The hidden tax on your best people
Sales teams spend most of the week on non-selling work. See how fragmented systems and manual quoting drain your best people — and what fixes it.
Samir Jokar
7/17/20265 min read
Your engineers and sales experts weren’t hired to be data-integration engines. But that’s how most of them spend their week.
Ask any leader at a mid-market industrial company what their best people should be doing, and the answer is obvious: solving customer problems, winning complex deals, engineering the right solution. Ask what those same people actually spend their days doing, and a very different picture emerges — one of copying numbers between systems, rebuilding pricing by hand in spreadsheets, and hunting for data that already exists somewhere in the organization.
This is the quiet organizational cost of manual quoting. It rarely shows up on a P&L, but it shows up everywhere else: in burnout, in turnover, in capacity that’s capped not by talent but by administrative drag.
The data: most of the week isn’t spent selling
The clearest measure of this comes from Salesforce’s State of Sales research. Across thousands of sales professionals, it found that reps spend only around 28% of their week actually selling — meaning roughly 72% goes to non-selling work (Salesforce, State of Sales). (More recent editions revise active selling time upward to about 40%, but the conclusion is unchanged: the majority of the week is consumed by everything except talking to customers.)
Crucially, Salesforce’s own breakdown names the culprits. Among the biggest time sinks: generating quotes, proposals, and gaining approvals, and manually entering customer and sales information (Salesforce, State of Sales). In other words, the quoting process itself — not selling, not strategy — is one of the single largest drains on a commercial team’s time.
Two more findings explain why that quoting work eats so many hours:
· The “toggling tax.” A Harvard Business Review study of 137 workers across three Fortune 500 companies found that people toggle between applications and websites roughly 1,200 times a day, losing nearly four hours a week — about 9% of their working time — just reorienting themselves after each switch (Harvard Business Review).
· The search tax. McKinsey Global Institute found that knowledge workers spend nearly 20% of the workweek searching for internal information or tracking down colleagues who have it (McKinsey Global Institute, The Social Economy).
These are broad, cross-industry studies — not measurements of industrial quoting specifically. But industrial quoting is a textbook case of exactly the pattern they describe: a task that forces skilled people to jump between disconnected systems and manually reassemble information over and over.
What it actually looks like in industrial B2B
To ground these numbers in the industrial context, we spoke with a product manager with over six years of experience in the B2B industrial sector.
Her description of preparing a single quote was strikingly concrete:
“Account information lives in one system. The product lives in another. Historical pricing is in a third. Costs come from yet another tool. You pull it all together by hand in a working file (OneNote, Excel), compute the margins manually on a calculator, and then send the price out by email — where someone else manually turns it into the quote that finally goes to the customer.”
And that’s the simple case — an existing product with known costs. For anything new, it compounds:
“For a new configuration, the costs aren’t available. So now you’re data-mining to find component costs, estimating the configuration cost yourself, converting currencies, and only then do you have something you can actually use for the pricing work.”
What stood out most, though, wasn’t the mechanics — it was the toll it takes:
“I can confirm the sensation of feeling drained. I know exactly how to make a quote — that’s the valuable part. But knowing I have to go and look for each piece of information all over the place, that non-value part, feels like a burden. It makes me feel like I’m doing monkey work.”
Read that back against the research. Every step in that workflow is an instance of the toggling tax (four systems for one quote), the search tax (mining for costs that aren’t readily available), and non-selling admin (manual margin math, currency conversion, spreadsheet assembly, re-keying into the final quote). A single quote can pull a skilled product or sales professional through an hour or more of pure data plumbing before a price even exists.
Why this is an organizational problem, not just an efficiency one
It’s tempting to file this under “inefficiency” and move on. But the cost is deeper, and it hits three ways:
1. Your most valuable people are doing your least valuable work. The person best equipped to win a complex deal or engineer the right solution is instead converting currencies and copying cells. That’s not just wasteful — it’s a misallocation of your scarcest resource.
2. It caps your capacity. When quoting scales linearly with manual effort, you can only quote as fast as your people can click. Growth means either burning out the team or hiring more people to do more manual assembly — neither of which scales cleanly.
3. It quietly drives errors and stress. Manual margin math, hand-keyed data, and email hand-offs are exactly where mistakes creep in — a wrong currency conversion, a stale cost, a transcription error. Every one of those is a margin risk and a stress point, and the people doing the work know it.
The result is a team that’s busy but not productive, capable but capacity-constrained, and increasingly drained by work they were never hired to do.
The fix isn’t more people — it’s connected systems
The instinct, when quoting slows down, is to add headcount. But as the Harvard Business Review researchers themselves concluded, “simply adding people to cover for bad processes won’t fix the problem.” The friction is in the design of the work — the disconnected systems and manual hand-offs — not in the people.
The alternative is to connect what’s already there: pull account, product, cost, and pricing data into one place, automate the margin math and currency conversion, and generate the quote directly — so your experts spend their time on judgment and customer relationships, not data entry.
How much of your team’s week is going to manual quoting?
Most companies have never measured it — how many hours their best people lose each week assembling quotes by hand across disconnected systems. If you don’t know that number, you’re paying the tax without ever seeing the bill.
Avanquor’s Pricing Discovery Audit maps your quoting workflow end-to-end, quantifies the manual effort buried in it, and designs an automation architecture built on your existing stack — owned by you, live in 4-6 months. No rip-and-replace, no enterprise licensing.
This is the second in a three-part series on the hidden costs of manual quoting in mid-market industrial B2B — covering time-to-market, organizational strain, and margin leakage.
Sources - Salesforce, State of Sales — reps spend ~28% of the week selling; quote generation and manual data entry among top non-selling time sinks. salesforce.com - Harvard Business Review, How Much Time and Energy Do We Waste Toggling Between Applications? (2022) — study of 137 workers across 3 Fortune 500 companies; ~1,200 toggles/day, ~4 hrs/week reorienting. hbr.org - McKinsey Global Institute, The Social Economy: Unlocking Value and Productivity Through Social Technologies (2012) — ~19% of the workweek spent searching for internal information. mckinsey.com - Anonymized practitioner interview — one product manager with 6+ years in B2B industrial, describing internal quoting workflow (identity withheld by request).
Custom pricing automations for industrial B2B - built on your existing stack, owned by you.
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