Picture a company that sells commercial kitchen equipment. A restaurant chain calls on Monday morning: it needs an oven, a dishwasher and a cold room for a new branch. The sales rep takes notes, finds the product codes in the catalogue, asks accounting for the prices, calls the manager about a discount, checks the delivery time with the warehouse and moves everything into a Word document. The quote goes out on Wednesday afternoon. By then the restaurant has already looked through the quote another supplier sent on Monday evening.
After a loss like this, the conversation usually turns to price: "the competitor must have gone lower." Sometimes that is true. But in most cases the problem is not what the quote says, it is the journey it takes. The information sits in five different places, every step waits for someone to answer, and nobody knows what stage the quote is at.
The first idea for shortening this is to buy quoting software. Software helps, but if it is set up before the decisions below are made, it moves the old confusion onto tidier-looking screens. None of the six decisions is technical; they are all questions that sales, accounting and management can settle around one table.
1. Start the quote the moment the request arrives
In most companies a quote counts as started when the rep opens the document. But the time the customer waits begins when the phone call ends. If the request is written in a notebook, an email or the rep's memory, nobody can see how many hours have passed since it came in.
Open the request as a record right away: who asked, what they asked for, when they need it, which rep has it. This record does two things. When the rep goes on leave or falls ill, the request is not lost; their manager sees all open requests in one list. And for the first time, "time from request to sent quote" becomes something you can measure. You cannot shorten a time you do not measure.
2. Keep one source for prices
What stretches quoting time the most is finding the price. If the price list sits in a file in accounting, the current price of some products is in a purchaser's email, and the exchange rate for foreign-currency items is decided that morning, the rep has to ask three people for every quote.
Decide where prices live; in most companies this is the ERP. Let the quote screen read the price from there instead of the rep typing it. For foreign-currency products, write down as a rule which rate is used and at what time. That way two reps do not give two different prices for the same product on the same day, and "where did this price come from?" is answered by looking at a record rather than by an argument.
3. Write down the discount a rep can give alone
Quotes often wait for discount approval. The rep calls the manager, the manager is in a meeting, the quote slips to the next day. Yet most discounts fall in the same range every time.
For each product group or customer type, set an upper limit the rep can give without approval. Quotes within that limit go out without waiting for anyone; only the ones above it go for approval. Ask for that approval in the system rather than on the phone, so the manager sees pending approvals in one place and leaves the decision with a reason. (We covered how to design approval rights in general in our story on roles and permissions; what matters here is reducing the number of quotes that need approval at all.)
4. Design the document the customer receives once
If every rep has their own Word file, every quote looks slightly different: one has no validity date, one is missing the payment terms, one still carries the old logo. Customers notice these differences; more importantly, missing information comes back later as a problem.
Fix the quote document as a template. Product lines, unit price, discount, tax, total, delivery time, payment terms, validity date and the contact details of the person who prepared it sit in the same place on every quote. The rep only picks the products and quantities; the document builds itself. This step alone removes a large part of the time spent per quote, because nobody is fiddling with formatting any more.
5. Number the revisions
Customers rarely accept the first quote. The quantity changes, a product is dropped, the payment term gets longer. If each change overwrites the same file, a few weeks later nobody knows which version the customer approved. An old price is used when the order is entered, and a dispute arrives with the invoice.
Save every revision as a new version of the same quote: the quote number stays, the version number goes up. Every document sent to the customer shows its version number. The accepted version is marked, and the order is created directly from that version. Then nobody has to copy anything by hand between the quote and the order.
6. Decide what happens after you send it
Once a quote is sent, the job is considered done, and most quotes are forgotten at that moment. The customer does not reply, the rep moves on to other work, and two weeks later it turns out the customer bought elsewhere.
Give every quote a follow-up date; when that date comes, it lands on the rep's list. When the quote closes, record the outcome too: won, lost, postponed. For lost ones, pick a short reason: price, delivery time, product not suitable, no reply. After a few months these records give a real answer to the question in the opening: are you really losing deals on price, or because you were late?
In short
Quoting time is usually stretched not by setting the price but by gathering information and waiting for approval. Log the request the moment it arrives, read prices from one source, write down the discount that needs no approval, tie the document to a template, number the revisions and give every quote a follow-up date. Once these decisions are made, the software you choose speeds up your process instead of reinventing it.
As part of this flow, BernCRM offers quote preparation from the product and price list, discount rules, manager approval and PDF output; it is set up to read prices from Logo, Mikro, Netsis or SAP. Quote templates and approval rules are configured to fit how each company works.
Our work on this: BernSFA Field Sales Software
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