Response time
How many RFQs did you let go by last month?
You are not losing those contracts on price. You are losing them because one person can price the work, and their calendar is full.
Let's talk — free callWhat the research measures
What the research measures, and what it does not
42 h
average response time to an inbound enquiry, measured across 2,241 companies
Harvard Business Review · March 2011
37%
only answered within the hour
Harvard Business Review · March 2011
×7
more likely to qualify a lead when answering within the hour
Harvard Business Review · March 2011
Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads", Harvard Business Review, March 2011. Figures current as of 3 September 2026.
The caveat, before going further: this study covers responses to inbound B2B enquiries in general, not manufacturing quotes. It is the best cross-sector measure available, and it is not a measure of your sector. No public study quantifies the effect of quoting speed on win rate in manufacturing.
Who prices what
What gets priced without your engineer, and what always comes back to him
Without him
What the configurator produces
- The product families already sold, with their options and their shop constraints.
- The pricing rules applied every week: material, labour by work centre, freight, mark-ups.
- The bill of materials and the cost price, generated from the configuration rather than re-keyed.
- Revisions: numbered, comparable, price frozen at the date of issue.
Always him
What comes back to the engineer
- Anything that requires new engineering, never done before.
- Waivers below the margin floor, which trigger an approval.
- Cases where the shop constraint does not exist yet, because the process is new.
- The final call on quotes that commit the company beyond a threshold you set.
The limits, up front
What we cannot guarantee
No win rate. No study quantifies the effect of quoting speed on win rate in manufacturing. Nobody has measured it for your sector, ourselves included. A vendor who promises you a percentage is making it up.
No shortcut on new engineering. A configurator does not shorten an RFQ that requires a design which does not exist yet. It frees your engineer's time for those, and that is all it does.
No timeline promised before seeing your rules. The size depends on the number of product families, the density of the rules and the state of your ERP. Anyone who gives you a figure before looking has not looked.
No automatic adoption. If the tool is slower than what it replaces, your salespeople go back to their own method, and no management directive survives three weeks of a tight quarter.
Your questions
What we get asked
How fast do we actually answer?
Most shops do not know, because nobody measures it. Count the RFQs received last month, the ones you answered, and the number of days between the two. The gap between what you believed and what you find is often the real surprise. You need nobody to produce that figure.
Will my salespeople have to learn yet another piece of software?
Yes, and that is exactly where these projects die. A tool that is slower than what it replaces loses, every time. That is why we train on live deals rather than fictional cases, and why we measure actual usage at 30, 60 and 90 days. If nobody opens it by the third month, the project has failed, whatever the configurator can do.
Can a configurator price a complex RFQ?
Part of it, not all of it. What repeats gets modelled and comes out without your engineer: the product families already sold, the pricing rules applied every week. Anything requiring new engineering still comes back to him. The goal is not that he stops pricing altogether, it is that he only prices those.
What happens when the customer changes the specs midway?
You redo the configuration, and the new quote comes out with its version. Revisions are numbered, comparable, and the price stays frozen at the date of issue rather than quietly recalculated. That is the part a spreadsheet holds least well: by the third round trip, nobody knows which version governs.
What does this change for my engineer, who is already swamped?
He stops pricing what he has already priced a hundred times. His rules are written down once, and a salesperson or a junior estimator applies them without interrupting him. He keeps the hard cases and the exceptions, which are the part of the job only he can do. We codify his judgement, we do not route around him.
We can look at your last month together. The call is free.
How many enquiries came in, how many answers went out, and how many days between the two. If the number suits you, we will have talked for nothing and that is perfectly fine.
Your quote is only ever used to build your example. Never shown to a third party, never cited as a reference without your written consent.