Manufacturers risk losing revenue to slower competitors as a new generation of B2B buyers demands digital self-service and faster quoting.
Something shifted in the last few years, and if you sell complex, configurable products, you’ve probably felt it. The people on the other side of your sales process aren’t the same people who were there five years ago.
During COVID, a wave of experienced buyers took early retirement. They were comfortable with spreadsheets, phone calls, and the leisurely back-and-forth of traditional quoting. That world hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it’s shrinking fast. The people replacing them expect to research, configure, and purchase at their own pace — and if you can’t offer that, they’ll find someone who can.
The cost of standing still
This isn’t just anecdotal. A survey we conducted last year of manufacturers across the sector found that 86% of respondents had lost at least one deal within the survey period. Those lost deals represented roughly 15% of potential revenue. The single biggest factor? Speed. The manufacturer who could return a quote faster usually won — even when they weren’t offering the lowest price.
That should give every commercial leader pause. You’re not losing on product quality or price. You’re losing on process. The three-month turnaround we often see from initial configuration through to placed order — that’s where deals go to die. Each step involves multiple people: the sales manager fields the enquiry, engineering reviews and updates the bill of materials, there are change requests after the initial spec, revised CAD drawings, more back-and-forth. It’s not one bottleneck. It’s a dozen small ones compounding.
Complexity is real — but it’s not the barrier you think
The most common objection I hear is some version of: “Our products are too complex.” And I get it. One industrial pump manufacturer I’ve worked with has roughly ten product lines, up to several hundred models per line, and over a million possible configurations within a single model. That’s daunting — not just for a customer online, but for salespeople who’ve been at it for years.
But that complexity already lives in your data. Your configuration rules, engineering constraints, regulatory exclusions — it’s all encoded somewhere. The question isn’t whether the knowledge exists. It’s whether you’re making it accessible.
This is where AI is making a material difference. Not the replace-your-workforce kind. Practical AI that reads your existing product data, your historical quote-to-order conversions, your customer firmographics — and uses it to guide a buyer toward the right model and configuration. If a customer is in Ireland, it can screen out configurations that don’t meet EU regulatory standards before they ever appear. If they haven’t provided enough detail, it asks the same clarifying questions your best salesperson would ask. And as it observes which configurations actually convert to orders, and which get modified by your engineers before approval, it refines its recommendations over time.
Augmenting people, not replacing them
That distinction matters. The manufacturers I work with who’ve adopted AI-guided configuration aren’t eliminating roles. They’re freeing salespeople from the low-value work — chasing part numbers, checking part supersessions, fielding order status calls — so they can focus on the consultative selling that actually closes business.
After-sales is the same story. Inside sales and customer service teams get buried under purely administrative calls: ‘where’s my order?’, ‘what shipped?’, ‘resend the invoice’, etc. When customers can pull that information themselves through a portal, your team gets time back for conversations that move the needle. And there’s a secondary benefit that’s easy to overlook: AI can learn how people search for and describe your products, often using terms your own team wouldn’t. That intelligence feeds back into how you present products online and how search engines find you — closing the gap between how you talk about your products and how your customers actually look for them.
Starting where the risk is lowest
Nobody has to bet the business on a full transformation overnight. The manufacturers getting the most traction tend to start with aftermarket parts — lower risk, high frequency, and the pain is immediate. If turning around a parts quote currently takes a day or two, making that near-instantaneous has obvious payoff. Aftermarket revenue accounts for 20–25% of total revenue on average across our customer base; I recently met a manufacturer where it’s 50%.
From there, the path widens naturally: portal capabilities for order visibility; reorder functionality; then guided configuration for new business, with safeguards like quote-only modes for complex builds that ensure nothing ships without human review. The goal isn’t to remove oversight. It’s to remove friction. And critically, none of this needs to disrupt what’s already working. Your ERP remains the system of record. Your CPQ rules are preserved and enforced. The investment you’ve already made in those systems becomes the foundation rather than something you’re replacing.
The competitive window is open
Manufacturers who move early are seeing real results — typically around three months to ROI from go-live. Average order values often drop, not because customers spend less, but because they order more frequently in smaller batches now that the process is fast enough. Monthly spend goes up. And in many segments, offering digital self-service is still uncommon enough to be a genuine differentiator.
The buyers across from you today aren’t going to revert to phone-and-email quoting. They’ll buy from whoever makes it easiest. The question isn’t whether to adapt, but how quickly.
Tarak Patel, VP of Product, Aleran Software
Tarak Patel brings more than 20 years of B2B product and marketing leadership to manufacturing digital commerce, with prior roles at Oracle, Salesforce, and Microsoft.
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