The Vedrai Observatory analyzes the commercial quoting processes of approximately 100 Italian companies in the manufacturing, retail, and consulting sectors (2022–2024 data). The proposal-building process is the most systematically overlooked bottleneck in the sales machine: each proposal of medium complexity requires 8–20 hours of work and 2–5 calendar days; 35–50% of B2B sales go to the supplier who responds first; and the variation in margins between proposals for comparable customers reaches 4.8 percentage points.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Average time-to-quote for complex proposals: 8–20 hours over 2–5 calendar days; with structured AI, this drops to 15–60 minutes (standard) and 1–3 hours (complex), representing a 70–95% reduction
- 35–50% of B2B sales go to the supplier who responds first; each day of delay incurs a Cost of Non-Decision that can be calculated in advance
- Margin variability between proposals for similar clients up to 20%; in a sample of 50 companies, the average difference between the best and worst-structured proposals is 4.8 percentage point.
Three customers with the same purchase volume. Three different profit margins. This is the real cost of a lack of standards
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