The RFQ response workflow
RFQ response is everything between a quote request landing and a priced answer going back. It breaks when requests sit in a shared inbox, pricing lives in one veteran's head, and the response takes days in a market where the fastest credible quote wins.
Where it breaks
- RFQs arrive mixed into a shared inbox with everything else. Nobody owns them; everybody assumes someone else saw them.
- Building the quote means checking stock in one system, cost in another, and asking the one person who knows the customer's pricing tier. If that person is at lunch, the quote waits.
- There is no follow-up. A quote goes out and either comes back as a PO or vanishes, and nobody can say which quotes are still live.
- Response time is measured in days — while the buyer's deadline was measured in hours.
What it costs
The labor is real but the leakage is the story: every RFQ that expired unanswered or lost on speed was gross margin someone else collected. Count last month's requests, your average response time, and your win rate when you answer same-day versus later — then run the calculator with honest numbers.
The systems that touch it
The inbox where requests land, the ERP or inventory system that knows stock and cost, the pricing sheet or tier rules, and the CRM that should be tracking the quote — if anyone updated it. The workflow is slow because answering one RFQ means visiting all four.
What to automate — and what to leave human
- Automate intake: every RFQ — email, portal, PDF attachment — becomes a structured request in one queue, with an owner and a clock.
- Automate the assembly: line items matched against stock and cost, the customer's pricing applied, a draft quote built for review instead of from scratch.
- Automate the follow-up: a quote with no answer in 48 hours gets a nudge; quotes about to expire surface to a salesperson.
What stays human: final pricing on large or unusual orders, substitution judgment when stock is short, and the phone call that wins the deal. Automation should hand your best quoter a draft, not replace the quoting judgment.
How we measure it
- Time from RFQ received to quote sent — median and worst case.
- Percentage of RFQs that get any response at all.
- Win rate by response time bucket.
- Hours per week spent assembling quotes by hand.
What a deployment looks like
Week one is measurement: we pull last quarter's RFQs and timestamp the real response times — the number is usually worse than anyone guessed. The build starts with intake and the draft-quote assembler, because speed is the lever. Speed to quote covers why the fastest credible answer wins so often.
Start the measurement → · Run the cost calculator →
FAQ
Our pricing is genuinely complicated. Can this still work?
Complicated pricing is an argument for the draft-assembler, not against it. The rules that are rules get encoded; the judgment that is judgment gets queued for a person. The draft arrives with the easy ninety percent done.
Do you replace our ERP?
No. The ERP stays the system of record. The build reads from it and writes to it, so the quote queue, the stock check and the CRM record stop being separate manual trips.
What if RFQs arrive as PDFs or spreadsheets?
That is normal, and parsing them into structured line items is exactly the kind of tedious, high-volume work automation is for. Low-confidence parses get flagged for human review instead of guessed at.
Distribution and wholesale · Speed to quote · System integration service · All workflows
Get in touch
Email solutions@ikonic303.dev to start with the measurement. ikonic303 is based in Colorado and works with clients nationwide.