Quoting costs you hours. This page prices them.
Work out what a year of quoting costs you in human hours, before you price any CPQ.
What does your quoting process cost?
Add up the human minutes one quote consumes (building it, revising it), multiply by the quotes you send in a year, and price those hours at what they cost you loaded. That total is your quoting cost. Most teams have never put a figure on it, because no single person watches the whole chain.
Six questions, and what each answer means
The calculator asks six things. Four of them feed the arithmetic. Two don’t, and those two are usually the ones that change someone’s mind.
1. How many quotes does your team send in a month?
Volume multiplies everything below it. This is also the input people get wrong in the safe direction: count the quotes that were built and never sent, and the ones rebuilt from scratch after a scope change. Both cost the same minutes as a quote that closed.
2. Minutes of human time in the first version, everyone included
A rep will tell you twenty. The honest number includes the sales engineer who checked the configuration, the ops person who fixed the template, and whoever answered the Slack message about which price book applies. Add those up before you type anything in. If a chunk of it happens in a quoting spreadsheet, count the spreadsheet’s minutes too.
3. Revisions before a quote gets accepted, and the minutes each pass costs
Revisions are where the multiplier hides. This question wants two numbers: how many passes a quote takes before someone signs it, and how long a pass runs. A quote revised twice at twenty minutes a pass costs more than the first build did. Most teams track neither one. Ask three reps and take the highest number.
4. The fully loaded cost of an hour of that time
Salary plus payroll tax plus benefits plus the overhead that keeps a desk open, divided by the hours that person actually works in a year. Most people reach for base salary. Base salary is the low number.
5. If two reps quoted the same deal, would they get the same number?
This one stays out of the math. It changes what the total means.
If the answer is no, some share of those hours is producing quotes that are wrong, and the credit memos and the margin given away sit outside this calculation.
6. Calendar days between the request and the sent quote
Cycle time gets its own line in the result. Days and dollars don’t add up to anything honest, so the calculator keeps them apart. It matters anyway. It’s the number that shows up in a lost deal rather than a payroll line.
The arithmetic behind the number
Five numbers, four steps. No weighting, no black box.
| Step | The math |
|---|---|
|
Quotes per year
|
quotes per month × 12
|
|
Minutes per quote
|
build minutes + (revisions × minutes per revision)
|
|
Hours per year
|
(quotes per year × minutes per quote) ÷ 60
|
|
Annual cost of quoting
|
hours per year × fully loaded hourly rate
|
No benchmark and no industry average are applied at any step. Every number in the result is one you supplied.
Assumptions this page makes, and how to overrule them
Four assumptions sit inside that table. Here they are, and each one is yours to change.
Twelve months of quoting. Step one multiplies your monthly volume by 12. If your business has a season, use an average month. Your best month will flatter the total.
One blended rate. Every minute in the calculation is priced at a single fully loaded rate. A quote that pulls in a sales engineer costs more per minute than one a rep builds alone. If that’s your situation, weight the rate up. Don’t average the difference away.
Revisions as an average. Question 3 asks for a typical number of passes and a typical length for one. Most teams track neither, which makes this the input to run twice: once with the number you believe, and once with the number your reps give you.
Days kept out of dollars. Cycle time is reported on its own line and never converted into money. Turning days into dollars would need an estimate of what a slow quote loses you, and that estimate would have to come from us. It isn’t ours to make.
A worked example, with numbers we made up
Every figure below is invented for the arithmetic. It isn’t a customer and it isn’t an average.
| Input | Hypothetical value |
|---|---|
|
Quotes per month
|
60 |
|
Minutes to build the first version, all hands
|
45 |
|
Revisions per quote
|
1.5 |
|
Minutes per revision
|
20 |
|
Fully loaded hourly rate
|
$65 |
|
Calendar days, request to sent
|
4 |
Every figure in this table is invented for the arithmetic, as is every figure in the small-quote test further down. No customer supplied any of it.
That’s 720 quotes a year at 75 minutes each: 900 hours, and $58,500. Nine hundred hours, spread invisibly across a sales team and whoever finance sends the approval to.
Quotivity does not take $58,500 to zero. A calculator that shows you it does is selling you something.
Three lines, and who reads each one
Three lines come out of that arithmetic: hours a year, dollars a year, and calendar days per quote. Hours and dollars are one measurement in two units. Days comes from its own question and stays on its own line. Which of the three matters depends on who’s reading, and in most companies that’s three different people. It’s also why the number usually doesn’t get counted at all.
Hours. What a sales leader reads.
The hours line is capacity you’re already paying for. Nobody invoices you for it, so it never shows up as a cost. It shows up as reps building quotes on a Thursday afternoon. That’s selling time. Most of those hours belong to a rep. If the number is large, your quoting throughput is capped by people, not by demand.
Days. What operations reads.
Calendar days are the process reading. The days between a request and a sent quote are days spent in queues and handoffs, and every handoff is a person who had to be available. Operations is usually one of them. If the days are long and the hours are short, the cost is in the waiting, and no amount of faster typing moves it.
Dollars. What finance reads.
Multiply the hours by a fully loaded rate and you have a payroll number for work that has never appeared on a budget line. It’s the floor for a build-versus-buy conversation, and it’s the only one of the three lines that compares directly to a software price. It’s also the only line with no published customer number behind it. The rate is yours, so a published one would describe someone else’s payroll.
Four things this number leaves out
It’s a diagnostic, not a forecast. All four omissions are deliberate.
Savings. Some of those 900 hours are judgment — deciding what to sell, deciding what to concede. Automation doesn’t touch those, and it shouldn’t. What moves is the mechanical share: retyping line items and rebuilding a template. That share is what quote automation works on.
