The sales manager walked into the Thursday morning meeting and said four words: “We lost Riverside.” Riverside was a $400,000 fabrication job, the kind that keeps a shop busy for three months. The customer’s reason was one line long — “we asked for pricing 11 days ago and never heard back.”
Nobody in that building was lazy. The estimator had done his part in a day and a half. The problem was everything that happened between the parts.
A quote that needed four people and three waits
This was an 85-person metal fabricator doing about $19 million a year. Any quote over $50,000 needed engineering to confirm tolerances, purchasing to price the steel, and the shop foreman to estimate hours. Each person finished their piece in a day or two. The waiting in between ate the rest of the week.
- Engineering finished Tuesday and emailed the file. Purchasing didn’t open it until Thursday.
- Steel pricing came back from a supplier in 36 hours and then sat in an inbox over the weekend.
- The foreman’s hours estimate was given verbally in a hallway and written down by nobody.
Add it up and the average quote took 8.6 days to leave the building. The win rate was 22%.
One rule fixed most of it: somebody owns the clock
They didn’t need faster people. They needed one person whose job was to know where every open quote was sitting and how long it had been sitting there. That’s the entire idea.
- Name a quote owner, and it isn’t the salesperson. It’s a coordinator who sees every request from arrival to send.
- Put a clock on each stage. Engineering gets 24 hours, steel pricing 24 hours, shop hours 24 hours. Miss it and the coordinator escalates that afternoon, not next week.
- Capture the estimate where it’s used. The foreman’s hallway number goes into the quote the moment he says it, not into someone’s memory.
- Send partial quotes when the customer is waiting. If steel pricing is the only holdout, send everything else with a clear note about what’s pending.
Notice what’s missing from that list: software. The tool matters far less than the clock. When ERP Consulting teams get this right, they spend most of their time on the rules and almost none on the screens.
What changed in 60 days
Average turnaround dropped from 8.6 days to about 31 hours. The win rate moved from 22% to 34%, partly because they were faster and mostly because they stopped being forgotten.
The revenue number is the one that got the owner’s attention: roughly $2.9 million in additional annual bookings from the same estimating team, the same shop capacity, and the same customer list.
A second ERP Consulting habit stuck as well. The coordinator now starts every morning by listing quotes that are more than two days old and calling whoever is holding them. It takes ten minutes and it has never once been a wasted call.
Try this before your next sales meeting. Take your ten most recent quotes that took more than five business days to send. Write down where each one sat the longest and who was holding it. Nine times out of ten, the same two handoffs show up. Fix those two first.