If you manufacture configurable products — custom cabinetry, windows, doors, furniture, or industrial parts — you already know that quoting is complicated. Your products have hundreds or thousands of valid combinations of size, material, finish, hardware, and accessories. Each combination maps to a different price.
What you might not know is just how much your current quoting process is costing you.
A 2025 survey by Aleran found that manual quoting costs manufacturers an average of 5% of annual revenue — roughly $2.5 million per company. And 88% of manufacturers reported losing deals directly because of manual processes.
Let’s look at why.
The Price Grid Problem
Most manufacturers manage pricing through some version of a price grid — a matrix that maps product options to prices. For simple products with a handful of options, this works fine.
But configurable products aren’t simple.
A typical residential double-hung window, for example, has more configuration complexity than nearly any other manufactured product: frame material, glass type, glazing, hardware, grilles, colors, sizes, and regional building code requirements. Multiply those options together and you get tens of thousands of valid combinations — each with its own price.
These grids end up living in sprawling spreadsheets that only a few people in the organization truly understand. When a dealer needs a price, they either dig through the grid themselves (and frequently get it wrong) or they pick up the phone.
The Phone Call Cycle
Here’s how quoting typically works for configurable products without a CPQ system:
- A dealer’s customer wants a quote on a custom product
- The dealer looks at the price grid, gets confused by the options, and calls the manufacturer
- The manufacturer’s inside sales rep pulls up the spreadsheet, walks through the configuration, and gives a price
- The dealer realizes the customer wants a different size. Repeat from step 2
- The inside sales rep needs engineering to validate the configuration. The dealer waits
- Engineering flags an issue — that combination of options isn’t manufacturable. Start over
This back-and-forth is the norm, not the exception. Research shows that sales teams “bounce manufacturing data and other relevant information back and forth using spreadsheets, emails, and phone calls,” and custom products “require engineering input to validate configurations, adding delays to the quoting process.”
For 71% of manufacturers, producing a single quote takes at least a full business day. At companies like Helmer Scientific, sales reps were spending up to 90 minutes creating a single quote — with frequent errors meaning rework and more delays.
Meanwhile, the dealer’s customer is waiting. And in today’s market, waiting kills deals.
Where the Real Costs Hide
The obvious costs of manual quoting are the labor hours: someone on your team fielding calls, looking up prices, and building quotes by hand. But the real damage happens downstream.
Configuration Errors That Reach the Shop Floor
When a dealer configures a product through a spreadsheet or over the phone, there’s no system enforcing what’s actually manufacturable. Invalid configurations slip through. One manufacturing client lost a $400,000 deal because their sales rep quoted a product configuration that physically couldn’t be built — by the time engineering caught the error, the buyer had signed with a competitor.
These aren’t edge cases. 44% of manufacturers cite data entry errors as a major issue, and 45% say manual quoting creates misalignment with actual customer requirements.
Pricing Mistakes That Erode Margins
Without automated pricing rules, every quote is a manual calculation. Under-quoting erodes your margins. Over-quoting loses deals. And when price grids are outdated — which happens constantly as material costs shift — every quote generated from them is wrong by default.
Data inaccuracies cost manufacturing businesses up to 12% in lost revenue, according to research by Experian.
Lost Deals From Slow Response Times
Your dealers are competing for business. When they can’t get a price quickly, they either guess (and risk errors) or lose the deal to a competitor whose dealers can self-serve. The longer your quoting cycle, the more revenue walks out the door.
What Changes With CPQ
CPQ — Configure, Price, Quote — is the system that replaces the spreadsheet-and-phone-call workflow with guided, rules-based product configuration and real-time pricing. Here’s what shifts:
1. Guided Configuration Prevents Invalid Products
Instead of navigating a spreadsheet and hoping the combination works, dealers configure products through a guided interface. The system enforces your manufacturing rules in real time — if a combination isn’t valid, it’s simply not available as an option. No invalid configurations reach your inside sales team, your engineering team, or your shop floor.
This alone eliminates what the industry calls “rework cycles” — the expensive back-and-forth that happens when operations or engineering catch errors after a quote is already approved.
2. Real-Time Pricing Without Phone Calls
With CPQ, pricing rules are built into the system. As a dealer configures a product, the price updates instantly. No phone calls, no waiting for a callback, no emailing a spreadsheet back and forth.
One door manufacturer found that when dealers could generate their own quotes, the total number of quotes increased by 30%. More quotes means more opportunities, and more opportunities means more revenue.
3. Dramatically Faster Quote Turnaround
The numbers here are stark. Teams using CPQ generate quotes up to 10x faster and cut approval times by up to 95%. Pella Windows improved quote generation time by over 80%. Howden Netherlands slashed pricing time by 83%.
When a quote that used to take a day now takes minutes, your dealers can respond to their customers in real time. That speed advantage compounds across every deal.
4. Fewer Errors, Lower Costs
CPQ users report 90% fewer pricing errors and 60-70% faster quoting. Configuration errors don’t just impact quotes — they affect purchasing, production schedules, and deliveries. Eliminating them at the source prevents expensive redesigns, production delays, and unhappy customers downstream.
5. A Better Dealer Experience
Ultimately, your dealers are your sales channel. When you make it easy for them to configure products, get accurate prices, and generate professional quotes — all without picking up the phone — they sell more of your products. It’s that straightforward.
Manufacturers using CPQ see quote-to-order conversion rates increase by up to 40%. And when dealers can self-serve, your inside sales team is freed up to focus on high-value work instead of fielding routine pricing calls.
The Bottom Line
Manual quoting for configurable products isn’t just slow — it’s expensive, error-prone, and it puts your dealers at a competitive disadvantage.
The shift to CPQ is happening across manufacturing. The market is projected to reach $7.5 billion by 2031, with manufacturing leading adoption. 54% of manufacturers now list digital quoting platforms as a top priority.
The manufacturers who equip their dealers with real-time configuration and pricing tools will win more business. The ones still relying on price grids and phone calls will keep losing 5% of their revenue to a process that should have been automated years ago.