The $120K Mistake: Why Hiring Another AE Is a Waste of Money

When your quoting bottleneck isn’t a talent issue—it’s a workflow issue. Invest in automation, not overhead.

Let’s do the math.

The average Application Engineer in the U.S. earns $100K–$120K per year, and that’s before benefits, training, and overhead. Multiply that across a growing sales team, and you’re sinking hundreds of thousands annually into a human patch for a broken system.

And what’s the output?
Manual quoting. Constant CAD tweaks. Email ping-pong between sales and engineering. If this sounds familiar, your problem isn’t that you need more people. It’s that you need a better process.

Here’s the truth:

You don’t need another AE. You need automation.

Spokbee was built for exactly this pain point. Our cloud-native CPD (Configure, Price, Deliver) platform replaces the bulk of AE quote-related tasks, turning your engineering data into interactive, real-time, customer-facing configurators that anyone can use. No CAD license. No manual quoting. No six-figure salary required.

What Are You Really Paying For?

Let’s break it down:

• Quote generation
• CAD model modifications
• Error checking
• Sales-to-engineering translation
• Customer-specific variations

These are all repetitive, rules-based tasks. And if something is repeatable, it’s automatable.

Spokbee turns every one of these functions into a self-serve experience for both customers and sales teams. Instead of throwing another body at the bottleneck, you eliminate the bottleneck entirely.

The Hidden Cost of Hiring

When you hire an AE, you’re not just paying for their time, you’re betting on their availability, accuracy, and ability to scale. That’s risky.

• People get sick. Platforms don’t.
• People make mistakes. Configurators don’t.
• People need onboarding. Spokbee is ready now.
• People can’t quote 24/7. Your website can.

From Overhead to Overperformance

Modern sales environments demand instant responses and digital experiences. Spokbee makes it possible to:

✅ Let customers configure products online in real time
✅ Generate accurate, up-to-date pricing instantly
✅ Ensure perfect alignment with live CAD data
✅ Free up engineers to innovate—not babysit quotes

All without hiring another AE.

A Smarter Investment

Let’s say your AE costs you $120K annually.

Spokbee costs a fraction of that and it scales across your entire sales pipeline. You don’t need 5 AEs. You need 1 Spokbee.

The ROI is clear:

• Fewer delays
• Fewer errors
• Faster quoting
• Happier customers
• Liberated engineers

Stop Hiring Your Way Out of Workflow Problems

Hiring another AE might feel like the logical next step, but it’s a $120K mistake if what you really need is a quoting solution that can grow with you.

Want to stop wasting time and budget?
Explore Spokbee 2.0 and see how smart manufacturers are ditching manual quoting for good.