Cost today · Scenario
What quoting enquiries costs you today
€5,235
a month for quoting 150 enquiries by hand
Today€5,235
With the system€788
Payback: 0.7 mo.
In your company
Plant with 50 people
40 enquiries · €1,396 a month
2.5 mo. payback
Plant with 200 people
150 enquiries · €5,235 a month
0.7 mo. payback
Plant with 600 people
400 enquiries · €13,960 a month
0.3 mo. payback
The team gets back about 127 hours of work a month, or 16 working days, and the company €53,358 a year. We count after the time a person spends checking and after the model cost. The process also brings money: the extra sales margin in this scenario is about €2,582 a month (see the assumptions under "How we calculate it"). According to Harvard Business Review (2011), in a study of 1.25 million sales leads, firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly 7 times as likely to reach a decision-maker as firms that tried an hour later.
Source: Harvard Business Review, The Short Life of Online Sales Leads (2011) ↗
+−How we calculate it
150 × 60 min = 150 h × €34.90 = €5,235 a month. With the system, a person checks the output in 15% of the old time (€785) and the model costs €3. That leaves €788. The saving is €4,447 a month, so €3,000 pays back in 0.7 months. On top of that, the extra sales margin in this scenario is about €2,582 a month, which the payback leaves out.
Assumptions: 1 hour to quote an enquiry with a drawing and checking in 15% of the old time are our assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. Model cost: reading the enquiry in our quoting system (about €0.0008) plus pricing the lines (Claude Sonnet 5.5, about 4,000 + 1,500 tokens), at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026. The extra margin is a scenario: we assume 1 in 40 enquiries quoted the same day ends in an order that a slow reply loses today, with a margin of €688. In the review we count it on your sales process.
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