A late quote is never recorded as lost. It is recorded as sent. It sits in the CRM with a status nobody updates and ages quietly out of the pipeline. The quotes you can name are the ones you lost on price, and those came with a conversation. The ones you lost on timing came with silence.

The buyer's attention window

An RFQ is not a standing invitation. It is a window, and it closes:

  • A buyer sending an RFQ has almost always sent it to more than one supplier.
  • The first credible answer sets the reference point. Every later quote is judged against it: on price, on lead time, and on how much work the buyer had to do.
  • Attention decays in minutes, not days. A buyer comparing three suppliers is not waiting patiently in between; they are reading whichever answer arrived first.
  • Being early beats being thorough but late. A complete quote on Tuesday competes against a decision that was framed on Monday.
  • The window is now shorter at the front. In McKinsey's 2026 Global B2B Pulse, a survey of nearly four thousand decision makers across thirteen countries, generative AI has entered the top five channels buyers use to find suppliers, which raises expectations for speed and expertise before a sales conversation even begins.
  • Buyers now do their comparison before they contact you. By the time an RFQ arrives, they are not opening a discovery conversation. They are waiting for a number.

Where the hours actually go: manual matching

Teams rarely lose time to laziness. They lose it to matching, turning what a buyer wrote into what your system calls it.

  • The request is in the buyer's words. A description, a photo of a nameplate, a competitor's part code, an old order reference. None of it is your SKU.
  • Someone has to translate it. Search the catalogue, recognise the equivalent, decide on a substitution when the exact item is discontinued.
  • Then verify it. Stock on hand, incoming, allocation, the pricing rule for that customer and that quantity.
  • Then chase the gaps. A missing quantity, an unclear destination, no delivery date. Each gap is a reply and another wait.
  • And repeat it per line item. A ten-line RFQ is ten of these, not one.
  • The knowledge is uneven. The person who knows the substitution rule for one product family may be on a plant visit until Thursday.

Every one of those steps is minutes. Multiplied by line items, multiplied by requests per day, they become the backlog, and the backlog is what buyers experience as your response time.

Coverage, not effort

  • Requests arrive at 19:40 from three time zones east. They are read at 09:15.
  • Weekends and public holidays are dead air on your side and ordinary working days on the buyer's.
  • Adding a person adds capacity in the hours you already cover, which are not the hours the delay comes from.
  • The requests that decay fastest are the ones that arrive when nobody is at a desk.

Every quote not sent is revenue that was already earned

This is the part that stays hidden. Think about what an RFQ already represents by the time it reaches you:

  • The demand exists. Someone has a requirement, a budget and a deadline.
  • You were found. The marketing, the reputation and the relationship that put you on the buyer's list are already paid for.
  • The buyer took the trouble to ask. That is the most qualified moment in the entire funnel.
  • And then nothing is sent, or it is sent on Tuesday. The cost of acquisition has been incurred in full and the revenue has not.

A quote that goes out late is not a slow win. It is usually a loss with a delay attached, on a deal you had already paid to reach.

The RFQs sitting unanswered overnight are not a queue. They are pipeline that was funded, delivered to your inbox, and then left to expire.

Stima was built around these gaps. It reads RFQs as they arrive on email and WhatsApp, matches them against your catalogue and stock, and answers the standard ones straight away, so a request that lands at 19:40 has a quote before anyone is back at a desk, and the team spends its hours on the quotes that genuinely need them.