Last year I worked with a distributor whose comp plan paid a monthly bonus to any salesperson who put out 100 or more quotes.
Six salespeople. Six hundred quotes a month. To what end?
They hit it. Of course they hit it. And the average win rate across those six people was 8%. Yep, 8%. Leadership thought they needed to paper the street with their prices.
Nobody on that team was lazy. Nobody was confused about the job. They did exactly what the company paid them to do, at volume, month after month, and the company got exactly what it bought: paper on the street.
If your first instinct reading that is *my team would never*, check your own quote to close ratio before you finish this paragraph. If it starts with a one, your reps aren't the problem, and reading further will be uncomfortable.
Stop Paying for Paper
Here's the belief underneath a low win rate, and it's almost always aimed at the wrong people.
My guys are busy. They're quoting plenty. They just can't close.
They're closing fine, relative to what you asked for. You asked for quantity of quotes. Quantity of quotes is what showed up.
That's the part owners have the hardest time hearing. The distributor above didn't have a sales problem that started with the salespeople. It started with a line in a compensation plan, written by leadership, that made the wrong behavior the profitable one. A rep who spent two hours qualifying an opportunity and walked away from it earned nothing. A rep who fired off a number in eleven minutes moved a step closer to a bonus.
Given that math, every rep on the team made the profitable choice. They stopped selling and started producing documents.
You can't out-coach an incentive. Whatever you pay for, you'll get more of it, and your team will believe that's what you wanted — because it is.
Count What an 8% Win Rate Does to Your Quote to Close Ratio
Run the arithmetic on 100 quotes a month at an 8% win rate.
Ninety-two of those quotes went nowhere. Every one of them consumed a rep's time, and most consumed somebody else's too — inside sales pulling pricing, operations checking availability, an engineer confirming a spec. Your whole company was working on business that was never going to close, at a rate of about eleven bad quotes for every good one.
That's the visible cost. The invisible one is worse: the opportunities your reps never worked because they were producing quotes. Nobody prospected. Nobody went back to a stalled account and asked a hard question. There wasn't time, and there wasn't a bonus in it.
Now the other side of it. Objective Management Group's data shows roughly a 30% lift in win rates when a defined sales process is coached — not written down, coached. That's the number that says this is reachable.
Here's what reachable looked like at that distributor. We removed the quote-volume bonus from the comp plan entirely and instead paid for win rate above 30%, so the money finally rewarded qualification. Then we installed Baseline Selling and coached it, week after week, because a new incentive without a process just tells people to do better without telling them how.
Six months in, the team average went from 8% to 31%. Six months after that, 49%.
Same six salespeople. Same market. Same products. Nobody was replaced.
Understand Where the Deal Actually Dies
The quote doesn't die at the number. By the time it goes out, the outcome was decided weeks earlier, in the part of the process most teams treat as small talk.
A deal is won or lost in qualification — between the first real conversation and the proposal. Four things have to be true before anyone builds a number, and if your reps can't tell you all four on a given opportunity, they're guessing.
There has to be a compelling reason to change
Not a preference. Not curiosity. Not "we're always looking at options." Something is wrong enough that this buyer has to do something about it. If your rep can't name the problem in the buyer's own words, there is no opportunity — there's a conversation.
The reason has to carry urgency
Plenty of companies have real problems they're perfectly willing to live with for another two years. A problem without urgency produces a quote, a polite thank-you, and silence. The question isn't whether it hurts. It's what happens to them if nothing changes by spring.
The rep has to reach the person who decides
Not the person who gathers quotes. What you send to a non-decision-maker is a document that gets compared on price and used to negotiate someone else down.
Budget, criteria, and a timeline come before the proposal
Before a number goes out, your rep should know what they're prepared to spend, how they'll choose, and when they intend to decide. If any of the three is missing, the quote is a research contribution to their process.
Notice what all four have in common. Every one of them is grounds for disqualification. That's the shift most sales teams never make: the job in the middle of the process isn't to advance everything, it's to get to a yes or a no fast and stop spending the company's capacity on maybes.
Score every open opportunity against those four. The ones that can't answer the questions don't get a quote — the price of the quote is a decision from the prospect.
Control the Specification Before It's a Bid
A quote and a bid aren't the same animal, and your team should treat them differently.
If you sell into formal construction bids, price competition is the endgame, not the beginning. By the time the package hits the street, the spec is written, the requirements are locked, and every bidder is answering an identical question.
Controlling the specification is the whole game in that market. It means being in the conversation while requirements are still being decided — with the people who write them — so what eventually goes out to bid reflects what you do best. Reps who show up when the bid drops are quoting. Reps who show up while the spec is open are selling.
Same discipline moved upstream. A bid you influenced is an opportunity. A bid you received is a lottery ticket with a labor cost.
You'll Say Your Customers Demand Quotes
The objection is fast and it's partly fair.
This is a quoting business. They ask, we quote. If we start qualifying, we'll lose volume.
You'll lose volume of quotes. That's the point. The distributor above cut quote volume substantially and their revenue went up, because 92 dead quotes a month were never revenue — they were the appearance of activity, and they were consuming the capacity that could have gone into real opportunities.
The second objection is the real one.
If my rep walks away from something, and it would have closed, that's on me.
Sometimes. But look at your own history: how many of the deals you've lost in the last year were lost at the price, and how many were dead before the quote went out and nobody would say so? Your reps already know which ones those are. They just don't have permission to say it, because the scoreboard rewards paper.
A quote is an answer. Your team never confirmed there was a question.
Pay for Won Business, Not for Paper
Picture the version of this where the process runs the way the rest of your company does.
Your reps bring you fewer opportunities, and you believe the ones they bring. Your operations stop pricing work that was never real. The forecast holds because everything in it has a decision maker, a reason, and a date attached. And your win rate stops being a number you explain and starts being a number you plan against.
Nobody in that picture works harder. They work on fewer things.
Start where that distributor started: look at what your comp plan actually pays for, then look at your quote to close ratio, and see whether they're the same story.
If you want the whole argument — why companies running EOS in every other seat still run sales on hope, and what to install instead — read Inside Out: Why Strong EOS Companies Have Weak Sales Teams.
Qualify hard. Quote less. Win more of what you send.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good quote to close ratio?
It depends on your market, but a team qualifying properly generally lands well north of 30%, and single digits is a signal that the process — or the incentive behind it — is pointed the wrong way. The distributor in this post moved from 8% to 49% in twelve months with the same six salespeople.
Why is our sales win rate so low?
Usually because quotes go out before the opportunity is qualified. If a rep can't name the buyer's compelling reason to change, the urgency behind it, the actual decision maker, and the budget, criteria, and timeline, the quote is a guess with a letterhead on it.
Should salespeople be paid for quote volume?
No. Paying for quote volume buys quote volume, and reps respond rationally by quoting everything that moves. Pay for won business or for win rate above a threshold, so the money rewards qualifying out as much as qualifying in.
How is a bid different from a quote in distribution?
A bid is a locked specification competed on price; a quote is a response to a request you can still shape. In bid markets the leverage sits upstream — being in the room while the specification is written, not answering the package after it drops.
Walter Crosby | The Sales Integrator™ | helixsalesdevelopment.com
