Manual Quoting Creates a Hidden Revenue Leak

Vipul Aggarwal

Building up ambitious commerce community to discuss and solve complex use cases.

B2B sales often involve custom pricing, volume discounts, and approval cycles. But when sales reps rely on spreadsheets, email threads, or disconnected CRMs to generate quotes, it slows everything down. Each quote becomes a task requiring tribal knowledge, internal back-and-forth, and pricing guesswork.

Manual quoting not only delays response times but also introduces errors, inconsistent pricing, and missed upsell opportunities. According to the Aberdeen Group, best-in-class B2B organizations using automated quoting solutions respond to RFPs 2.5 times faster and convert 33% more deals.

Buyers don’t wait. A 2024 McKinsey study found that 76% of B2B buyers will choose the vendor that responds first with a clear quote, even if it is not the lowest price. Speed isn’t a preference. It’s a deciding factor.

How Manual Quoting Slows Down the Sales Process

Most delays in B2B selling happen before an order is placed. Manual quoting slows the sales funnel from the top.
Common delays from manual quoting include:

Searching for current pricing across systems or emails
Double-checking inventory availability via phone or warehouse systems
Manually calculating discounts and volume breaks
Sending quotes as Word or PDF files and waiting for customer feedback
Having to re-enter data into CRM, ERP, or OMS post-approval

Each of these steps introduces friction. Even minor errors—such as quoting the wrong pack size or outdated pricing—lead to erosion of trust and prolonged negotiations.

Stage	Manual Friction	Impact
Price Lookup	Searching for tiered or contract rates	Inconsistent pricing and margin leakage
Product Configuration	Building out SKUs manually with no validation	Errors in bundle or variant logic
Inventory Validation	No visibility into livestock or warehouse location	Promising unavailable items
Approval Routing	Internal signoffs via email or Slack	Lost time, missed deadlines
Order Conversion	Manual re-entry into backend systems	Data duplication and processing delays

The Real Cost of a Slow Quote

The time it takes to generate and deliver a quote directly affects win rates. If your competitor quotes in 2 hours and you take 48, you’ve likely lost the deal.

IDC reports that slow quoting adds 20% to average sales cycle length.
Salesforce data shows 43% of sales reps say generating quotes is the biggest time drain in their process.
CSO Insights found that companies with automated quoting have 2x higher deal win rates and 28% shorter cycles.

It’s not just about speed. Accuracy matters too. A pricing error, wrong product code, or omitted terms can turn a confirmed order into a rejected one. In B2B, trust is transactional and built through clarity, consistency, and professionalism.

Manual Quoting Breaks When Orders Are Complex

Not all B2B quotes are equal. Builders' merchants, equipment suppliers, and manufacturers often sell configurable products or large bundles with site-specific pricing. Manual quoting in these industries doesn’t scale.

Key challenges include:

Multiple SKUs with dependencies or rules (e.g., base + add-ons)
Regional price variations or branch-based fulfillment rules
Customer-specific terms and legacy discounts
Integration with CRM, ERP, and shipping systems

Reps end up maintaining personal spreadsheets to track discounting logic or historical pricing. That’s not scalable, nor auditable. Worse, it locks key knowledge in individual heads instead of shared systems.

What Sales Teams Need Instead

Sales teams need quoting systems that support their business's sales approach—fast, configurable, and customer-specific. Manual quoting fails under pressure because it wasn’t built for scale.

A sales-optimized quoting workflow should include:

Live product and pricing sync from PIM or ERP
Customer-specific pricing logic tied to contract or deal size
Smart configuration of complex products (e.g., by size, material, spec)
Automated approval routing with real-time status
Instant conversion of approved quotes into orders

When quoting is digitized and automated, sales reps focus on selling, not admin.

Modern Capability	Manual Alternative	Benefit
CPQ software	Excel or PDF-based quotes	Speed + accuracy
CRM integration	Copy-paste customer info	better segmentation + reporting
Inventory API connection	Phone calls to warehouse	Real-time availability + trust
Approval workflow engine	Email threads	Reduced delays + audit compliance
Quote-to-order automation	Re-entering order data	Seamless sales-to-ops handoff

BetterCommerce Enables Fast and Customizable Quoting

BetterCommerce includes CPQ as part of its modular stack, designed specifically for B2B sales. It allows reps or buyers to generate quotes using real-time inventory, pricing, and configuration logic—all while syncing directly with OMS and ERP.

Better Commerce's quoting tools support:

Volume-tiered pricing and SKU rules for complex products
Branch-based fulfillment visibility for regional sales teams
Customer-specific pricing logic and discounts
Approval workflows and version-controlled quote history
Automatic conversion of accepted quotes into sales orders

All actions are logged and traceable, reducing errors and ensuring compliance with pricing policies.

A Faster Quote Means a Faster Sale

Manual quoting is not just a productivity drag—it’s a risk to your pipeline. Every hour spent chasing approvals or fixing quote errors is a lost opportunity. Buyers expect responsiveness. Sales leaders expect predictable pipelines.

Fixing quoting doesn’t require a full overhaul. But it does require removing manual dependencies, integrating pricing and inventory systems, and giving reps tools they actually use. Automation isn’t about replacing the salesperson. It’s about empowering them to move at the speed of the customer.