Quote tracking: ditch the spreadsheet
Someone asks how that big quote from a fortnight ago is going and you genuinely don't know. Did they say no? Did you forget to chase? The spreadsheet you meant to keep updated is three weeks stale.
Where it hurts
Quotes are money in waiting, and most small firms have no reliable view of them. They go out by email and vanish into a fog. Some get accepted, some get a polite no, and a worrying number just go quiet because nobody followed up. You feel busy quoting, but you can't say how much is sitting out there or how much you're winning.
The spreadsheet is the usual answer and the usual failure. It only works if someone updates it every single time, and nobody does. Within a month it's missing half the recent quotes and lying about the status of the rest. You end up trusting your gut, which is optimistic on a good day.
The real cost is the quiet ones. A quote that never gets a decision isn't a no, it's a maybe you abandoned. Chased at the right moment, a fair few of those usually turn into jobs. Left alone, they're just lost revenue you never notice leaving.
What I'd build
I'd set up quote tracking wherever your quotes already live, so there's no separate list to maintain: each quote carries a status and a follow-up date, and a pipeline view shows everything outstanding with a total value against it. Then I'd deal with the reason spreadsheets die, which is that someone has to update them. An AI step reads the replies as they come in, marks quotes won, lost or wobbling without anyone typing, and when a quote's gone quiet past its follow-up date it drafts the chase in your voice, ready to approve and send. Win rate then falls out of the data for free: quotes won against quotes sent, no extra admin. HubSpot's free CRM or the pipelines in QuickBooks and Xero carry it, depending on what you run.
What changes
- One live view of every outstanding quote and its total value
- Statuses update from the replies themselves, not from memory
- Quiet quotes get a chase drafted in your voice, ready to approve
- Your win rate emerges from the data without any extra typing
Related fixes
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