Tool
One quote, end to end
How many quotes you are asked for a month, how many minutes each one takes, what an hour of the person building it costs, what share goes out with a stale price and what that costs. Below, the same quote with an agent: where it goes, what it does at each step and what stays with a person.
One quote, end to end
- the agent does it
- a person does it
- always a person
the steps of the quote
- Read the request and see what's missingEmail and chat
Reads the request the moment it arrives, at any hour, and detects what is blocking the quote before anybody opens it.
- Ask for the missing detail immediatelyEmail and chat
Writes in minute one instead of two hours later, which is the only stretch of the turnaround that can genuinely be shortened.
- Identify the account and its listCustomers
Resolves which account it came from and which price list applies, with the rate currently in force.
- Calculate quantities and discountsPricing
Applies volume discount rules across the whole order rather than line by line, which is where the errors get made.
- Assemble the documentDocument
Generates the quote in the usual format, with the right terms and the lead time that comes out of stock.
- Send it and log itERP
Sends it through the channel the customer wrote in and logs it, with a date, so the follow up exists at all.
- Follow up two days laterEmail and chat
Writes again incorporating what happened, which is the step abandoned when new quotes are waiting.
- Decide the exception pricePricing
When the price the rule produces is not the one worth offering, a person decides, with everything else already assembled.
Today that is 70 hours a month and 12 quotes arriving late or going out wrong. Between the time and the ones never discussed, USD 1,320 a month.
With the agent holding 7 of the 7 steps, 4 hours and USD 66 are left.
The difference is USD 1,254 a month, USD 15,048 a year.
And 36% of that difference is not time: it is the quotes that entered the conversation instead of arriving once a decision had been made.
Of what a person still does, the heaviest step is: Decide the exception price.
You set all five numbers. How the minutes split across steps is ours, taken from how it gets done by hand. The modelling assumption: the quote that arrives late or with an error falls in the same proportion as the mechanical steps stop waiting for somebody to have time.
This object is the interactive half of an article: Putting a quote together is eight steps and seven need no judgment