Somewhere in your records are the enquiries from last year. They asked, you quoted, nothing happened, and everybody moved on.
That list is the warmest source of work most small businesses own, and the least used.
Why they did not buy
Occasionally price. More often the timing was wrong, the budget moved, the person left, or a more urgent thing came along.
None of those are permanent. All of them change within a year.
What not to send
A mass message announcing that you are still here. It reads as marketing and gets deleted.
What works
A short, individual message that shows you remember the specific thing.
"We spoke last March about the billing setup for your Surat office. I was reminded of it today. Did that ever get sorted?"
It is a normal message from a normal person. It gets replies, because it is specific and it asks about them rather than announcing something about you.
Work through it properly
Ten a week beats a hundred in one afternoon. A hundred in one go becomes a template, and a template stops being personal.
Record what comes back. Some will have gone elsewhere and that is useful to know. Some will say not yet, which is a date. A few will say they were just thinking about it, which is the whole point.
Then stop letting it happen
The reason this list exists is that quotations had no closing step. A quotation that ends in a recorded outcome, won or lost or postponed with a date, never becomes a forgotten folder.
Leave a Comment