The incomplete RFQ: six fields to quote without four rounds of back-and-forth

«Hi, I need a price for 500 of these parts.» Photo attached, taken with a phone over the desk, without a single dimension written next to it. That is how a factory quote request arrives —an RFQ, when the person writing is the buyer at a large company—: no material, no thickness, no finish, no date and no delivery point. The natural response is to ask for what is missing.

That is where the quote is decided, and not because of the days lost in the back-and-forth: it is decided by who owes the next message. If you ask, the ball is in the buyer's court and your quote does not yet exist anywhere; what exists is a question of yours waiting for an answer. If you quote anyway and write above the price the assumption you used to cover each empty field —«quoted in 1010 sheet, 2 mm, bare, pickup at our plant»—, what comes back is not a loose data point: it is a correction on a number that is already on the table.

The six data points that move the price in a factory are quantity and whether it repeats, material and thickness, drawing or photo with one dimension written next to it, finish, the date they need it at their plant, and where it gets delivered. None of the six is required: whoever knows three answers three, and it gets quoted anyway.

In industrial purchasing that difference is also a formal one, and it is the part almost no shop takes into account. The buyer can rarely open an order with a single quote: to put together the internal purchase request they need to collect three. An email from you asking about the thickness is not a quote and does not go into that folder. A price with six assumptions printed above it does go in, even if you correct it twice afterwards. Whoever asks is left out of the comparison before anyone looks at their number, and for an administrative reason, not a commercial one.

The six fields, and why none of them can be required

There are six because those are the ones that change the price in a factory. There is no seventh one worth the friction of asking for it.

1. Quantity and whether it repeats. 500 one-off is not the same as 500 per month: in the first, tooling or setup is amortized over a single run; in the second you can quote half. It is the data point that moves the most money and the one almost nobody asks about.
2. Material and thickness. "Steel" is not a data point. Between a 1010 and a 304 there is a price difference no shop efficiency can make up for.
3. Drawing, sample or photo with one dimension written next to it. The written dimension is what matters: a photo without scale cannot be quoted, and demanding a drawing shuts out everyone who does not have one, which in SMB purchasing is a good share of the people writing to you. What they have is a broken part on the desk.
4. Finish. Bare, painted, zinc-plated, anodized. It is the field most often forgotten and the one that adds an outsourced process with its own lead time on top of yours.
5. The date they need it at their plant. A specific day, not the word "urgent". "Urgent" makes you quote with a lead-time cushion that later takes you out of the running against someone who asked for the real date.
6. Where it gets delivered. Pickup at the plant, delivery within 40 km, or shipping to another region are three different prices for the same job.

None of them is required, and that is what separates this mechanic from an ordinary form. A required field is a place where the buyer gives up: they do not have the thickness at hand, they close the window and write to the supplier next door. Six fields, zero red asterisks. Whoever knows three, answers three.

The order is not accidental either: it starts with quantity, the one thing the buyer always knows by heart, and leaves for the end whatever they have to go look up. If the first field forces them to get up from the desk, there is no field two.

The exact text for answering a quote request

This goes out as the reply to the first message, whether WhatsApp or email. Copy it and change whatever applies to your shop:

Thanks, it is already in for quoting. To have the number today, these six data points are what I need. Answer the ones you have at hand; for the missing ones I quote with an assumption that I leave written above the price.

1. Quantity and whether it repeats (e.g.: 500 one-off / 500 per month)
2. Material and thickness (if you do not know, put "whatever you use")
3. Drawing, sample or photo with one dimension written next to it
4. Finish (bare, painted, zinc-plated, anodized)
5. Date you need it at your plant (a day, not "urgent")
6. Where we deliver it

That "I quote the missing ones anyway" is the whole mechanic. It drops the barrier to zero and at the same time warns that there will be assumptions, so the block that comes next surprises nobody.

Every empty field is answered with a cheap assumption, not with a question

The quote goes out with a block above the price stating exactly what it was quoted with:

Quoted assuming:

• 500 units one-off, no volume break for repeat orders
• DD sheet, 1.2 mm (not specified)
• General shop tolerance, no verification of fit with third-party parts
• No finish, delivered bare
• 12 business days from PO and down payment
• Pickup at our plant

If any of these is not the case, tell me which one and I will send the corrected number back the same day.

Every assumption is the base, cheap option, not the one that covers you. This is counterintuitive and it is where almost everyone gets it wrong: if you assume the expensive option so you do not get stuck, your number comes out high, the buyer drops you in silence and you never find out that you lost over a requirement they never asked for. With the cheap assumption your number is the floor, and every correction the buyer makes is an increase they asked for themselves and already accepted before seeing the new price.

