The fastest way to waste three months in enterprise sales is treating "send me a quote" as a buying signal.
A founder I coach got a call last week from a buyer he'd never spoken to. The guy said, "We've met internally, we want ten licenses for four years." Specific. Confident. Sounded like a buyer.
My founder fired off a $100K quote that same day. Honored an old discount, threw in another 10% off, packaged it up beautifully.
Two days of silence. Then the response: "This is untenable, we need to seriously cut this down."
My founder asked the obvious follow-up: "What's your budget?"
Answer: "We can't tell you that."
So now he's negotiating against a number nobody will share, with a junior analyst who can't answer questions about IT requirements, can't answer questions about standard terms, and can't tell him whether procurement is going to torch the deal in three weeks anyway.
Here's the part that took him a minute to see, and that took me a few failed startups of my own to internalize:
The quote request was never a buying signal. It was a curiosity signal.
The real buying signal is when the buyer is willing to burn internal clout. Convening IT. Getting procurement on a call. Making asks of their own people. That costs them something. That means they actually want your solution.
A request for a quote costs them an email. That's it. They're poking around. Maybe they have budget that has to be spent by the end of the year. Maybe their boss told them to "get pricing." Maybe they're benchmarking you against you competitor and have no actual interest in your company.
You don't know. And you won't know until you make them do work that costs them something -- time, effort, social capital.
Here is the rule he and I came up with:
No proposal goes out until the right people are on a call together. Internal champion, IT, and ideally procurement. You will not get procurement most of the time. Fight for it anyway, because that's the room where deals quietly die after you've spent two weeks writing quotes.
If they won't take that meeting, they're not qualified. They're curious.
The hardest part of this is emotional, not tactical. When a buyer calls you up sounding excited and specific, every cell in your body wants to maintain the momentum. You want to send the thing. Keep them happy. Not be the friction.
That instinct is exactly how you burn three months chasing ghosts.
Slow down, cowboy. Curiosity isn't intent.