Stop 2 of 8 · Weekly
Quotes and the supplier call
Turn a customer email into a quote from your own price list, and walk into the supplier call with the two numbers that matter.
The quote is the slowest fast job you do
An office manager emails Nadia four lines of shorthand at 4:40 on a Tuesday. You know what she means. Turning that into a quote takes twenty minutes of looking up part numbers, checking the volume rule and doing tax by hand, and it usually happens after dinner.
Give Claude the price list and the email in the same chat and the twenty minutes becomes three. The part you keep is the part that matters: reading the assumptions before it goes out.
Three price lists, one table
Forty suppliers, and the four you actually spend money with send price lists in four different shapes. One is a PDF, one is a spreadsheet with merged cells, one is an email. Pack sizes differ, so the sticker price lies. Everything has to come back to price per unit before a comparison means anything.
What a call sheet is
A call sheet is not a spreadsheet you read down the phone. It is two numbers, three questions and one thing you have decided not to say. The two numbers are the lines where you spend the most with this supplier and are not getting the best price, stated as dollars a year rather than cents a unit. Cents are arguable. A number like eleven thousand dollars a year is a conversation with a different temperature, and it is the one your rep will take back to their manager.
Try this
[paste the customer's email] Using the attached price list, build a quote for this customer. One line per item with quantity, unit price and extended price. Apply our volume rule of 5 percent off any line over ten units. Add 7.75 percent sales tax on taxable lines only. At the end, list every assumption you made about what they meant, so I can check those before this goes out.
[upload the three supplier price lists] Build one table with the product, each supplier's price per unit, and the cheapest per line. Where pack sizes differ, convert to price per unit and tell me where you did that. Flag any line where the cheapest is more than 10 percent below the next one so I can check for a typo or a different pack size.
From that table, write me a one-page call sheet for my call with Meridian tomorrow. Start with the two lines where we spend the most with them and they are not the cheapest, with the gap in dollars per year at our current volume. Then three questions to ask, and the one thing I should not say. Keep it to a page I can hold in one hand.