A buyer's letter that changed how we quote
In 2023 a procurement manager sent me a one-page note explaining what she actually wanted in a quote. We changed our quote template within a week. Here's what was in it.
Sometime in early 2023, a buyer from a tier-2 auto supplier in northwestern Indiana sent me an email with a one-page PDF attached. The subject line was "How to write me a quote." I read it twice and forwarded it to our office team. By the end of the week we'd rewritten our standard quote template.
Five things she wanted on every quote
The PDF was structured around five complaints she had with vendor quotes generally — not specifically with ours, though we recognized ourselves in two of them.
- Inside dimensions, not outside. The half-inch matters more than vendors realize, and quoting outside lets vendors hide a slightly smaller box.
- Wall construction stated explicitly. "Heavy duty" is not a wall construction. Double, triple, or single — say which.
- Lead time as a range, not a number. "4 business days" is a promise; "3–5 business days" is a forecast. She wanted the forecast.
- Quantity tiers built in. She wanted to see what pricing looked like at 100, 250, 500, and 1,000 units on the same quote — not to negotiate, but to plan annual volumes.
- Total freight estimate, not freight TBD. Even a wide range is more useful than "freight TBD," because she's building a budget too.
What we changed
Inside dimensions had always been our default — that one was already correct. Wall construction we'd been sloppy about; we tightened up the template. Lead time as a range was new for us. Quantity tiers we'd never bothered to include but started adding. Freight estimates we built into the template even when the freight component was small.
Total redesign time: about three hours. Net effect on close rates: hard to measure precisely, but the close-rate on quotes that went out in the new template was meaningfully higher in the next two quarters. Better quotes get more orders. Who knew.
The lesson
The buyer wasn't asking for anything she shouldn't have been able to expect. She was asking for the quote to actually function as a planning document. The fact that it took an explicit letter from a customer to nudge us into doing that is on us.
Now every quote out of our yard hits her five points. If you receive a quote from us and any of the five are missing, email Donna. She'll fix it inside the hour.
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