Deep Strut, 20 Footers. The Hidden Cost of Quoting with Incomplete Data

March 10, 2026

The email said: "Deep strut, 20 footers."

That's it. No finish. No gauge. No profile. No hole pattern. No quantity. Just five words and a deadline.

If you work in manufacturing, you already know what happens next.

The Detective Work

Someone on your inside sales team stops what they're doing. They open the email. They squint at it. Then they start playing detective.

Which deep strut? There are 14 SKUs that could match. Is it pre-galvanized or hot-dip? 1-5/8" or 1-7/8"? Slotted or solid back? And "20 footers"... are we talking 20 pieces or 20-foot lengths?

So now they're cross-referencing past orders. Calling the rep. Checking the customer's purchase history. Pulling up three different spreadsheets. Asking the guy two desks over if he remembers what this account usually orders. It's an absolute mess.

Thirty minutes later, they send a quote. Maybe it's right. Maybe it's not. Either way, they've burned half an hour before they even touched a pricing tool.

This Isn't a Broken Process. This IS the Process.

Manufacturers deal with incomplete, ambiguous, shorthand-filled requests every single day. Contractors and buyers speak in their own language. They send one-liners that assume you already know what they need. Especially since last time you did.

Most of the time, your team figures it out. Because they're good at their jobs and they've been doing this for 15 years.

But here's the part nobody talks about.

What Happens When Those People Leave?

All that tribal knowledge (which customer calls deep strut "channel," which account always wants hot-dip, which rep rounds up to the nearest hundred) walks out the door with them.

And the new person? They're staring at "deep strut, 20 footers" with absolutely no context. No history. No shorthand dictionary. No one to ask because the person who knew is gone.

We've talked to manufacturers running 20-year-old homegrown quoting systems held together by a single person approaching retirement. We've seen teams processing hundreds of RFQs a week where every quote requires manual interpretation of vague specs. We've watched reps skip the quoting system entirely, relying on draft orders and screenshots because the tools can't handle the ambiguity of real-world requests.

This is the norm, not the exception.

A Systems Problem, Not a People Problem

The manufacturers we talk to aren't struggling because their products are complicated. They're struggling because the translation layer between what a buyer asks for and what actually gets quoted is entirely human, entirely manual, and entirely undocumented.

Think about what that really means. Your quoting accuracy depends on who happens to be at their desk when the email comes in. Your speed-to-quote depends on how many tabs they have open. Your margin depends on whether someone remembers that this customer gets the volume discount.

That's not a people problem. That's a systems problem. And it's costing more than anyone wants to admit: wrong quotes, lost deals, and margin erosion from rework.

The Compounding Effect

Here's where it gets worse. These two problems (fragile systems and incomplete data) compound each other.

A legacy quoting system can't handle ambiguity. It needs clean inputs, exact SKUs, specific quantities. But the real world doesn't send clean inputs. It sends "deep strut, 20 footers." So your team becomes the translation layer, manually bridging the gap between messy reality and rigid systems, every single time.

The more complex your catalog, the worse this gets. Variable pricing by volume and customer. Different units across product lines: strut by the foot, fittings by the each. Commodity prices that fluctuate daily. Custom kits combining products that aren't typically sold together. Every layer of complexity widens the gap between what buyers send and what your system needs.

The Question Worth Asking

If your quoting team spends more time decoding requests than actually pricing them, that's worth paying attention to.

Not because your people aren't smart enough. They clearly are. They've been making it work for years. But because the cost of depending on tribal knowledge, manual interpretation, and one-person systems only goes in one direction.

The next time someone on your team gets a five-word RFQ and spends 30 minutes turning it into a quote, ask yourself: what happens when they're not here to do that anymore?

We're building something at ChannelFlex to close this gap. Reach out if you want to talk about what you're seeing.

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Nick Tomassetti is the Co-Founder & CEO of ChannelFlex, building AI-powered quoting and order processing automation for industrial manufacturers and distributors.