A quote that takes five days to reach the client contains, in nearly every job book I have opened, somewhere between forty minutes and two hours of actual work. Everything else is the document sitting still: in a diary waiting for a site visit, in an inbox waiting for a supplier price, on a kitchen table waiting for the owner to have a free evening. That ratio is the entire subject, and you can measure it by Friday without buying anything.
Search for what fast quoting is worth and the same claims come back: being first doubles your win rate, firms that quote same-day take a third more work, quick follow-up lifts conversion by 27 per cent. Trace any of them to a stated method and there is nothing there — a vendor blog citing a vendor blog. We ran that exercise properly for the cost of an unanswered enquiry and reached the same place: two of the most repeated speed figures in the industry have no primary source at all.
What survives is thin and worth saying plainly. The 2011 Harvard Business Review study by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington, covering 1.25 million leads, measures contact and qualification — not quotes. No comparable dataset exists for quote turnaround in any industry. Anyone offering you a quoting multiplier is inventing it. So the honest reading of "the numbers" in the title is not an industry benchmark. It is two figures out of your own job book.
Touch time is the total minutes a person spends actually producing the quote. Elapsed time is the wall clock, from enquiry to the client holding the document. Divide the first by the second and you have what the lean literature calls process cycle efficiency. The rule of thumb published across that literature puts most unimproved processes between 5 and 10 per cent, and treats 25 per cent as the point where a process earns the description. It is a rule of thumb rather than a measured constant, and it deserves to be used as one.
Apply it. One hour fifty of work spread across five working days is 110 minutes against roughly 2,400 available — under 5 per cent. That number says something quite specific, and it is not that quoting is slow. It is that quoting barely happens. The five days are storage.
| Stage of a five-day quote | Touch time | Elapsed | What it is waiting on |
|---|---|---|---|
| Enquiry read, job understood, call returned | 15 min | 4 hours | Somebody noticing the message |
| Site visit, or specification confirmed | 45 min | 2 days | Two diaries agreeing |
| Supplier prices requested and received | 10 min | 1.5 days | A third party — genuinely |
| Pricing, margin, wording, formatting | 35 min | 1 day | An evening the owner has free |
| Sent, and a follow-up scheduled | 5 min | half a day | Nothing at all |
| Total | about 1 h 50 | 5 days | Under 5 per cent efficiency |
One justification for speed should be put down before it spreads: that a slow quote loses money because input prices move underneath it. In Kanaky (New Caledonia) that claim is checkable. The BT21 all-works index published monthly by ISEE, the territory's statistics institute, stood at 99.72 in February 2026 and 102.02 provisionally in May, a rise of 1.7 per cent across the preceding twelve months. May's movement came mostly from diesel, up 21.5 per cent, alongside bitumen at 6.5 per cent and the equipment index at 2 per cent.
Read that properly. Even in a month with a violent fuel component, the general index moves about a point. Five days of that is a rounding error against any sane margin. Price drift is a real problem across a ninety-day validity window; it is not an argument for answering faster, and selling it as one is dishonest. Quoting speed is worth money because the client is comparing you against someone else this week — not because concrete moved.
Go back to the table and sort it by who is waiting. Two rows wait on the physical world: a site visit needs two diaries to meet, and a supplier answers when the supplier answers. Those are floors, and pretending otherwise is how projects lose credibility in week three. Everything else is waiting on the business itself — roughly fifty-five minutes of work stretched across three days.
That is where a two-hour quote comes from. Not from working faster, but from deleting the storage between the working. And it sets an honest ceiling: for a job that genuinely needs a visit, two hours is a fiction. The promise holds on standard, repeat-shape work with a known specification, which in most trade books is more than half the volume. So the correct sentence is not "every quote in two hours". It is "quotes that need no visit go out the same day, and the rest get a dated commitment within two hours".
Speed is the easiest thing in this field to oversell, so the failure modes belong in the same article. The first is scope. A quote produced quickly on work that was never pinned down becomes a variation argument three weeks later, and variations cost more than the job you won by being early. Firms pricing bespoke work know this and are right to resist. The rule that keeps both: compress the administrative wait, never the scope conversation. Where scope is genuinely unclear, the fast output is a dated holding position with its assumptions listed — a different document, which should look like one.
The second is quieter. A quote sent in two hours and never followed up performs worse than a slow quote from someone who rings on Tuesday. Sending is not the finish line, and the follow-up is the cheapest component of the whole system.
It depends entirely on whether the job needs a site visit. For standard work with a known specification, same-day is achievable and two hours is achievable once the price list sits in a template — because almost all of the delay is waiting rather than working. For anything requiring a visit or a bespoke supplier price, two hours is not honest, and the useful commitment is a dated one given within two hours. Promising a single turnaround figure across both categories is how quoting promises fail.
Not in any form worth relying on. The widely repeated claims — that being first doubles win rates, or that same-day quoting adds a third to won work — have no traceable methodology behind them. The credible speed research, notably the 2011 Harvard Business Review study of 1.25 million leads, measures contact and lead qualification, not quote turnaround. The defensible position is narrower: a client actively comparing suppliers this week is more likely to decide before a slow quote arrives. That is a reason to be quick without inventing a coefficient.
It should not, because the part worth automating is not the pricing judgement. Assembling a document from an agreed price list, applying the margin rule, checking the arithmetic and formatting the output are mechanical steps where a machine outperforms a tired person at nine in the evening. Deciding what the job involves, whether the scope is complete and whether the work is worth taking stays with the person who carries the risk. Systems that blur that line produce fast quotes that lose money on variations.
Measure touch time against elapsed time on the last ten quotes, then look at which stages are waiting on you rather than on a third party. In almost every case the largest recoverable block is the pricing-and-formatting evening, which sits waiting for the owner to be free. Removing that one queue typically cuts a five-day quote to under two, before anything else changes and before any supplier or diary problem is touched.
Kanaky Tech is an AI automation agency working across New Zealand and the Pacific. Start with a free AI opportunity audit: we map how your business actually runs, rank what is worth automating, and give you a clear scope before anything is built — no obligation.