Just reviewed and received a quote. I had a different perspective of the timing of the quote.

I reviewed a quote we sent out before Easter (price and availability). After phoning the person to check that they got everything they wanted, I found out that they had needed the items urgently, and decided to make them up on a hand lathe – meanwhile they said it took us 2 weeks to quote them. I was stunned – our service was so poor and hand lathing is so expensive! I apologised and said we usually did same-day with quotes. I thanked them for letting me know how we were doing.

It was in that stunned, in-a-daze, mode that I considered that quoting late is just disrespectful. It’s clear that we didn’t want the business and, more importantly, we didn’t care about helping them with their problem.

To top it off, it seemed to me that they had only sought a quote from us! This is the easiest sort of business to win, and we lost it. Wow.

In fairness, it looked like we responded within 41 minutes, but something didn’t connect. When helping someone out is this easy, I’m prepared to do more than just flick an email quote back. The probability of connecting is so high that it is safe to invest more effort. I was thinking a follow up phone call: did you get the quote, how does it look to you, is there anything else I can do to help your business?

Receiving a quote was a very different story. I must have got ~7 quotes back by now. My normal supplier hasn’t replied to me. The first quote (apart from the generate-an-instant-quote-online) was 30 min in. Prices for printing my catalogue ranged from a bit over $200 to a bit over $500. In my mind, I had done the work of specifying what I wanted, translating it into print-house-language, and was basically buying a commodity product.

One of the stand-out quotes was from a place who wasn’t setup to help me out. They explained that they only did long runs, and said they had passed on my request for a quote to kwik-copy. They were not going to get a cent out of me, but genuinely did something that might be helpful (even though I don’t think very highly of kwik-copy). Very impressive.

I took on the practice of deleting the quotes that were higher than the lowest quote I had received. For me, cutting the cost from $330 to $230 is a massive incentive to choose a supplier. I guess I look at the catalogue as an expense, rather than as an investment. I hope it will increase sales, but I really have no way of telling its impact. I guess it also helps to say that I’m coming from digital-only where distribution was free.

Speed of responding to a request for quote (RFQ) seems to translate to: these people care, these people are on the ball, these people will be fast with my job because they are fast with my quote, they must be the best. In my mind I thought all of those things. If there is no quote issued promptly, there is no chance of winning the business. I discarded lots of quotes because the price was too high, but I’m not even considering those that don’t quote me.

If the product is easy to source (like print work for my catalogue), then price will be a determining factor. So, unless I have an existing relationship with a customer, or the customer clearly prefers my product, then I better be the cheapest.

Other notable, a person called me to say their sales rep was out, and they would get a quote to me as soon as possible. They were quite apologetic. Clearly, they perceived speed of quoting as critical. It did more for me than automated email responders.

Lessons learned:
* I want to help people, so I need to respond promptly with a quote
* Emailing a quote is not always sufficient and provides no feedback, so do a follow-up call