Growth-oriented companies realize that quoting speed and accuracy are only a part of the equation.  Getting more quotes out can pay huge dividends. Even factoring in a conservative success rate can increase sales by thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Say, for example that you typically put out five quotes a day using Excel with the average quote being $800.  That’s $4,000 a day, $20,000 a week, or $1,040,000 a year.  At a 25% success rate that’s $260,000.  Now, suppose that you’re able to put out twice as many quotes with web-based quoting. That’s $520,000 in yearly sales.  In fact, many users are seeing average quote increases of three times; or what would be $780,000 in this example.

“This is just the beginning,” explained SecturaSOFT COO, Brad Stropes.  “Shops are always trying to increase throughput but are usually doing so downstream and missing the true bottleneck. Most organizations pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to add additional operations to attract new customers. However, they are missing out on a huge growth opportunity within their frontline estimating department.”

Using the previous example, say we triple those five quotes to fifteen by turning quotes around in hours or minutes rather than days. A company’s win rate will rise dramatically as you are beating the competition to the punch and blocking their ability to turn a quote.  Now rather than a 25% success rate, you’re able to double or triple that number.  This creates a compounding ROI from $780,000.00 to a $1.5 million – $2.3 increase in business without additional machinery. 

But can a typical fabricator effectively handle this extra business without adding equipment and resources?  “Fabricators love equipment and so do we,” said Stropes.  “But adding equipment isn’t the only solution.  Remember, if it’s taking days to turn quotes around, you’re removing days you could be getting started on a job.  If you can turn quotes in a few minutes and get a jump on jobs by days, your throughput increases saving months on production time each year.  Combine this and the removal of hours of manual entry of jobs into your ERP, and you’ll soon realize where the true bottlenecks are.”

Take a look at your numbers and ask yourself these questions: How many quotes are you sending out? What’s the average dollar amount?  What is your success rate? And how much gold dust is falling through the saloon floor cracks?