“I lost another one,” the sales manager said, dropping a printed email on my desk. A customer had asked for pricing on 30 SKUs on Monday morning. The quote went out Thursday at 3 p.m. The competitor’s quote landed Wednesday.
Nobody in that 20-person wholesale team was lazy. Every single person was busy. That’s exactly what made the problem invisible.
We timed every handoff on one real quote
Total elapsed time: 4 days and 6 hours. Actual working time: 3 hours and 20 minutes. The other 90% was people waiting on other people.
- Rep emails the SKU list to the sales manager, who is in meetings until 4 p.m.
- Sales manager checks stock in one place, pulls cost from a spreadsheet that was last refreshed in March.
- Finance director has to approve anything under 22% margin, and he was traveling Tuesday.
- Two of the 30 SKUs had no cost loaded at all, so someone had to call purchasing.
- The final quote sat in a draft folder until the rep remembered to send it.
The waiting was the problem, not the work
You don’t need a new system to fix 90% of this. You need to decide in advance what nobody should have to ask about. That’s the part most ERP Consulting projects skip because everyone is busy arguing about screens.
Four decisions cut that team’s quote time to under a day:
- Pre-approved margin bands. Reps quote down to 18% without asking anyone. Below that, it goes to finance, and finance has a four-hour response clock.
- One source of truth for cost. If a cost isn’t loaded, the quote tool flags the SKU instead of letting someone guess.
- A stock freshness rule. Available quantity is shown with the time it was last updated. Anything older than four hours is marked as an estimate.
- A 24-hour default. Every open quote gets a status every morning. No quote sits untouched for more than one business day.
What 60 days of change produced
Average quote turnaround fell from 4.1 days to 9 hours. Win rate on quotes went from 31% to 44%. The team didn’t hire anyone and didn’t work weekends.
The uncomfortable truth is that speed in quoting is rarely a technology gap. It’s a decision-rights gap. Who is allowed to say yes without asking is the single most powerful lever in a sales operation, and it costs nothing to define.
Here’s your first move. Take the last quote you sent out and write down the timestamp of every handoff. You’ll find your bottleneck in about 20 minutes, and it almost certainly won’t be the software.