Where the Value hides in Sales.
Quotes, CRM, tenders, follow-ups that never happened.
Hold these three questions in your head while you read.
- How often does this happen? Per day, per week, per month.
- How long does it take each time, including the interruptions around it?
- What did the last mistake in this process cost, in money, in rework, or in a customer's patience?
You answer them in your head. That is the whole exercise.
You met them, you got on well, and then three weeks passed and neither of you picked the thread back up.
- The follow-up nobody sent
- Call notes that live in one person's notebook
- A client who mentioned a deadline that nobody wrote down
- The birthday, the new baby, the promotion you found out about too late
- Warm leads that went quiet and were never chased
How many deals last year went quiet after a good first meeting?
The request comes in written in their words, not yours, and you rebuild the whole quote from a similar one you did last quarter.
- Quotes rebuilt manually from customer emails and spreadsheets
- Prices hunted down in a spreadsheet nobody owns
- Last quarter's quote opened and edited into this one
- Discounts applied from memory
- A quote sent two days after the customer asked
- The same product described differently in three quotes
How many hours a week does your team spend building quotes by hand?
The questionnaire has two hundred questions, and you have answered every one of them before, in a document you cannot find.
- Proposals and tender answers written from scratch despite forty previous versions
- The certificate scan hunted down again for every bid
- Reference projects rewritten slightly differently each time
- A deadline weekend spent assembling attachments
- The approved answer from last time, reworded from memory
How many working days does one tender response take your team?
The call went well, and now comes the part nobody enjoys: typing what happened into the system.
- CRM entries typed after every call
- Notes on paper that never make it in
- Opportunities updated the day before the pipeline review
- Two colleagues holding different versions of the same customer
- Next steps that exist only in someone's head
How many minutes of typing follow each hour of selling?
The customer says yes, and the order is keyed from the quote into the system, line by line, again.
- Order confirmations keyed into the system
- The quote and the order carrying the same content, typed twice
- A special agreement that never reached delivery or invoicing
- Handover emails asking what was actually sold
- An order delayed because one field was missing
How often does an order need rework because something was keyed wrong?
You sent the quote, they said looks good, and then nothing, and nobody called to ask why.
- Quotes with no answer and no follow-up date
- The competitor you lost to without learning the reason
- Win rates nobody actually calculates
- A price objection that was never passed on
- Repeat customers who stopped ordering, unnoticed
How many open quotes from last quarter never got a follow-up?
If one of these hit a nerve, that’s your process. Bring it to the call and we’ll tell you within 30 minutes whether it’s worth pursuing, and what it would have to deliver to be worth it.
Find out if it’s worth it