Slow commercial quotes: the cost that never appears on the income statement
08 Apr 2026
2 min 44 sec
There is a moment every Chief Commercial Officer knows. It arrives at the end of the quarter: revenues are there, but the margin has slipped again. No obvious mistake, no client lost on price. And yet something has eroded the result. Most companies face this moment with historical reports, the manager's experience, and a comparison with the prior year. The problem is not a lack of information. It is that the decision-making framework is retrospective.
We analyzed three years of data on the commercial processes of approximately 100 Italian companies in manufacturing, retail, and consulting, mapping every significant dysfunction and the drivers behind it. What emerges changes the way one looks at the quoting process.
The signal was there. The method was missing.
From 2022 to today, every point of margin erosion in the companies we analyzed had an identifiable and measurable origin in the quote-building process: unstructured pricing, slow response times, variability between quotes for similar clients that no one had ever quantified. This is not a consolatory observation: it means the problem existed, and that those who monitored it had a window to act.
Consider the data on response speed. In many manufacturing companies, a job-order quote takes 3-5 calendar days, between drafts, delays, and revisions. But research on B2B purchasing behavior shows that 35-50% of sales go to the supplier who responds first. Not the cheapest. Not the best. The fastest. Those who managed quotes through an artisanal process responded late. Those with a structured system closed first.
This is not an isolated case. In a sample of 50 companies analyzed by Vedrai in 2023-2024, the margin difference between the best-structured and worst-structured quotes, for the same client and product, averaged 4.8 percentage points. On commercial revenues of EUR 10 million, this represents up to EUR 480,000 in recoverable additional margin every year, without acquiring new clients and without raising prices.
In seven out of ten years, margin erosion was measurable in advance, before the income statement recorded it. The problem was not the availability of data. It was that no one was watching with a method.
What it costs to have no method
The Vedrai Observatory simulated the impact of a structured quoting process versus a reactive one across three years of real data, in four commercially intensive sectors: job-order manufacturing, B2B retail, management and IT consulting, and distribution. The differential is not marginal. And in periods of highest competitive pressure, it coincides precisely with the phases when margins and pipeline were already under pressure for other reasons.
The cost of the artisanal quoting process does not appear as an error in the income statement. It appears as an inevitable cost, as physiological variability, as individual salesperson performance. This is the distortion the report quantifies, sector by sector: a sales team of 10 people handling 4 complex quotes per week spends over EUR 300,000 per year in person-hours alone just to build proposals. Add to this 15-25% of prospects lost to slow response times, and pricing variability between equivalent quotes that in some sectors exceeds 20%.
The right question, for those leading a company or a commercial function, is not how AI works in the quoting process. The right question is: how much does it cost us every month not to have adopted it yet? Download the full report
In 7 companies out of 10, margin erosion was measurable before the income statement recorded it. The problem was not the market.
