How to reply to a request for quote (and why it sits unanswered for days)
A request for quote is the best email you can get: somebody has decided, unprompted, that they want to buy from you. It is also one of the emails that sits unanswered the longest, because answering it means reading someone else's text properly, pulling three concrete facts out of it, and dressing those facts in a form that sounds neither stiff nor dismissive. This post is about what has to be in that reply, what tone to hit, and which part of the job actually eats your time.
What the reply has to contain
A request for quote has one feature that separates it from a cold approach: the buyer has already told you what they want. Your reply doesn't have to convince them they have a problem. It has to show you understood it, and give them something to decide on.
Four things, without which the reply is incomplete:
- Proof that you read it. One sentence pointing at something specific in their message. Not "thank you for your interest in our services", but "understood, you need this in place by the end of September and the install has to happen without stopping the line". That one sentence does more work than a whole paragraph about your company.
- A number, or an honest explanation of why there isn't one yet. If you can't price it without more information, say exactly what information, and give a range anyway. A reply with no figure in it forces the buyer to write another email, and every extra email is another chance for them to reply to somebody else instead.
- Scope: what's in and what's out. This is the part that saves arguments later. "Delivery is included, removal of the old furniture isn't" costs you nothing today. The same sentence after the invoice costs you a great deal.
- One clear next step. Not "please do not hesitate to contact us", but "if the range works, I'll send the itemised quote on Monday. I just need the room dimensions".
If your actual quote is an attachment, the email still has to carry those four things. The attachment gets read second, and often not at all.
Tone: somewhere between the legal department and the group chat
Business email in English has two default registers and both of them are wrong. The first is the impersonal corporate one: "We are in receipt of your enquiry and will revert in due course." Nobody has said "revert" out loud since 1997. The second is the over-familiar one, all "Hey!" and exclamation marks, which on a first contact reads as though you didn't take the request seriously.
The safe middle is simpler than it looks. Keep the greeting and the sign-off standard and short. Use "Hi Anna" and "Best regards", then spend all of your attention on the content. Politeness in a commercial email isn't made of ornament. It's made of answering specifically and fast. Nobody has ever been offended by a plain "Hi Anna". Plenty of people have felt ignored by three flowery paragraphs with no price in them.
A few things worth dropping: the passive voice ("your request will be processed"), the hedging ("we would like to propose"), and the word "solution" five times in four sentences. You are writing to a person who still has twenty other emails to get through today.
What it looks like in practice
Say this lands in your inbox:
Hi, we're fitting out a new office, roughly 40 desks. We need it in place by the end of September, and the install has to happen outside working hours. Could you let me know whether you can do it, and roughly what we'd be looking at cost-wise?
A reply with all four elements fits into six sentences:
Hi Tom,
yes, 40 desks by the end of September is doable. Evening and weekend installs are standard for us, at no extra charge.
For that scale you're looking at $48,000 to $62,000 excluding tax; the spread comes down to the worktop finish and whether you want pedestals under the desks. Delivery and installation are included; removal of your old furniture isn't, but I'll add it for about $2,000 if you need it.
To turn the range into a real number I need a floor plan, or the number of rooms and their dimensions. Send whatever you have and the quote comes back to you within two working days.
Best regards,
Notice what isn't in there: a paragraph about how long the company has been trading, the word "solution" in every sentence, and not one "please find enclosed". What is in there: a number, a boundary and a date.
The expensive part isn't the writing
This is the heart of it, and it's why every "how to write a great email" guide lands slightly beside the point.
When you sit down to answer a request for quote, writing four paragraphs takes a moment. What's expensive is getting to the point where you know what to write. You open the thread, read again what the buyer actually asked, work out whether this is the one with the September install or the one with two delivery addresses, check what you promised in your last message. Only then do you know what goes in the email.
That is context switching, not writing. And it's the reason an email that "takes three minutes" sits in the inbox for three days. Those three minutes are never three minutes.
That observation has a direct consequence for any tool promising to write your emails for you. A tool that can't see the thread doesn't take the expensive part off your hands. You can dictate to it, or type it an instruction, and you'll get back grammatically correct text. But you were the one who had to read the enquiry first and summarise it for the tool. You paid full price and got a discount on the cheapest item in the basket.
How we solved it in Word2Mail
Word2Mail is a browser extension that runs inside Gmail and Outlook. You open the request for quote, click "Write with AI", say or type a few words ("range 12 to 15 thousand, install midweek, delivery billed separately"), and the finished reply appears in the compose window.
The part that matters here: the extension reads the thread you have open. You don't have to summarise what the buyer asked, because it already has that in front of it, including your own earlier messages in that conversation. Your few words are business decisions, not a retelling of somebody else's text. The AI writes the rest around them: the acknowledgement, the shape, the courtesies, the next step.
Two technical things worth knowing before you install anything of this kind.
First, we don't ask for access to your mailbox. The extension reads the thread that's open on your screen, the same way your browser reads it. It never logs into your mail account and it has no view of the rest of your correspondence.
Second, the content of your email is used to write that one draft and never goes into training a model. I'm writing that down not because some rule obliges me to, but because not every tool in this category works that way, so it's worth saying out loud.
Who this isn't for
Honestly, because it saves both of us the time.
Not for you if you mostly write cold emails to people who have never contacted you. There's no thread to read there, so the biggest advantage disappears and what's left is an ordinary AI email writer, of which there are plenty.
Not for you if your quote needs a spreadsheet and the email is only wrapping for an attachment. The extension will write the wrapping. The numbers are still yours.
Not for you if you work in a desktop mail client instead of a browser. This is a browser extension: Gmail and Outlook, in Chrome, Edge and Firefox.
One sentence I'm not going to write
I could drop a number in here for how many minutes a tool like this saves you. I'm not going to, because I haven't measured it honestly. We measure how long our own generation takes. We do not have a decent counterfactual for how long the same person would have spent writing the same email by hand. Until we have one, any number would be an assumption in the costume of a measurement, and the internet has quite enough of those already.
Here's a one-minute test instead. Open the oldest unanswered request for quote in your inbox and watch how much of that minute goes on reading and how much on writing. The answer will tell you more about your own inbox than somebody else's statistic ever will.