Conf Industries, an Italian manufacturer of customizable hospital logistics equipment, saw a clear opportunity. Sales were strong, and demand for customized products was growing, but quoting was hindering speed-to-market. Each custom request triggered engineering reviews, manual BOM creation, and back-and-forth with sales. A simple caster swap could delay an order by days.
They needed to move faster not just in production, but in how their organization handled sales, configuration, and customer engagement.
Across the medtech industry, quoting is becoming a critical pivot point. Whether you’re launching a surgical platform or expanding into outpatient channels, speed-to-market depends on how quickly, and how accurately, you can configure, price, and quote highly customized solutions.
The New Medtech Market Reality: Medtech Sales Models Are Feeling the Squeeze, and Quoting Is a Flashpoint
According to KPMG’s insights on medical device sales, revenue growth in medtech is being challenged by shifting buyer dynamics, persistent supply chain issues, and a slew of industry factors.
Sales leaders are navigating:
- A shift toward economic buyers, with finance and procurement exerting more influence than clinical stakeholders.
- M&A-driven consolidation, requiring sales teams to position integrated ecosystems rather than single products.
- Rising expectations for digital customer experiences, including hybrid interactions and on-demand configuration support.
- Continued supply chain volatility, making it critical to align quotes with what can actually be delivered.
These pressures expose a weakness in many medtech companies and outdated quoting processes that create friction between initial customer interest and final delivery. When quotes take days to generate and weeks to fulfill, even efficient manufacturing can’t deliver the speed that today’s market demands.
Streamlining Technical Validation in the Configuration Process
In regulated medical environments, product configuration requires precision. Every component combination must meet regulatory standards and manufacturing constraints. This requirement traditionally places technical departments at the center of the quoting process, creating a bottleneck.
“It has to pass through the technical office,” explains Flavio Ventura, CEO of Conf Industries, describing their pre-automation approach. This technical validation step added days to their sales cycle, dramatically slowing their time to market.
Efficiency-driven manufacturers are digitizing their product knowledge into rules-based or constraint-based configuration engines. These configure, price, quote (CPQ) systems ensure that every quote meets all engineering, regulatory, and manufacturing requirements automatically.
Conf Industries embedded their product and engineering rules directly into their CPQ system, with the ability to configure valid solutions easily on their website without relying on a technical expert. This approach eliminated almost all communication errors between teams and customers. “We practically reduced the error in communication, basically, by 95%,” notes Ventura. By creating validated configurations from the start, they removed a major source of delay in the customer journey.
Redirecting Engineering Talent to Innovation
The medtech industry faces growing pressure to innovate faster while managing increasingly complex product portfolios. Yet engineering talent often gets consumed by routine quote validation rather than new product development.
This misallocation creates a compound problem: it slows current sales while delaying the development of future products. When engineers spend their time checking configurations instead of designing new solutions, innovation stalls.
By automating the configuration validation process, Conf Industries made a significant change in how they deploy their technical talent. “This actually created a save of time around 80 percent,” Ventura explains. “We can connect directly the sales team to the production team without disturbing [engineering].”
The company now dedicates five of their six previously sales-focused engineers to research and development initiatives. This reallocation accelerates their ability to bring new products to market while simultaneously improving quote speed, creating a dual benefit for overall speed-to-market.
Connecting Sales Promises with Production Reality
Recent supply chain disruptions have highlighted a disconnect in many medtech organizations: sales teams making delivery promises without full visibility into production capacity. This misalignment often leads to either overly conservative delivery estimates or promises that can’t be fulfilled.
Leading manufacturers are connecting quoting systems directly to production data. This integration helps maintain that quotes reflect current capacity and realistic timeframes.
Conf Industries saw dramatic improvements in delivery times after modernizing their CPQ process to align solutions with manufacturability and send an accurate bill of materials (BOM) directly to production from sales. “We cut delivery dates on the standard production, definitely,” Ventura explains. “On the standard production, we cut the delivery date about 50 percent, I believe. We are now able to give to customer, for certain products, like 15 days delivery. In the past, it used to be at least 40, 45 days.”
By creating a direct connection between sales and production, they eliminated additional friction that was extending their delivery windows. For medtech companies struggling to meet today’s supply challenges, this ability to confidently commit to faster delivery creates a meaningful market advantage.
Empowering Distribution Channels with Self-Service Configuration
The medtech sales model typically spans multiple channels, including direct sales teams, independent distributors, and procurement partners. This complexity creates knowledge gaps that slow down the sales process.
When distributors can’t configure products without factory support, the sales cycle extends by days or weeks. For customers expecting rapid responsiveness, poor experiences turn potentially loyal businesses away.
Conf Industries addressed this challenge by giving their distributors direct access to their Tacton CPQ platform. “So try to imagine [giving] this power to the distributor directly… They’re not gonna call you anymore asking you technical things.” observes Ventura. “You go on the CPQ tools and you can add it by yourself, and you know the price that you get. And then if you wanna sell it to your end user, you get the end user price to you.”
The company accelerated sales across their network while creating a consistent experience across all channels. By democratizing configuration capabilities throughout their sales ecosystem, Conf Industries enabled every partner, as well as customers through their web configurator, to operate with the same speed and accuracy as their internal teams.
Turning Configuration Data into Market Intelligence
Digital quoting systems provide valuable visibility into customer preferences and market trends. By analyzing which configurations customers request, manufacturers can identify high-demand combinations and declining product lines. Conf Industries transitioned from predicting insights based on ERP data to being able to predict insights directly from their offers in CPQ.
“The insights you can take through CPQ now is to understand which trends are driving your market,” Ventura explains. At Conf Industries, this visibility led to significant portfolio refinement: “I probably cut some of them, like 50 to 60 products in the catalog, because there was no amazing demand anymore.”
By concentrating resources on high-demand products, manufacturers can further improve speed-to-market for their most important offerings. They’re optimizing a cycle where market intelligence continuously refines the product portfolio, making it progressively faster to quote, produce, and deliver what customers actually want.
The Compounding Benefits for Speed-to-Market
For manufacturers embracing modern quoting approaches, the impact on speed-to-market extends throughout the entire commercial process:
- Quotes generated in minutes rather than days
- Engineering resources redirected to innovation and new product launches
- Delivery timelines aligned with actual production capacity
- Channel partners empowered with self-service capabilities
- Product portfolios optimized based on market demand
Conf Industries’ experience illustrates the potential magnitude of these improvements:
- 80% faster quote processing
- 50% shorter delivery windows
- 95% fewer communication errors.
Similar results are being reported across the medtech landscape as more manufacturers recognize the strategic importance of sales and quoting automation.
Meeting New Medtech Market Expectations
As the industry continues evolving toward greater customization, digital purchasing expectations, and value-based selling, speed-to-market has become a critical competitive differentiator. The days when medical device companies could succeed with slow, manual quoting processes are rapidly disappearing.
Today’s market leaders recognize that speed-to-market in medical device and medtech sales begins with the first customer interaction. By transforming how they configure, price, and quote their solutions, they’re creating commercial velocity.
If quoting is the roadblock between your product and your customer, it’s time to move. Learn how Tacton CPQ helps medtech manufacturers quote faster, sell smarter, and grow without friction.