Author: Aymeric Halvarsson
Many building and construction material suppliers feel the pain of shrinking margins, but the reasons often aren’t as obvious as they seem. You might think it’s external factors like market competition, but it’s often internal inefficiencies like bad data and outdated processes that lead to losing margins.
In this blog, we’ll break down five internal hidden issues that silently kill your margins and explain how efficient suppliers are turning things around. If you want to stop underbidding yourself, improve quote accuracy, and win more profitable deals, this one’s for you.
Key takeaways
- Five hidden issues—outdated cost data, internal underbidding, slow quote turnaround, lack of win/loss insights, and poor forecasting—are silently killing supplier margins.
- Many of these issues can be addressed manually using shared spreadsheets, approval checklists, and regular data updates, but even these processes demand time and discipline.
- Software solutions help automate and streamline quoting, tracking, and forecasting to remove friction and improve margin protection.
- Slabstack is purpose-built to solve these exact challenges with tools that quote faster, track performance, and protect your bottom line.
5 hidden issues that are killing your margins (and your win rate)
These five issues often go unnoticed until it’s too late, costing you deals you should be winning and profits you should be earning.
1. Outdated cost data leads to inaccurate quotes
Prices of construction materials like cement and additives can shift rapidly—especially as suppliers explore greener, more cost-effective alternatives like SCMs.
As a result, quoting from outdated spreadsheets causes misalignment between actual costs and bid values.
Your reps could be using numbers that are weeks or months old, and that gap means you risk either underpricing and eroding your margin or overpricing and losing the bid entirely.
Without live cost data, you’re quoting on outdated assumptions, and in a business where pennies per cubic yard make a difference, those assumptions can add up to thousands in lost revenue.
2. No visibility across teams causes internal underbidding
When your sales reps can’t see what their peers are quoting, they end up competing with each other. One rep hears a customer went with a lower price and immediately slashes their next quote—not realizing it came from their own team.
This kind of internal undercutting happens more than you think, especially in companies using siloed tools or spreadsheets. It drives down your average price and creates a race to the bottom, where everyone loses.
3. Slow quote turnaround and lack of oversight over rep behavior
In this industry, whoever gets the first accurate quote usually wins. But if your quoting process is slow, manual, and dependent on approvals from busy managers, you’re often too late.
Worse, without controls in place, low-margin deals can slip through simply because no one double-checked them before they were sent. The right quote at the wrong time, or the wrong quote at any time, hurts your ability to grow and protect profitability.
4. No centralized view of win/loss data
If your sales team doesn’t know why they won or lost the last ten deals, they’ll keep guessing.
And those guesses can be costly. Without centralized tracking of win/loss data, patterns are missed. Maybe you’re always losing in a certain region or on a specific product line. Maybe a competitor is undercutting you consistently, or your lead times are too long.
Without this data, you can’t adapt, improve, or optimize your quoting strategy. Every lost deal becomes a missed opportunity to get better.
5. Lack of forecasting & demand visibility
Many suppliers underestimate the value of quoting data as an early signal of future demand.
If you can’t see what’s coming, you can’t prepare your plants, adjust inventory, or adapt your pricing in time. Without forecasting tools, decisions get made based on gut feel rather than data.
That leads to overstocking, missed revenue from rush jobs, or even unprofitable work due to poorly timed price strategies.
But the good news is that these issues are fixable. Read on to get some practical tips on how you can improve efficiency as a building and construction materials supplier.
What winning suppliers do differently
Fixing these challenges doesn’t require an overhaul, just a smarter approach. The most successful suppliers have adopted a few key habits that consistently protect and grow their margins. Here’s how.
Quote with live pricing, not static spreadsheets
Getting accurate, real-time data into your quotes is one of the fastest ways to protect your margins. Instead of quoting based on outdated spreadsheets, forward-thinking teams use tools that automatically sync material, freight, and fuel prices from dispatch.
This ensures that every quote reflects today’s costs, not last month’s estimates.
Even if your team still uses spreadsheets, a simple recurring update using supplier emails or dispatch exports can significantly improve quoting accuracy.