Deals. A quote that took four days when a competitor’s took four hours doesn’t appear here. Nobody can size that for you honestly, so this calculator doesn’t try.
Margin. Discounts nobody caught and prices below the book cost real money and show up nowhere in a time-based total. At True North, that work re-captured 30% realized margin over roughly 18 months. That’s a separate project from the one this page is measuring.
Your own attention. The person who owns the quoting spreadsheet is usually the person you’d rather have doing something else. There’s no line for that.
Where the minutes actually go
Two published customer results map directly onto the two lines this calculator reports.
On build minutes and headcount, from a HubSpot marketplace review by D. Peterson at Watershape:
Our process went from as many as 6 people down to 1. Simple proposals that required 30 minutes are down to 3 minutes. Complex proposals that required 90 minutes or longer are down to 10-15 minutes.
D. Peterson
Watershape
On cycle time, Aptarro’s negotiation cycle went from 29 days to 6 — a 79% reduction. Renée Durrance, Senior Director of Business Systems at Aptarro, put the reason plainly:
Sales reps are incentivized to stick to price book because they can get their deal out the door much faster.
Renée Durrance
Senior Director of Business Systems, Aptarro
Neither result is a benchmark, and neither is a prediction about your inputs.
Peterson review: HubSpot marketplace listing. Aptarro figures: the Aptarro case study.
You priced the problem. This is what closes it.
Everything up to here measures. This part changes what gets measured. Four systems do that. Each one takes over something a person does by hand today, and each one below is tied to the question whose answer it moves.
Configurable Products
What it replaces: the build minutes you counted in question 2. Today a rep assembles a valid configuration from memory, or walks over to the person who carries the exceptions in their head.
The failure it prevents: the wrong product, and the rebuild it costs you. The rule attaches to the attribute. Write the 480-volt rule once and it holds for every SKU carrying that attribute, including whatever you add next spring. A rep can’t put an invalid pairing on a quote.
Who stops waiting: the rep, on the walk over and the wait for an answer.
Guided Selling
What it replaces: more of question 2’s minutes, moved for a different reason. A new rep in front of an empty quote screen, and the months it takes them to learn what to ask.
The failure it prevents: the missed question, which comes back as a revision. Discovery arrives as a fixed sequence of prompts, so a rep in week two builds what a rep in year ten builds.
Who stops waiting: the new rep, who can build a quote without borrowing an hour of someone else’s day. And the person whose hour it was.
Calculated Pricing and Price Books
What it replaces: part of the revision count in question 3: some of those passes are a price that was wrong the first time. Under that sit a pricing spreadsheet nobody has refreshed in months and a duplicate product for every segment that buys it.
The failure it prevents: the stale price. Price books are on both plans, so each option inside a bundle reads its price off the book the quote sits on. One bundle carries every segment. Calculated pricing is on the Enterprise plan. A standalone product can carry a different formula in each price book.
Who stops waiting: finance. The number on the quote is already the number they’d have arrived at.
Rules Engine and Approvals
What it replaces: the calendar days you entered in question 6. Today the discount policy sits in a document and in the sales manager’s memory. Approval starts when somebody notices they were tagged in a note.
The failure it prevents: the discount that never had to be asked for, and the days a quote waits in a queue for one. The cap is live while the rep is still typing, and a discount past the floor goes straight to approval on its way out. Approval holds once it’s given. Nobody pulls the quote back and changes the number afterward.
Who stops waiting: everyone. The policy becomes the fastest route a quote has out the door.
The mechanical share is the part these four systems take. How big it is inside your own quotes is not something a page can tell you. That’s the demo.
Small quotes, small number
Some readers should close this tab. Here is the test: your quotes run to about three line items and they almost never get revised. Feed that in and the calculator returns something boring, and it should.
Five minutes a quote, 40 quotes a month, $65 an hour works out to 40 hours and about $2,600 a year. Quotivity Professional is $5,000 a year plus $2,500 one-time onboarding. The arithmetic says don’t buy it. Build those quotes in HubSpot’s own quote tool and skip the demo.
Questions about quoting cost
Multiply your monthly quote volume by twelve. Work out what one quote takes: build minutes, plus revisions times the minutes a revision costs. Multiply those two figures together, divide by 60 for hours, then multiply by a fully loaded hourly rate. That is your annual human cost. Cycle time in days is reported on its own line.
No. Every figure in the result comes from what you enter. Published quoting benchmarks pool wildly different quote types, so a manufacturer configuring 200 SKUs and an agency sending a two-line retainer land in the same average and it describes neither of them.
Not the same number. Cost is what you spend today, and you can measure it. ROI needs a second estimate of how much of that cost is mechanical, which is a conversation about your actual quotes. Quotivity is a HubSpot-native CPQ app, so the honest version of that conversation starts with what HubSpot already does for you.
The retyping ones. How many that is depends on how mechanical your quote already is. Two results are published behind this calculator: 30 minutes down to 3 at Watershape, and a 29-day negotiation cycle down to 6 at Aptarro. Those are two customers with two catalogs. Read them as evidence that the mechanical share is large. Don’t run them as a multiplier over your own inputs.
Your cost sits in cycle time, not in build minutes, and the fix is approval routing. Approvals that route on a discount past your ceiling, a quote total, a segment or a flagged product are covered on the advanced quote approvals page.
Run your own numbers, then bring us the worst one
Take the quote that took longest last quarter. Run them through the four steps above, then book a demo and we’ll go line by line through which of those minutes are mechanical and which are yours to keep.