Unsold estimates: count them before you chase them

Open, lost and expired are different piles

An unsold estimate can be one of three things in your records. A lost quote has an answer, and the answer was no. An expired quote ran out of time without one. An open quote is still waiting: nobody has said no yet.

Only the open pile is still in play, so that is the one to count before anyone picks up the phone. Lost quotes belong in your close rate and open ones do not, because a quote with no decision has not been lost. Counting it as a loss makes a slow pipeline look like a selling problem.

The close rate is a separate count, with its own post: Close rate on estimates: count decided quotes only.

When a quote becomes stale

A quote you presented on Tuesday is still being decided. Calling it unsold on Friday treats an ordinary few days of thinking time as a problem. Revvy draws the line at 14 days: a quote is stale when it is still open and was presented at least 14 days before the date of your export.

Those 14 days are Revvy's default, picked to give an ordinary decision time to happen. Every default on this page (14 days, and the 15% recovery rate below) is Revvy's judgement, not an industry figure, and you can change any of them. If your jobs are large and your customers take longer to decide, a longer line is reasonable. Pick one and use the same one every time you count.

In practice, take the date of your export and count back 14 days. Every quote still open that was presented on or before that date goes on the list.

Count it, add it up, find the average

You need one export from your field-service software's estimate report: every quote with its status, the date it was presented, the amount, and the last date anyone followed it up. Filter it down to the stale open quotes and write down two numbers, how many there are and what they add up to. Then work out the third.

The Open-Quote Call List turns that list into a call sheet, highest value first. If the export has no presented date or no follow-up date, the Records Checklist lists the fields an estimates export needs.

Below five stale quotes there is nothing to put a figure on. Revvy will not price open quotes until it has five, because a figure built on three or four quotes is mostly noise. Work the list anyway: three quotes are still three calls.

Interactive worksheetThe Open-Quote Call ListA count and total of your stale open quotes, a one-time figure at a rate you chose, and a printed call sheet to fill in, highest value first.

Never followed up, or followed up and still open?

What a blank follow-up date tells you

Some stale quotes have had a second call and are still open. Others have had nothing since the day they were presented. The follow-up date on the quote tells them apart: on an open quote, a blank last follow-up date means nobody has recorded chasing it.

Count those quotes separately and call them first, since nobody has asked the customer anything since the quote went out. If the date is blank because people chase quotes and never write it down, you have learned something too. The count will keep saying the same thing until somebody starts recording it.

Why the two counts are not added

The quotes nobody chased are part of the stale pile, not a second pile. Put a figure on each and add them, and you have priced the same quotes twice. Revvy shows the no-follow-up figure on its own card, as the share of the open-quote figure sitting in quotes nobody chased. It adds nothing to the business total, because the open-quote figure already includes those quotes.

Putting a figure on the pile

Choose your own recovery rate

The recovery rate is the one number you cannot count from the export. Revvy starts at 15%, a default it set low on purpose, and the Open-Quote Call List explains why and lets you put in your own.

If you have chased old quotes before and kept the outcomes, use the rate they give you. If you have not, treat 15% as a starting point to argue with. A month of calls with the outcomes written down will give you a rate of your own.

Revvy also gives the figure as a range rather than one number. The band depends on how many quotes you counted: ±45% under 30 stale quotes, ±30% from 30 and ±20% from 60. It reflects the size of the sample, not how sure anyone is about the rate you chose.

One-time, not yearly

These quotes exist today. Once they are worked they are gone, and next month's pile is a new count. So the figure is one-time. Multiplying it up to a year would be inventing quotes, and adding it to a yearly figure, such as what a better close rate is worth, mixes a list with a rate.

Revenue, not profit

The figure is the value of the quotes, so it is revenue. What you keep depends on your margin on that work. Revvy works out a profit figure only when a gross margin is on file, and never borrows an industry average to fill the gap.

Then make the calls

Work the call sheet from the top, and give each second contact a reason. An outline to adapt:

1. What has changed since the quote went out, if anything: an opening on the schedule, a part now in stock, an answer to a question the customer asked.
2. What is still open on the quote, in one sentence.
3. A next step the customer can say yes or no to, such as a date to book.

We make no claim about how often that works; your outcome column will tell you. Write the date of every call into the quote's follow-up field as you go. Next month's count then takes minutes, and it can tell chased quotes from untouched ones.

In the demo

Revvy runs both checks, open quotes and quotes with no follow-up, whenever it analyses an estimates file, and CSV import works today. It counts the no-follow-up quotes once, inside the open-quote figure, and gives each figure a confidence level and a low, a mid-point and a high.