Quotes, let’s win them! In this course, we will cover what we should do after we send a quote to a customer to maximize the chance of winning the order.

In NCAB group, we quote over a 100 000 times a year. So we spend roughly 50 000 hours in producing quotes – that’s more than 300 hours per salesperson in this company. That’s a lot of work, and it’s actually cost, and we don’t want to waste that. We want to win business, so we are successful.

Following up quotes is all about building relations and understand if our offer fits the customer needs, or if not, what do we need to do to make the offer fit? The author Michelle Moore said “Not following up on your prospects is the same as filling up your bathtub without first putting in the stopper in the drain” and that’s a good point. So if we invest into do a quote, we should follow up on it – simple logic.

Well, I don’t expect actually that we’ll follow up everything, the minimum requirement is that we follow up all quotes that have value over 1 000 dollars, plus any prototype and any quick-turnaround quote.

Following up shows customers also that we take Full Responsibility and that we want to build Strong Relationships. It’s in our DNA as it is in our values.

It is important to understand that our primary job is not actually doing quotes; our job is to win business. The process of quoting is just a very important step in growing our business.

Remember, we can’t win all the orders all the time. But it’s our job to make sure that there’s always a next step. And an agreement is a win, because it brings us closer to the orders now and in the future.

Following up will give us happier customers, probably the order and an even better chance on winning the next opportunity as well.