Standardize pricing logic and enforce margin floors
Clear pricing rules create guardrails that protect your profitability. By enforcing margin floors and standard pricing logic, you reduce the chances of accidental underbidding. This kind of discipline ensures that while reps still have autonomy, they aren’t making pricing decisions that hurt the business.
To start, even a basic pricing matrix in Excel with color-coded margin bands can help you create a clear view of acceptable quote ranges.
They use templated quoting workflows for speed and control
Templates help ensure every quote is consistent, accurate, and aligned with your margin goals. A quoting workflow allows reps to pull in pre-bundled materials, apply pricing logic, and get manager approvals automatically.
That reduces delays, eliminates manual errors, and frees up time to focus on customers.
Even with basic tools like Excel or Word, templated quote formats with embedded rules can have a big impact. You can define pricing structures, bundle common material combinations, and include standard terms or margin checks.
Track every quote and learn from the data
Every quote—won or lost—holds insight into how your business operates. Capturing why deals fall through or succeed helps you refine your strategy with every bid. By tagging lost quotes with reasons like “price,” “timing,” or “spec mismatch,” you can uncover patterns and course-correct quickly.
You could start this process by creating a shared spreadsheet where your team can manually tag each lost quote with a reason to help start this feedback loop.
Use forecasting to price and plan proactively
Forecasting accurately helps your sales and operations teams stay in sync. Instead of reacting to last-minute orders, use historical quote volumes and win rates to estimate future demand.
This allows you to plan inventory, prep plants, and adjust pricing strategy before demand spikes.
Start by combining monthly quote volume with historical win rates to estimate demand and pricing strategy for the next quarter.
All the tactics we just mentioned work, but they also require time, spreadsheets, and a level of manual upkeep that most teams simply can’t sustain. That’s where a cost management software for construction material suppliers can help. Read on to know how.
How Slabstack helps you quote smarter, win more, and protect your margins
Slabstack is purpose-built software for building and construction material suppliers that pays for itself in as little as 60 days.
It brings quoting, pricing, forecasting, and performance analytics into one easy-to-use platform, so you can protect every margin point without slowing down your sales team.
Real-time cost feeds eliminate quoting errors
No more quoting off stale spreadsheets. Slabstack syncs with your dispatch systems like Command Alkon and Sysdyne to pull the latest material, freight, and fuel costs, so every quote reflects today’s numbers. This real-time visibility ensures that you’re never underquoting due to outdated inputs, helping you stay competitive without compromising on profit.
Sales rep guardrails prevent underbidding
Set minimum margin thresholds and auto-flag risky bids. Reps stay empowered to move fast, without unknowingly quoting below profitability. These built-in protections maintain pricing discipline, prevent margin erosion, and build long-term pricing confidence across your team.
Dynamic quoting workflows boost speed and accuracy
Customize templates with built-in pricing logic and automatic approvals. Quotes go out faster, look cleaner, and require less back-and-forth. This removes bottlenecks in the quoting process and ensures consistency, helping your team spend more time closing deals and less time formatting quotes.
Win/loss analytics surface quote trends and rep performance
Track which quotes are converting, where you’re losing, and why. Get visibility into performance by customer, region, or rep—so you can improve win rates over time. These insights let you fine-tune pricing strategies, coach sales reps more effectively, and prioritize the most profitable opportunities.
Easy integration with dispatch
Once approved, quotes flow directly into dispatch as tickets. This seamless handoff ensures the quote details move straight into dispatch without the need for re-entry or back-and-forth between teams. That means fewer mistakes, faster ticket generation, and better alignment between sales and delivery operations.
Forecasting tools that drive smarter pricing and planning
Slabstack’s forecasting dashboard breaks down quoting activity by region, product, and customer type, so you can adjust pricing, prep your plants, and align sales and ops before demand hits. This predictive view empowers you to make data-driven decisions, reducing the risk of overproduction or stockouts.
Here’s what John Malcolm, Vice President at Carew Concrete, has to say about using Slabstack:
“The live information flowing between Slabstack and Command works better than Command’s own MobileSales did. Slabstack even pulls data back from Command—something MobileSales never managed.”
If you’re tired of quoting based on guesswork and seeing it cost you deals or erode your margins, it’s time to fix the internal processes behind your pricing.
Book a demo to see how Slabstack helps you win smarter, quote faster, and protect your margins.