What does manual quoting actually cost a distributor?
Manual quoting costs a distributor three ways. Direct labor: distributors we talk to put roughly $110 of labor into a 100-line quote, at about 30 minutes of desk time each. Declined work: distributors we talk to report busy desks turning away 30 to 50 percent of inbound RFQs for capacity, revenue handed back before anyone reads the request. Headcount: the manual fix is hiring more inside salespeople, and even then distributors we talk to describe one salesperson doing about 100 quotes a day and still working three hours past close. The real total is labor plus declined revenue plus the salaries bought to keep up.
How much labor goes into a single quote?
Distributors we talk to put roughly $110 of labor into a 100-line quote. They report about 30 minutes of desk time, and that is the clean case: real turnaround stretches to hours or days once clarifications and availability checks stack up. None of that 30 minutes is selling. It is reading a PDF, matching each line to a SKU, hunting the customer's price level, and typing it all into the ERP.
Multiply by the desk's daily volume and the number stops being abstract. That is payroll spent on transcription, every day, before a single judgment call gets made.
Why don't declined RFQs show up as a cost?
Because nothing records them. At busy desks, distributors we talk to report declining 30 to 50 percent of inbound RFQs, not on price, not on fit, on capacity. There is no line item for the quote that never got written, so the loss never reaches a P&L. The customer hears no, or hears nothing, and sends the next RFQ to whoever answered.
That invisibility makes it the easiest of the three costs to underestimate. The labor shows up in payroll. The declined RFQ shows up nowhere.
Is hiring more inside salespeople the fix?
It is the default fix, and it buys typing capacity at salary prices. Distributors we talk to describe hiring inside salespeople specifically to keep up with quote entry, then watching the ceiling move instead of disappear: one inside salesperson doing about 100 quotes a day and still working three hours past close.
Headcount scales linearly with volume and brings recruiting, training, and turnover with it. The work being bought is mostly data entry against the item file, which is exactly the work that does not need a salary.
What changes the cost math?
Stop paying salary for the typing. Quoting.ai Supply reads the inbound request, email, PDF, WhatsApp, fax, or voice note, matches each line against your item file, applies the customer's price levels from the ERP, and drafts the quote into an approval inbox. The human decision stays; the 30 minutes of transcription goes.
The result is cost per quote measured in the reviewer's minutes, a desk that stops declining RFQs for capacity, and a Human Edit Rate that tells you exactly how much to trust the drafts. On DDI Inform and Spruce, approved quotes write back to the ERP today; Epicor, NetSuite, and SAP are in development, and an ERP-light mode covers the rest.
Related questions
Where does the $110 per quote number come from?
It is sales-math framing from distributors we talk to, not measured customer telemetry: what the desk time on a long, 100-line RFQ works out to in labor. Your number moves with line count and wages, so run it against your own desk: quotes per day, minutes per quote, what that hour costs you.
What is the fastest way to cut cost per quote?
Remove the retyping, not the reviewer. When line matching, price levels, and ERP entry are drafted automatically, the human spends minutes approving instead of half an hour transcribing, and the same desk answers the RFQs it used to decline.
Does automating quoting mean nobody touches the quote?
No. Every draft lands in an approval inbox, and rollout runs through Assist, Guarded, and Autopilot modes as your Human Edit Rate earns it. Setup is two steps, connect the inbox and upload inventory, with a white-glove kickoff call included.
See it on your own work
Distributors: two steps and a kickoff call. Estimators: upload a plan on a live trade. Either way, the product proves it or it does not.