A buyer has already decided you're worth a quote. She finds the contact form. It asks for company size, a budget range, how she heard about you, and a message. There is no obvious place to attach a drawing. She starts, then gets called into a meeting. The tab stays open for a day, and then it's gone.
Or she does submit, and hears nothing for a week. By then she is already talking to someone who replied the same afternoon. You may never know she tried.
It's easy to treat lost quotes as a pricing or capacity problem. Sometimes they are. What we keep noticing is earlier than that. The request never really arrives, or it arrives and sits. The form was often built to collect information marketing wanted, not what an estimator needs to start work. And nobody told the buyer what happens next, or by when.
A slow, silent maybe can feel worse than a no. If she doesn't know whether you got the drawings, she doesn't wait patiently. She goes and finds someone who will tell her.
Three suggestions
1. Cut the form to what the estimator needs, and make drawing uploads easy
If the estimator can't start without a drawing, a material, a volume and a date, those are the fields. The rest can wait. A long form feels thorough. It also gives a busy buyer a reason to quit halfway.
Do this next week: Sit with an estimator and a printed copy of the form (or a screenshot). Cross out every field they don't need to start a quote. Make sure a drawing can be attached in one step, including from a phone.
2. Say what happens after they submit, and by when
"Thank you, we'll be in touch" is not a next step. Tell them who has it, what you'll do first, and when they should expect a reply. Even a simple standard helps: "You'll hear from an estimator within one business day, even if we need more information."
The wait does not get shorter because you said that. It gets easier, because the buyer is no longer guessing.
Do this next week: Rewrite the confirmation message, and the line next to the submit button, so both name the next step and a time. Then make sure the team can actually keep that promise.
3. Send a quarterly test RFQ, and time the reply
You can't fix a leak you only hear about from a lost deal. Send your own request, or ask someone outside the company to send one, with a drawing attached. Time how long it takes to get a useful reply, and note who owned it.
Do this next week: Send one test RFQ through the live form. Don't warn the person who usually answers. Write down what happened, hour by hour, until a real reply arrives.
How you'll know it worked
A test request comes back on the time you promised, with a named person and a clear next step. Real buyers stop chasing you to ask if you got the drawings. And when a request does sit, someone notices, because it has an owner.
A question for your peers
If you sent your own company an RFQ this morning, how long would it take to get a useful reply, and who would own it?
Run the RFQ Leak Check to find the stages where requests drop out, and one thing to fix first.