Your Buyer Is Ready. Your Quote Isn’t. Here is How to Fix It.

There’s a moment in every B2B deal when momentum is high. The buyer has done the research. The budget is aligned. Decision-makers are convinced. Everyone is ready to move, but then quotes enter the picture, and everything slows down.

The buying journey, which felt fast and digital up to this point, suddenly drops into an offline maze of spreadsheets, pricing approvals and internal emails. The customer who was ready to purchase now just waits.

While sales teams work through pricing and details on their side, the buyer’s world keeps moving. Other vendors keep calling, internal teams keep asking for updates, and priorities keep shifting.

Research shows that 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process¹. Quoting is often where that stall becomes permanent.

In a world where nearly two-thirds of B2B companies already offer e-commerce², quoting remains the one step that still behaves like 2005: manual, opaque and painfully slow.

Quote Is More Than a Number. It’s a Business Enabler

Underneath every quote is a structured negotiation.

The buyer formalizes their needs through a Request for Quote (RFQ). This includes products, quantities, specs, timelines and service levels. The seller then responds with a proposal that balances price, feasibility and value.

When quoting is done well, it brings clarity for both sides.

• Buyers get a clear, confident view of the specs, the price, the timelines, and how each option compares. It helps them make decisions based on value, not guesswork.
• Sellers get a moment to demonstrate expertise. A well-prepared quote shows they understand the buyer’s needs, can handle complexity, and can tailor the offer.

Quoting is a strategic tool that aligns buyer requirements with seller capabilities and sets the tone for the entire relationship, but this is exactly where traditional quoting starts to crack.

The Challenge With Traditional Quoting Process

Modern B2B quoting has to solve three competing demands at once:

1. Personalization
   Buyers expect quotes tailored to their context: Industry, volume, history, support needs and commercial constraints. They want to feel understood, not treated as a line item.
2. Customization
   Sales teams need the flexibility to configure complex offers: alternative products, tiered pricing, contract terms, service bundles, warranties, delivery options and more.
3. Scalability
   Operations teams need all of this to work at scale across thousands of SKUs, multiple regions, multiple channels, and growing volumes of RFQs without the entire process collapsing under its own weight.

Traditional tools weren’t built for this. They rely on manual spreadsheets, static price lists, disconnected email threads, rigid approval chains and limited integration with CRM, ERP and inventory systems.

A modern quoting solution brings every part of the process into one connected flow.

Instead of stitching together PDFs, spreadsheets, approvals and inventory checks across five systems, quoting happens in a shared, digital workspace that turns quoting from an operational chore into a growth engine.

Modernizing Your Quoting Solution

One of the biggest misconceptions is that modernizing quoting requires the perfect CRM, perfectly clean pricing data and a full replatform of commerce and back-office systems.

In reality, the fastest wins come from modernizing the quoting layer first and letting the efficiency ripple outward.

A quoting capability that plugs into your existing commerce experience offers one of the highest ROIs of any digital sales initiative, because it improves the single moment that most directly determines revenue.

HCL Commerce+ Quoting is designed exactly for that.

It:

• starts with the RFQ that can be created from a shopping cart, a requisition list or custom requirements.
• lets buyers attach specs, diagrams, bills of materials and custom attributes so nothing gets lost in translation.
• gives sellers tools to propose alternatives, adjust pricing intelligently, and negotiate terms without leaving the quoting workspace.
• plugs into existing systems (ERP, CRM, inventory, pricing) so quotes are always grounded in reality.

In other words, it doesn’t force you to choose between flexibility and control. It gives you both.

Learn More About Our Quoting PBC

If your quoting process still lives in email threads, offline spreadsheets and tribal knowledge, it’s not just a technology gap. It’s a revenue gap.

Our Quoting PBC modernizes quoting for any size organization. It brings negotiation, pricing logic, fulfillment context, and approvals into a single, scalable capability.

Learn more about our Quoting PBC.

Sources

1. https://www.forrester.com/press-newsroom/forrester-the-state-of-business-buying-2024
2. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/busting-the-five-biggest-b2b-e-commerce-myths