The 7 Fatal Mistakes of Quoting – #1: Treating Every Quote the Same

While quoting quickly and accurately has proven to be the fastest way to gain a competitive advantage, more doesn’t always = better. On average, job shops win about 30% of the jobs they quote. This, of course, implies that they’re missing out on about 70% of the work they go after.

Treating every quote the same is often to blame here; it leads you to spend the majority of your time on quotes that you will likely not win. So many job shops make the mistake of quoting every RFQ that comes into their shop, taking away time from the owner, the estimator, and often the engineers who could better serve the company by spending their time building parts of orders already won.

But if you haven’t evaluated the RFQ, how could you possibly know whether it’s worth spending the time to quote it? Why spend time quoting a job you have no chance of winning?

How to avoid this fatal quoting mistake and prioritize your RFQs:

Determine your odds of winning.
Have you ever quoted for this customer before? If you have quoted for the customer in the past, look at your win rate for that customer. How often have you won quotes from them? Was it profitable for your business? Do you have the capability in your shop to make the parts? Who are your competitors? If there are other job shops that can easily make this part, how will you differentiate yourself?

There are so many different ways to prioritize your backlog of quotes, whether it’s by material, process, or otherwise. Having a way to gather all of this data and analyzing quotes with that key information in mind increases your chances of not only winning the job, but making sure you’re optimizing your profit margins.

Knowing this information allows you to quickly evaluate your chance of winning the quote and therefore determine whether or not you should quote the job. If not, it can fall lower on your priority list. Uncovering this data is easier if you have a centralized repository where all past quotes are stored, so consider implementing software that allows you to do just that.

Gather all the information you need upfront.

Do you have all the information you need to provide an accurate quote? Too often, job shops dedicate hours of their time building out a quote that they eventually come to realize can’t be completed. You may have been provided with the wrong file or are missing key details, and this leads to increased time spent going back and forth with the customer. This can further delay the process and lead you to ultimately lose out on the job. Using an online form that guides the buyer to fill in all the necessary information before submitting their RFQ will help streamline communication and reduce errors.

Start Building Up Your Defense Today

At Paperless Parts, we empower job shops by automating their quoting process through modern technology. Our geometry-driven quoting, secure file-viewing and sharing capabilities, online collaboration and CRM tools, interactive digital quotes generator, and so much more, are helping manufacturers across the U.S. quote faster, win more work, and grow their business.

Curious about the second fatal mistake of quoting? Click here to find out.