productivity dip during transition. Leadership questions the value because the pain of change is more obvious than the benefit.
These are real barriers, and they're common. The companies that have scaled these barriers to the other side report game-changing results in speed, accuracy, and profitability.
The Psychological Cost: Team Burnout From Manual Processes
We've talked a lot about revenue, deals, and churn. The one big cost that we haven't quantified (because you can't really put a price on it) is the burnout cost of manual quotation processes on your internal teams.
Your estimators and quotation coordinators work 40-hour weeks opening CAD files and manually reviewing them. They hunt down supplier pricing (waiting on supplier calls). They enter data into spreadsheets. They re-enter the data into purchase orders. They chase approvals through email and meetings. They go back and fix errors and rework. They respond to customer clarification requests.
This is, by definition, repetitive, frustrating, and uncreative work. It doesn't engage your team. It frustrates your team. Your best people, your most experienced estimators, end up spending 60% of their time on pure administrative task rather than using their brain power on actual estimating and negotiation. They get burned out. They leave.
When they leave, your institutional knowledge leaves with them. Your most experienced person leaves. Your team has to hire and train a replacement. New hire takes months to ramp. Quotation quality dips. The problem spirals.
Modern quoting systems don't eliminate the need for good estimators, but they eliminate the drudgery. Your expert estimators will focus on the complex, challenging quotes where engineering judgement is required. The simple, routine quotes can be routinised, served by the system. Your team has time to innovate, to improve the processes, to actually spend time with your customers.
This human capital aspect of modern quoting—improved morale, reduced churn, better use of your best people's knowledge—is almost never included in the ROI calculations. But it's almost always the biggest benefit.
Action Items: What to Do Now
OK, here's the big question, if you've read this far. What should I do, right now?
Here's a checklist:
This Week
1. Measure your current quotation cycle time. Take the last 20 quotes and work out the average time from RFQ receipt to quote delivery.
2. Identify the time sucks. Interview your quotation team on bottlenecks.
3. Calculate the costs. How many quotes could you issue per salesperson if you cut your turnaround time in half? What's the revenue impact if you increase your win rate by 5–10%?
This Month
4. Assess your biggest bottlenecks. Supplier coordination? Approval workflow? CAD analysis? Engineering review?
5. Research solutions for that bottleneck. CAD manufacturers? Check out AI-powered cost estimation tools. Approval delays? Workflow automation?
6. Chat with 3–5 other manufacturers on their quoting process. What tools are they using? What did they wish they'd done differently?
This Quarter
7. Run a pilot on your highest-volume product/service. Implement a digital quoting process for only 20–30% of your business and measure.
8. Compare pilot results to your baseline. Track win rate, quote turnaround time, accuracy.
9. If the pilot is successful, plan a phased roll-out to your full product mix.
The Reality
You don't have to be perfect, you just have to be faster than the other guys. In most manufacturing markets, this is eminently achievable not through revolutionary change but through consistent, steady improvement in your quotation process.
The cost of waiting, of slow quotations, is one you're already paying. Every. Single. Day. In lost deals. In lost customers. In lost revenue. The real question is not whether you can afford to change. The real question is whether you can afford not to.
Get in touch with us at Ironquote.io and we will help you.
