Request for quote in B2B
Your shop shows a price. The buyer asks for a quote anyway. Understanding why they do that — and it is rarely because they missed the price — decides whether your quoting process wins deals or just documents them.
Four reasons buyers ask
Their process requires a document. Above a threshold, most purchasing departments require a written offer, often two or three from different suppliers, attached to the internal requisition. The buyer is not negotiating. They need a PDF with a number, a validity date and your company's terms on it, because without one their own approval workflow will not move. Answer fast and you are frequently the offer the requisition gets built around.
The thing is not fully priced. A configured product, a made-to-order
assembly, a cut-to-length item, a project quantity that needs a supplier
enquiry — these have no catalogue price, and they should not fake one. In the
Revenue Cloud these are entries of type On request: the buyer is shown "on
request", never €0.00, and the request is the intended next step. See
How pricing works and
Configure and order.
The terms, not the price. Delivery split across two sites, a call-off schedule, a retention period, packaging in the customer's own labelling, freight on a crane truck to a construction site with a timed slot. The unit price may be uncontroversial while everything around it needs writing down.
They want a better number. The honest one. A volume that justifies a different price, a competitor's offer in hand, or a framework negotiation coming up. This is a sales conversation, and it is the reason quoting is a sales tool rather than a form.
Response time is the competitive factor
In a three-supplier enquiry, the offer that arrives first is read first, sets the frame for the others, and disproportionately wins. Not because it is cheapest — because by the time offers two and three arrive, the buyer has already built their requisition around a structure, and a differently structured offer costs them work.
The number to manage is therefore time from requested to sent, and the
number to manage it against is not an average. It is the tail. An Innendienst
that answers most requests in four hours and a tenth of them in six days does not
have a four-hour reputation; it has a six-day one, because the buyer remembers
the wait, not the median.
Three things make the tail long, and all three are fixable:
| Cause | Fix |
|---|---|
| Requests arrive by email into a personal inbox | Requests land in one queue everybody can see — Sales › Quotes › Requests |
| The person who may grant the discount is on holiday | Discount authority per role, with a deputy, not per person |
| Every quote is written from scratch | Templates and drafting from the request, not from an empty form |
A quote is a sales-rep tool, not a buyer tool
This one is worth saying plainly, because it decides how you build the process.
Buyers do not want to use a quoting system. They want to ask a question and receive a document. Every additional field on your request form is a reason to send an email instead — and an email is a request that never enters your queue, never gets measured, and gets forgotten when the person who received it is out.
Keep the buyer's side to what you genuinely cannot draft without: which articles, how many, when they need it, and a free-text box. Everything else — the terms, the freight, the discount structure — is your side of the work.
The system's real user is your Innendienst. They need the account's history, the last three quotes to this customer, the current contract prices, the margin on the line they are about to discount, and the authority to send without chasing a signature. That is what makes quoting fast, and speed is what wins.
What a good B2B quote contains
Vendor-neutral, and it is a longer list than a B2C order confirmation:
- Your quote number and date, and the buyer's own enquiry reference if they gave one. Their reference is how the offer gets found again in their system.
- A validity date. Without one, the offer is either indefinite or worthless, depending on which lawyer you ask.
- Line items with quantity, unit and unit price — and the unit stated
explicitly.
PCE,M,KGare not interchangeable, and "500" means three different orders depending on which one it is. - The price basis. Net, in the buyer's currency, with the VAT stated separately. See Currencies and tax.
- Scale prices where they apply. Showing that 600 metres costs less per metre than 500 is not giving margin away — it is how you get an order for 600.
- Delivery terms and lead time, Incoterms where relevant, and freight either priced or explicitly quoted separately.
- Payment terms, matching what the account actually has — see Payment terms.
- Your terms and conditions, as a block on the document rather than a link. Procurement archives the PDF, not your website.
- A named person with a direct number. German B2B buyers still phone, and the quote that has a name on it gets the call instead of the competitor.
How this works in the Revenue Cloud
A buyer raises a request from the cart or from a product page — the cart becomes
the request's lines, so nothing is re-keyed. Where a line is priced On request,
the request path is the only path to a price, which is exactly the intent.
Requests land on Sales › Quotes › Requests with the account, the contact, the requested lines and the buyer's note. Drafting from a request creates the quote with the lines already in it and links the two, so the response-time clock has both ends.
For buyers who arrive through a procurement system rather than your storefront, the request usually comes as a document in their format, not a form on your site — see Punchout explained.
Next
- Handle a quote request — the task, step by step.
- Quote templates and documents — the PDF that carries all of the above.