Following up on quotes without losing any

Ask an agency how many quotes are currently open and what they are worth together, and you rarely get an answer within ten seconds. That is a strange gap, because that is literally the revenue of the coming months. And it is exactly why quotes do not get followed up.

Following up on a quote means getting in touch after you have sent it, to hear where the client stands and what the next step is. The standard advice is about when to call and what to say. It is usually fine advice, but it does not solve the real problem. At most agencies a quote goes unfollowed not because someone misjudged the timing, but because nobody was thinking about it any more.

When should you follow up on a quote?

The rule of thumb you find everywhere is a first contact after a few working days, then twice more with space in between. More often becomes annoying, less often and you are out of sight.

More useful than that rule is one agreement you make before you send the quote. Ask at the end of the meeting: when do you expect to decide, and is it alright if I call you after that? Then your follow-up is no longer a sales call but an appointment you are keeping. That changes the tone of the conversation completely, and it gives you a date to put in your list.

How often do you follow up?

Two or three times, and then you stop and say so.

That last part is what people skip. Answering a third attempt with silence is worse than closing it off with a short email: I have not heard back, I will assume this is not live right now, let me know if that changes. That gets a reply surprisingly often, and if it does not, at least your pipeline is honest.

What you should above all not do when it stays quiet: drop your price. It makes your original price look unreliable, and you start the relationship with a discount you will never get back.

Why do agencies forget to follow up on quotes?

Not out of laziness, and not because they are afraid to call. It goes wrong in the handover between two moments.

The moment you send the quote, you are done with that client and you jump to the next one. The quote is in your sent folder. In your head is a vague intention to chase it next week. Nothing reminds you next week, because your sent folder is not a task list.

On top of that, an open quote makes no noise. A complaining client you hear. A project with a deadline you see. A quote nobody responds to is silent, and silent things always lose to loud things. At Hokuspokus B.V. the quote does not slip through the cracks because it is unimportant, but because it does not beep.

So the solution is not a better call script. The solution is that the quote itself gets a status, an owner and a date on which it reappears in someone's list.

How do you keep track of which quotes are open?

Three things you need to be able to see, and once you have them, following up is almost automatic:

• Which quotes are open, with the amount and the date you sent them
• What the next action is per quote, with a name and a date attached
• What the total open value is, so you know how your pipeline looks

That can be a spreadsheet, and for a freelancer with four quotes a month it is fine. It gets tight as soon as several people are sending quotes, because then nobody knows what the others have out. At that point a pipeline with stages becomes useful, where "quote sent" is simply a stage and not the end of the process. Which stages work for agencies is covered in CRM stages for marketing agencies.

And of course: the better the quote itself, the less you have to chase. Getting proposals signed faster goes into that.

When is following up a waste of time?

That exists too. If you sent a quote in response to a cold enquiry, never spoke to the decision maker, and had the feeling you were one of five, the odds are low and the investment is high. One polite email is enough there.

Following up pays off mostly on quotes that came out of a real conversation. That is a good filter for where to spend your time.

Where Wecooking fits in

In Wecooking a quote sits in the CRM as a deal with a stage and an owner, and you attach a follow-up task with a date to it right away. That task appears in your list on the day itself, so following up does not depend on whether you remember. If the deal is won, it becomes a client project in one click. From 19 euros per month, everything included, currently free in beta.

What it does not do: no invoice comes out of it and there is no time tracking, so for the financial side after the signature you need something else. And it does not make the call for you. A system that puts the quote in your list solves the forgetting, not the conversation.

If you just want to see how much is currently open at your place, trying it for free is probably faster than searching your sent folder.