Recording why you lost the quote

Ask an owner why they lose work and the answer is price. Ask the records and no answer comes back at all. Somebody deleted the lost quotes, or they sit in a stage no report reads. Nothing has ever tested the belief, so the belief has gone unchallenged for years. A Lost stage and one field change that in a quarter.

Keep the quote, mark it lost

Deleting a lost quote destroys the only record of what the business offered and at what price. A Lost stage in Diract CRM keeps it, and the quote stays comparable against the ones that won. The next quote for similar work then starts from a real figure rather than a fresh guess. A quote kept also answers the customer who rings back in November about the price from June.

One reason, from a short list

A free text box produces forty different phrasings nobody can count. Six options produce a report. Six reasons cover almost everything a small business meets: price, timing, scope, went elsewhere, no response and we declined. Each one suggests a different fix, which is the test of a good list. Diract CRM records the reason as a field rather than free text, so a quarterly count takes seconds.

No response is the answer that changes things

A quote that never got an answer is not a loss on price. The business lost it on follow-up, and follow-up is fixable this week. Most owners recording lost reasons for the first time find this category is their largest by a distance. That finding usually lands badly, because the fix costs nothing and was available the whole time. One scheduled call two days after a quote goes out moves most of those into a yes or a clear no.

Price loses differently depending on the gap

Losing by five per cent is a negotiating problem. Losing by forty is a scope problem, and the two need opposite responses. Anybody who cuts prices in answer to a forty per cent gap has misread the quote entirely. Where the customer will say the winning number, that number belongs beside the reason. A dozen of them tell an owner whether the business prices badly or quotes a different job from its competitors.

Declining is a result, not a failure

A quote the business chose not to chase, or priced deliberately high, belongs in the same list with that reason. Without it, a deliberate decision reads as a defeat in every report. The win rate then reads lower than the truth, and somebody starts fixing a problem the business does not have. Diract CRM keeps the decline as its own reason, which protects the number and the decision together.

Read it quarterly, grouped by source

A week of lost quotes is noise. A quarter of them is a pattern, and the pattern usually names one thing to change. Our guide to what to measure covers putting that beside the numbers somebody reads daily. Grouping by source is where the money hides. Enquiries from one builder converting at a fifth of the usual rate is a commercial fact worth a decision. That comparison needs the source recorded on the enquiry, which is one field somebody fills in at intake.

Two numbers that mislead on their own

Two estimators with very different win rates deserve understanding rather than a conversation about ability. One of them usually quotes the harder jobs, or the enquiries that arrived late, and the record can show that. Win rate misleads the same way across kinds of work. A business winning half its domestic quotes and a fifth of its commercial ones has one number hiding both. Splitting the rate by kind of work turns a score into a decision about where the estimating time goes.

Ask the customer, and ring them again later

A short message asking why they went elsewhere gets an answer more often than anybody expects. The answer is usually specific, and it usually names something the business can change. Asking also leaves the door open, which matters more than the information itself. A customer who went elsewhere in March is a customer whose new supplier may have disappointed them by September. Diract CRM filters the lost quotes older than six months with the reason beside each, which beats any call list money can buy.

What to change first

• Lost quotes stay, marked lost rather than deleted
• One reason comes from a list of about six
• No response counts separately from price
• The winning price gets recorded where the customer says it
• A deliberate decline reads as a decision, not a loss
• The reasons get read quarterly, grouped by source
• Lost quotes over six months old become a call list