Industrial buyers reject quotations for structural reasons long before they compare price. If your document cannot be evaluated against a matrix without follow-up questions, it loses to one that can.
The nine fields evaluators look for
- Registered entity name, address, licence number and tax registration.
- Quotation number, date and explicit validity period.
- Line items matching the RFQ numbering exactly.
- Technical reference per line — standard, grade, datasheet revision.
- Unit price, currency and total, with taxes stated separately.
- Incoterm with named place, not just "CIF".
- Lead time from a defined trigger (PO date, advance receipt, drawing approval).
- Payment terms and warranty.
- Explicit exclusions and assumptions.
Exclusions are a strength, not a weakness
A quotation with no exclusions reads as either naive or deliberately vague. Listing what is not included — site supervision, third-party inspection, demurrage, drum deposits — signals that the scope was actually read.
Match the buyer's line numbering
Evaluators tabulate. Any renumbering, merging or renaming of RFQ lines forces manual mapping and invites a clarification round you may not win.
Keep the commercial and technical documents separate
Two documents, cross-referenced: a clean commercial quotation and a technical annex. Mixing them buries price in prose and irritates the committee. The annex structure is covered in structuring a technical proposal.
Generate, don't copy-paste
Most quotation errors — stale validity dates, a previous client's name, an old bank line — come from editing last month's file. Producing quotations, proforma invoices and delivery notes from a structured business document platform such as DocMak.com removes that class of error and keeps numbering sequential, which matters when a buyer audits the transaction trail later.