How many days between the site visit and the quote, in your company?

A client contacts several companies for the same job. The first quote arrives the next day, yours three days later, for a similar amount. The usual delay runs from one day to a week depending on the company, but that figure alone says nothing: what matters is the gap with the quotes that arrive before yours.

A delay nobody measures#

Most companies know their win rate, or have at least looked at it once. Almost none know, without digging through dates one by one, how many days pass between visiting a site and sending the matching quote. This delay lives in no dashboard: it lives in the memory of a salesperson who visited four sites this week, and no longer remembers precisely which one has been waiting three days and which one ten.

The client, on the other hand, measures it without even trying. They called several companies, and they compare response times as much as prices, often before reading the detail of the pricing.

What happens between the visit and the sending#

Between the visit and the sending, two kinds of time get mixed together. The first is unavoidable: taking measurements, asking a supplier for a current price, checking an availability. The second is not: it is the moment when the person who saw the site finally sits down to put the quote together and send it, and that moment depends on their schedule, not the client's.

In a small company, the same person often visits, prices and lays the tiles the following week. The quote then waits for the current job to leave a free slot, and that free slot rarely arrives on the day of the visit.

A worked example#

A renovation company with fewer than ten people sends around fifteen quotes a month, with an average delay of five days between the visit and the sending. By a prudent assumption, one quote in eight is lost not on price, but because the client already picked another company in the meantime: order of arrival decided it, not the pricing. With an average margin of €1,500 per job, that is around €2,800 of margin a month that depends on no sales argument at all, only on a delay.

Three moves to cut this delay without rushing the pricing#

1. Measure the real delay. Track, over the past month, the number of days between each visit and the matching quote being sent. Without this figure, there is no way to know whether the problem actually exists in your company.
2. Separate what takes time from what waits for a slot. Confirming a supplier price takes time out of necessity. Formatting and sending only wait for a place in the schedule: that is what can be shortened.
3. Keep a base of lines and prices already validated. A quote rebuilt from a blank page at every visit always takes longer than one built on what already served the previous week.

What changes with an application built for the business#

The quote is prepared from the site, at the moment of the visit: lines and prices already used on comparable jobs are suggested, rather than re-entered. The quote goes out as soon as it's ready, with the client's electronic signature, without waiting for a return to the office to format it.

Once sent, the quote changes status on its own: sent, followed up, signed or lost, with the reason when it is lost. That is how you find the real reasons for losing a quote, and know whether it was the price or the delay that made the difference. See also what quote tracking built for the business can automate.

What not to do#

Do not sacrifice the accuracy of the pricing to gain a day. A quote sent fast but wrong, one that has to be redone or that underprices a job, costs more than a quote sent late. The goal is not speed for its own sake, but removing the days lost for no reason: the ones tied to a schedule, not to a calculation.

Time between the visit and the quote: the key takeaways#

A quote that arrives after a competitor's starts with a disadvantage that no sales argument always makes up for. Measuring it is the first move, even before trying to shorten it: as long as this delay stays an impression, nobody can say whether it is improving from one month to the next.

The same principle applies once the quote is signed: calculating your margin before sending the quote avoids the bad surprises that a slow response simply comes before.