The True Cost of Manual Sales Quotation and How to Fix It

Let’s face it: In the fast-paced world of sales, time is money. Yet, so many organizations still build quotes in a platform like Google Docs or Excel and send them to clients via email.

If you’ve ever found yourself drowning in spreadsheets, chasing down approvals, or dealing with frustrated customers waiting for a quote, you’re not alone. Truth is, the way your team handles quoting today could be silently eroding your bottom line.

The inefficiencies, errors, and delays manual quoting creates in your revenue pipeline affect everything from sales velocity to customer satisfaction. Spending hours (or days) crafting quotes, double-checking calculations, and navigating internal bottlenecks like discounts and approvals cause opportunities to fall through. And when one of your reps makes a mistake, there’s a good chance it will cost you time, money, or even the deal itself.

The good news: It doesn’t have to be this way. By understanding the true cost of manual quoting and exploring modern solutions, you can turn your quoting process into a competitive advantage. In this post, we’ll dive into how.

Manual quoting is costing you sales and revenue.

Every minute spent wrestling with spreadsheets or correcting mistakes is a minute you’re losing revenue. Your sales team is losing deals and missing out on opportunities because they’re bogged down in administrative tasks. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Time-consuming quote creation

There’s a saying that “time kills all deals.” And it’s true — as many as 50% of all sales go to the vendor who responds first.

In today’s fast-paced and convenience-driven market, buyers expect quick and accurate responses. If your team takes days to send out a price estimate, you’re giving your competitors a golden opportunity to swoop in with a faster offer.

Spreadsheets, while versatile, are not built for the complexity and speed required in modern sales. Every product, discount, or custom configuration has to be manually calculated, cross-checked, and formatted — a process that’s not only tedious but also prone to human error.

Prone to errors and inconsistencies

Manual quoting turns even small human mistakes into costly problems. A mistyped discount, miscalculated price, or overlooked approval step can lead to quotes that undercharge, overpromise, or confuse customers—costing you revenue or trust in seconds.

And when product details or pricing change (and they will), outdated spreadsheets and documents scattered across your team guarantee someone will send a quote with discontinued features or wrong specs.

Inconsistencies and mistakes chip away at your credibility. Every error forces rework, stalls deals, and leaves buyers wondering: If you can’t get the quote right, what else will go wrong?

Reduced sales productivity

According to data from Salesforce, the average sales rep only spends 28% of their time actually selling. While there are dozens of things that go into the remaining 72%, a major contributor (and a largely avoidable one) is admin work.

With manual quoting, there are a lot of things that cause your sales process to drag out:

• Checking prices and discounts
• Searching for and inputting product information
• Formatting quotes to match branding and legal standards
• Tracking down internal approvals and sign-offs from legal and finance teams

Every one of these tasks takes time away from selling and building relationships with customers.

Compliance and approval bottlenecks

When pricing policies and discounting rules are managed manually, even the best-intentioned teams end up cutting corners.

• A sales rep, eager to close a deal, offers a 20% discount without approval.
• A manager, buried in emails, misses a pricing exception that violates your margin targets.

Enforcing policies becomes a nightmare when approvals live in inboxes or spreadsheets. Sales teams waste time chasing down stakeholders (“Is finance available to review this?”), while customers wait impatiently.

And if you can’t easily track who approved what, you’ll have compliance headaches. Manual systems make it nearly impossible to prove you followed pricing rules, and they remove accountability from the process.

Revenue loss due to poor pricing strategy

Inconsistent discounting erodes your margins. Without guardrails, reps might underprice or overpromise to win deals. The financial fallout from this is (a) you’ll have to deal with the lower margin or (b) you’ll need to tell the customer you can’t honor the price or service levels they were given, damaging trust and potentially losing the deal.

It’s also worth mentioning your pricing strategy needs to be fair. And even if you’re quoting complex or customizable products, it needs to have some consistency. Giving out discounts and making up prices on the spot will confuse your customers and cause them to question your product’s true value. And you won’t be able to accurately track the success of different pricing strategies.

Poor customer experience

Since spreadsheets aren’t designed to support modern complex sales, they create a lot of issues on the buyers’ end, too. Buyers expect fast responses, personalization, and transparency in the sales process.

Without a modern quoting software, you’re unable to deliver any of those things. Instead, you’re making it difficult to buy from you. And that means a lot of your competitors will turn to someone else.

5 ways to overcome the challenges of manual sales quotation

Fixing all these issues is a lot easier than you think. In fact, all you need to do is to get rid of your manual quoting process and switch to a modern CPQ solution, integrate it with the rest of your business systems, and build your culture and internal workflows around that system.

