I find that custom quoting and long sales cycles tend to go together.
The longer the sales person spends in front of a client, the more reasonable the custom work sounds to the buyer and seller. I mean, if you're selling vacuum cleaners, you're there for 30 minutes  and you don't even entertain custom work.

For a start, go on a couple of sales calls to see what's really happening. One product manager told me that his sales guy started discounting on the first call! No wonder they can't make any profit,  eh?

Custom quoting means either requests for product modifications or excessive discounting. Either can be diagnosed with win/loss analysis.

You may recall from Practical Product Management that Win/ Loss Analysis is a product management function, not a sales function. From Win/Loss you can identify product deficiencies but more often you identify process problems. And process problems are so much easier to fix.

From Win/Loss you may learn that your current set of products doesn't align with the buyer's problem(s), which is why you're hearing that you need product modifications. From win/loss you will find that the
price is almost never a key decision point.

Finally, look in the Practical Product Management materials in the > pricing section for a discounting tool. It shows revenue on one axis and discount on another. This will help you identify deals that have excessive discounting. Then you can look for similarities: same  territory? geography? industry?

Go visit some active sales with a sales person and you'll see any disconnects between the seller and buyer.Go do some win/loss visits (without sales people) and you'll diagnose process problems and product deficiencies.
Assess the discounting of the past to look for similarities and then address those as problem areas.

By Steve Johnson