Our sales team is quoting new service contracts at record speed, but our gross margins are dropping because our actual delivery costs are higher than estimated. What weekly scorecard metric can we track to measure our pricing and quoting accuracy?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

When sales volume is high but profitability is low, you have a quoting disconnect. Your sales team is operating on outdated assumptions, while your delivery team is absorbing the cost of underpriced scope. To fix this, you must introduce a weekly metric that bridges the gap between sales promises and operational reality.

Your Sales seat must own a weekly metric called quoting margin accuracy. This is calculated by comparing the estimated gross margin of won contracts against the actual gross margin realized during the first thirty days of delivery.

Every week, your Finance or Operations seat must feed this data back to the Sales seat. If the actual margin of delivered work is more than five percent lower than the quoted margin, that contract's metric goes red on the scorecard.

Reviewing this weekly in your Level 10 Meeting™ forces your Sales and Operations leaders to stay aligned. If the metric is consistently red, use IDS® to identify the issue. The root cause is usually one of two things: either your sales reps are discounting services to close deals without operational approval, or your pricing model has not been updated to reflect rising labor and delivery costs. Tracking this ensures you protect your profit margins before scaling your volume.