Cost of a project (in vendor’s perspective)

Recently came across a few sales meeting where the customer needs us to provide professional service and I had a tough time cracking my head on how many man-days to quote. Here’s a simple breakdown on how an incident management process is implemented using Footprints in a customer’s site, end to end:

Day 1 – Sales meeting with customer following up a lead (PM)
Day 2 – Demo with higher level mgmt (CIO + PM)
Day 3 – Meeting discussion with IT team on requirements
Day 4 – Meetup with the team to demo the POC env
Day 5 – Assist customer with project enhancements and queries
Day 6 – Help in documentation write ups to justify budget
Day 7 – Quotation building and price negotiation
Day 8 – Procurement process with documentation submissions
Day 9 – Technical evaluation on Env required for software
Day 10 – More technical evaluation on HA, backup, DR, etc
Day 11 – Installation of server, troubleshooting security restrictions, firewall, connectivity.
Day 12 – Indept Requriement study kick off meeting for incident process
Day 13 – Form design, field types, dependancy between fields discussion
Day 14 – SLA setup, pending SLA status, work hours, response time discussion
Day 15 – Workflow, email templates, roles and permissions discussion
Day 16 – Approval process and mgmt reports discussion
Day 17 – Build incident mgmt project in their production env
Day 18 – testing with the IT team if what is build is as per whats needed
Day 19 – Enhancements and fixes to project
Day 20 – second round of testing
Day 21 – Final confirmation meeting with customer
Day 22 – Prepare project configuration documents
Day 23 – Sign off on Delivery Order
Day 24 – Chasing their finance team to pay up…….

End of the day, the customer says : “You only need to spend 1 day building Footprints, why are you quoting me 10days?!”