[jandrese]

But then you have to waste a salesguy's time generating a quote for a product that I'm not likely to purchase. I hate doing that. I'm basically stealing from them just because I'm trying to shop around for the best product. I'm calling salesguys and giving all of them my information and getting several different quotes, but I'm only going to execute on one of them. And now they're spamming my inbox every time their company does something even though I've never bought anything from them.

[chpatrick]

The reason they make you do this is because different companies pay orders of magnitude different amounts for services like this.

[b112]

1) Use a throwaway email for that quote

2) Write up what you want, and email ALL the companies you want a quote from... CCing them all in the same email.

Make sure to indicate a close date for them "and all other possible bidders" to submit by.

Now they all know who their competitors are, AND, they know there could be other, extra competitors, AND they know to price as competitively as possible.

The sales people at the other end, and the company, will know if they want to "waste their time or not".

This works well with car dealers too. If you want the best price on a specific make and model with specific options, send to the 10 dealers in a 2 hour drive radius.

[jandrese]

I wonder if this is one reason many companies have web forms to request the quote. So you can't mass email for them.

[phone[phone]]

So you'd rather someone else subject themselves to that for your own benefit than do it yourself?

Seems kind of selfish, does it not?

[jandrese]

I'm sorry I don't understand. The alternative was to have a basic price for the product or service on their website that a person could look up.

Maybe if I'm some big bulk buyer and think I can get a better deal by talking to the salesguy then I'll do that. But if I'm some small fry buying like 1 or 2 of the things I know they aren't going to give me a break, but I still have to go through the "contact the sales person, they call you back, you explain what you want, they generate a quote within 5-7 business days that is good for 30 days after being generated, you end up not buying the thing for whatever reason" rigamarole.

Sidenote: I've never had a vendor balk at me using an "expired" quote to buy something. Our purchasing process never proceeds within 30 days, but turns out the prices don't change either. It is very common to be executing on a quote that's 6 months old.