How many quotes are actually waiting on you right now?

How many quotes are actually waiting on you right now? Most owners answer with a rough figure, pulled from memory or from a salesperson's inbox. The real total is almost always higher, and nobody knows how long each one has been sitting there. Counting it properly takes ten minutes, as long as you look in the right places.

Why the number in your head is wrong#

Every salesperson keeps their own list: an inbox, a notebook, a memory that fades. A quote sent last week is still on it. A quote sent in the spring, with no news since, has usually vanished from every screen without being lost for good: the client can still reply six months later to a proposal you have already written off.

We thought quotes with no reply meant clients who just didn't want to go ahead.

It is not only a memory problem. A pending quote has no fixed home: it lives in whoever sent it's inbox, sometimes in a shared spreadsheet nobody updates, sometimes nowhere written down at all.

The ten-minute method#

You don't need a tool to start. Three steps get you to a real number once:

1. List every place a quote could be sitting: each salesperson's inbox, the shared folder, the paper binder, the tracking spreadsheet if one exists.
2. For every quote found, note the date it was sent and the last news from the client. No vague status like "in progress": a precise date, or nothing.
3. Set aside the ones with no reply for more than two weeks. Those are the ones that matter: a quote sent yesterday is not yet a forgotten one.

Once the three lists are combined, the total almost always surprises on the high side.

What that number tells you#

Take a hypothesis: a renovation company with fewer than ten people sends twenty quotes a month, averaging €3,000 each. If the inventory turns up fifteen quotes with no reply for more than three weeks, that is €45,000 waiting on a decision, with nobody sure who is supposed to follow up.

The full calculation of what unchased quotes cost, with an anonymised figure from our files, is in the article on quotes nobody chases: one quote in six that is never chased would have been signed. And the right moment to follow up matters as much as the follow-up itself.

What changes with an application built for the business#

Once quotes live in one application, the question "how many are pending" no longer needs an answer: it is simply displayed. Every quote carries a send date, a current status and, once a delay is crossed, a visible flag for whoever needs to act, not only for whoever sent it.

The owner sees the full pending total at a glance, sorted by age or by amount. A quote can no longer stay invisible because the person who sent it is on holiday or changed roles: it belongs to the business, not to an inbox.

Quotes awaiting a reply: the key takeaways#

The real number of pending quotes is never found in a memory: it comes from adding up every place a quote could be sitting. Ten minutes is enough to do it once, and the result usually changes how you see the problem: it is not a lack of occasional follow-ups, it is information with nowhere to live.

Doing this inventory once does not keep it up to date. The real question is how often you are willing to redo it by hand: every week, or never again.