1. Implement CPQ software for automated quoting.

Start by implementing a CPQ (configure, price, quote) system. CPQ handles the processes of product configuration, pricing calculations, and quote delivery through a centralized application. It eliminates manual data entry by guiding users through configurations (guided selling), applying real-time pricing rules, and instantly generating error-free quotes.

For a smooth CPQ implementation:

• Audit your pain points. Identify exactly where manual quoting slows you down (e.g., complex product bundles, approval delays).
• Choose the right CPQ vendor. Look for platforms that align with your industry’s needs (e.g., Salesforce CPQ for Sales Cloud users, DealHub for SaaS teams that need subscription management). And make sure you prioritize user-friendliness to ensure adoption.
• Start small. Pilot the software with a focused team or product line. Use their feedback to refine workflows before scaling company-wide.

2. Integrate CPQ with CRM and ERP systems.

CPQ turns quoting from a chore into a competitive edge. For example, it auto-calculates volume discounts, ensures compliance with pricing rules, and lets you send polished, branded quotes directly to customers in an instant — no more “I’ll get back to you.”

What it can’t do, however, is function separately. Integration erases silos. When a seller creates a quote, they’ll see real-time inventory levels, customer purchase history, and credit limits, all in one place. Deals move faster, and quotes reflect exactly what you can actually deliver.

The two main systems that need to talk to each other are CRM (for customer history) and ERP (for real-time inventory/pricing). To integrate them, work with your IT team or CPQ vendor to build seamless integrations using APIs.

3. Standardize your pricing and discounting rules.

Standardization stops rogue discounting and margin leaks. Reps can still negotiate, but they can do so within safe boundaries, so finance sleeps better knowing your pricing policies are more than just suggestions.

To determine the optimal pricing and discouting levels, start by assembling a cross-functional team. Include sales, finance, and leadership to agree on rules (e.g., “Max 15% discount without VP approval”).

Document everything. Create a single source of truth (e.g., a pricing playbook) that outlines every different pricing scenario — bulk orders, seasonal promos, segment-specific deals, you name it.

Once you have everything, an admin will program these rules in your CPQ. Then, whenever someone creates a quote, they’ll see only the allowed discounts and prices. For example, if they try to offer 20% off, CPQ can flag it and route it for approval.

4. Enhance collaboration between sales, finance, and legal teams.

Collaboration should be proactive, not reactive. When everyone knows their role and has visibility into the process, sales approvals happen faster. Mastering your deal desk means breaking down departmental barriers and giving them the tools they need to work on deals with your sales team.

Tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams (integrated with CPQ) let teams discuss quotes, tag stakeholders, and track approvals in real time. In lots of cases, such as with DealHub and Slack, the sales approval workflow can happen directly in the chat itself.

Pro tip: To clarify roles, use a RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) to prevent bottlenecks. For example: Sales creates the quote, Finance approves discounts, Legal reviews terms.

5. Train sales teams to leverage automation tools.

According to data from Experlogix, sales teams that implement CPQ 10x their quote generation velocity and reduce approval times by 95%. But that hinges on sales’ ability to leverage it. So, you need to drive adoption and turn your sales team into CPQ power users.

Start with “why.” Show reps how CPQ saves them time and eliminates all the problems they’re having with Excel. Then, carry out hands-on workshops that include role-specific training (e.g., “How to upsell using CPQ’s product recommender”).

Ongoing support is crucial as well. You have to keep helping your reps overcome new challenges as they arise. That means your sales leaders must be ready to answer questions and provide guidance, as well as track CPQ usage metrics.

Automate your sales quoting process with CPQ.

Today, automation is a strategic imperative. By adopting CPQ software, you’re not just fixing a broken process; you’re rebuilding it to be a profit driver in a modernized sales org.

The roadmap is clear:

1. Pick the right CPQ vendor.
2. Integrate your other sales and financial software.
3. Set up the basics: product database, pricing rules, approval workflows.
4. Break down silos between sales and your back office.
5. Train your sales team and continue supporting them as they use the tool.

If your goal is to create a streamlined and scalable sales process that’s exactly aligned with what and how you sell, the time to act is now. Audit your quoting process. Identify one bottleneck CPQ could dismantle today. Then, pilot, measure, and iterate.

The tools exist. The ROI is proven. The only missing piece? Your decision to turn quoting from a cost center into a competitive weapon.

Ready to start exploring CPQ solutions? Check out my guide to evaluating CPQ for SMB vs. enterprise needs, as well as our product reviews and comparisons.