And the correction is what you are after. When someone replies "no, it is 500 per month and it goes zinc-plated", they have just handed you the two data points that were worth money, without you asking for them, and they handed them over while arguing about your price instead of comparing someone else's.

The data point that moves the price threefold is not assumed: it gets quoted in two lines

There is a limit. If the difference between two options is on the order of three times, the assumption is not enough, because getting it wrong is not a correction: it means you quoted something else.

There, two prices go in the same quote. "In SAE 1010: X. In AISI 304: Y." Two lines, no explanation beside them. The buyer chooses, and in most cases that choice reaches you in one word the same day. An assumption works for whatever changes the price by 10 or 20 percent. For whatever changes it threefold, the two-row table goes in.

The practical rule: at most one data point in the quote splits into two prices. If you split three, you sent a price list and the buyer will not choose anything.

The quotes you lost took longer to go out, they did not go out more expensive

Before building the form, check it against your own history. No system needed: WhatsApp search and a sheet of paper are enough.

Open the last ten threads where someone asked you for a quote and write down three things about each: how many messages there were between the request and the first number you sent, how many days went by, and whether you ended up winning it. Then split them into two columns and take the average number of days for each.

The shape the result usually takes is this: in the ones you won, the first number went out the same day or the next one, with one message in between or none; in the ones you lost, the average stretches to four or five days and there were almost always three messages or more before the price. That is the typical shape of this exercise, not a measurement of ours, and the only number that decides anything is yours.

Add a fourth column nobody ever looks at: of the ones you lost, in how many did you find out why you lost. If in most of them nobody ever replied, you did not lose a price comparison, you lost your turn. A quote that loses on price gets told to you; one that arrived late, or with an expensive assumption the buyer never asked for, dies in silence and teaches you nothing.

That is the pair of numbers that explains why the same shop, with the same capacity and the same price, wins some quotes and loses others. If in the lost ones the first number went out several days later than in the won ones, the problem is not your price: it is when it arrives.

The limit is not how many requests come in: it is how many heads are quoting

The form can be a saved message in WhatsApp, a Google form or a fixed line in your email signature: the six fields fit on a phone screen in any of the three versions. None of this gets bought.

And it holds up considerably longer than people assume, because what sustains it is not volume. A shop quoting forty requests a week with a single person and a dated material price list will be better off than one quoting twelve split across three people who improvise the lead time. As long as there is a single criterion, the hand-written assumptions block works even if the assumptions live in the head of whoever is quoting: one head alone is consistent with itself.

There is a single-drawing test for finding out which side you are on. Take one you have already quoted, erase the price and ask each person who quotes to price it separately, without talking to each other. Then compare two things: the numbers, and what sheet, what lead time and what tolerance each one assumed to get there. If the gap between the highest and the lowest is the one you would get by changing material, you do not have a form problem: you have three price lists coexisting in the same factory, and the customer sees one or the other depending on who they wrote to.

Where it stops being enough: the material that moves, the validity that expires and the quote you cannot find

The form solves the incomplete request. It does not solve three things, and all three show up together as soon as there is more than one person quoting.

The first is that your assumptions age. "DD sheet, 1.2 mm" has a price that has moved since the last time you updated it, and with a quote built on an old material cost you make money and lose money alike. When the input moves every month, the assumptions block needs to be tied to a current price list, not to the memory of whoever is quoting.

The second is follow-up, which in a factory is not asking whether they have made up their mind. It is that your quote has a written validity period and it is about to expire: past that date, the number you sent is one you can no longer sustain with today's material list. Knowing which of the thirty open quotes expires this week is not done from memory, and what gets lost when it is forgotten is not just the sale: it is having done the same calculation twice.

The third is that you have no history. When the same buyer comes back eight months later for the same part, there is no way to find what you quoted them or with what assumptions: it is in a WhatsApp thread among two hundred others. So you either redo the whole calculation, or you repeat the old number dragging an old material cost along. For the same reason, the comparison above —days to the first number in the won ones against the lost ones— is something you do once, by hand, over ten threads, but you cannot keep it live by buyer and by part type, which is exactly what would tell you whether you always lose the same family of jobs.

Start with the form and the assumptions block, which is free and works this week. What comes after gets bought the day the assumptions stop belonging to one person and start belonging to the factory: the same sheet, the same lead time and the same tolerance coming out of a dated table, identical for whoever picks up the message.