The Quoting Speed Problem: Why Most Manufacturers Take Too Long to Quote Custom Products
You just left a great customer meeting. They need a quote on a make-to-order product. The opportunity is real, the timing is right, and they're evaluating multiple suppliers. How fast can you get them a quote? For most manufacturers, the honest answer is five days or longer. Not because their teams aren't working hard or don't care about winning the business. But because they don't have the right tools for the job.
Christian Wettre
EVP, GM North America
Why Custom Quoting Takes So Long
The problem isn't effort or intent. It's process friction and scattered information.
When a sales rep needs to quote a custom product, they typically face a pricing scavenger hunt. They're tracking down the engineering team to understand design requirements. They're searching for similar past projects to use as reference points. They're emailing purchasing to get current material costs. They're checking with production about capacity and lead times. They're manually calculating labor hours and overhead allocation.
Each of these steps involves waiting for responses, digging through files, and piecing together information from multiple sources. Even experienced reps spend hours reconstructing pricing logic that should be readily available. And throughout this process, there's constant risk of error - using outdated material costs, miscalculating labor, or missing cost components entirely.
The result is slow turnaround times, stressed sales teams, and quotes that go out days after the customer requested them. By the time your quote arrives, faster competitors may have already secured the opportunity.
The Cost of Slow Quoting
In competitive custom manufacturing markets, quoting speed directly impacts win rates. Customers evaluating multiple suppliers often give disproportionate attention to vendors who respond quickly with complete, professional quotes. Fast response signals capability, organization, and genuine interest in the business.
Slow response creates the opposite impression. Even if your quote is ultimately more competitive on price or capability, arriving days late puts you at a disadvantage. The customer has already spent more time with your competitor's proposal. They may have already begun conversations about next steps while still waiting for your response.
Beyond win rates, slow quoting also creates internal costs. Sales reps spend valuable selling time on administrative scavenger hunts instead of building customer relationships. Pricing errors slip through when teams are rushed or working with incomplete information. Margin gets left on the table because reps lack real-time visibility into costs and profitability.
How Integrated Systems Transform Custom Quoting
When manufacturers connect their CRM to their ERP system, the custom quoting process fundamentally changes. Here's what becomes possible:
The pricing scavenger hunt stops. Sales reps access current BOMs, material costs, labor rates, and overhead allocations directly from the quoting interface. No more emailing multiple departments or digging through files. The information they need is already integrated and current.
Teams build quotes from existing BOMs. Instead of reconstructing pricing logic from scratch for each custom quote, reps can start with existing bill of materials for similar products, then modify as needed for the specific customer requirement. Engineering knowledge gets reused instead of rediscovered.
Margins show up in real time. As reps build the quote, they see profitability calculations automatically. They can test different configurations, adjust pricing strategies, and understand exactly what margin they're proposing before the quote goes out. No more guessing whether a deal makes financial sense.
Quote turnaround goes from days to hours. When all the necessary information is integrated and accessible, the actual work of building a quote shrinks dramatically. What took five days of coordination can happen in a few hours of focused work.
Reps follow a process, not heroics. Fast quoting stops depending on the institutional knowledge of your most experienced reps or their willingness to work evenings and weekends pulling information together. The process becomes repeatable and accessible to the entire sales team.
Every quote is traceable. Because quotes are built in an integrated system rather than improvised in spreadsheets, you can trace every component of how pricing was calculated. This creates accountability, enables continuous improvement, and makes it easy to reference past quotes when similar opportunities arise.
Confidence replaces anxiety. When your team hits send on a quote, they're confident it's based on current costs, accurate calculations, and appropriate margins. It's a good deal for the customer and a profitable deal for you.
CPQ Results Without CPQ Cost
Full Configure-Price-Quote systems offer powerful capabilities, but they come with significant implementation costs and complexity that puts them out of reach for many mid-market manufacturers.
The alternative approach is integrating your existing CRM and ERP systems to enable faster, more accurate quoting without the full CPQ investment. By connecting customer relationship data with operational and financial data, manufacturers can achieve many of the speed and accuracy benefits at a fraction of the cost.
This integrated approach gives you an edge over competitors still running manual quoting processes while avoiding the expense and implementation timeline of enterprise CPQ platforms.
The Competitive Advantage of Quoting Speed
After two decades of helping manufacturers improve their sales processes, one pattern is clear: the winners of complex deals consistently have processes and systems their competitors don't.
Quoting speed is one of the most impactful competitive differentiators in custom manufacturing. When you can respond to opportunities in hours instead of days, with confidence instead of anxiety, and with accuracy instead of risk, you win more business at better margins.
The difference between surviving and thriving often comes down to having the right systems in place to execute faster and more reliably than your competition.
At TCP Americas, we help manufacturers connect CRM to ERP for faster, more accurate custom quoting. By integrating solutions like SugarCRM with Epicor ERP, we enable sales teams to access the operational and financial data they need to build quotes quickly without sacrificing accuracy or margin.
Your team is already working hard. Give them the right tools for the job.
Ready to accelerate your custom quoting process? Contact TCP Americas to learn how CRM and ERP integration can help your sales team quote faster and win more business.