Every shop owner knows follow-up “matters.” Almost none can say what not doing it costs, in dollars, for their shop. This article is a worksheet: four numbers you can pull from your own records in under an hour, one multiplication, and a few honest caveats about what the result does and doesn’t mean.

Everything below is an illustrative walkthrough with example numbers. Your inputs will differ — that’s the point of doing it with your own data.

The four inputs

Input 1: Quotes per month. Count quotes actually sent, not RFQs received. Pull three typical months and average them. Say a shop sends 40 quotes a month.

Input 2: Average quote value. Total dollars quoted in those months divided by quote count. Use the median instead if one $400,000 outlier distorts the average. Say it’s $9,000.

Input 3: The silent rate. This is the number nobody tracks, and the reason this worksheet is worth an hour. Take last quarter’s quotes and mark each one: won, lost with a reason (the buyer actually told you), or silent — no order, no rejection, no answer. Most shops doing this for the first time find the silent pile is the biggest of the three. For the walkthrough, say 60% of quotes end in silence.

Input 4: The follow-up gap. Of the silent quotes, how many got at least one real follow-up after the quote went out? A “real” follow-up means a message or call that asked about this quote — not a newsletter. The sent-folder check is quick: search the customer’s address, see what went out after the quote date. Say 1 in 5 silent quotes got a follow-up, so 80% of silent quotes were never worked at all.

The multiplication

With the example inputs:

40 quotes/mo × $9,000 avg            = $360,000 quoted per month
× 60% silent rate                    = $216,000/mo ending in silence
× 80% never followed up              = $172,800/mo of unworked silent quotes

That last line is the number to sit with: in this scenario, roughly $173,000 of quoted work per month goes quiet and is never touched again. Annualized, over $2M in quotes gets written off by default — not lost to a competitor’s price, not lost to lead time. Just never worked.

What you can honestly claim back

Here’s where most vendor math goes wrong, so let’s be careful. You cannot recover $173,000 a month. Most silent quotes are silent because the job is genuinely gone or the project died. The honest question is: what share of unworked silent quotes would convert with competent follow-up?

Nobody can tell you that number in advance — anyone who quotes you an industry statistic for it is selling something. What you can do is reason about a floor. Within your silent pool, some quotes have buyers who simply parked the project; some had a spec revision coming; some sat in a folder waiting on a meeting. Follow-up converts a slice of those situations into orders, and — just as valuable — converts most of the rest into answers, so your estimator stops re-quoting for ghosts.

Run the math at deliberately modest recovery rates and see if it still clears the bar:

$172,800/mo unworked  ×  5% recovery  ≈  $8,600/mo
$172,800/mo unworked  ×  8% recovery  ≈  $13,800/mo

At margins typical for custom work, even the 5% line funds a serious follow-up effort many times over. And if your real silent pool is half the example’s size, the conclusion barely changes — that’s the useful property of this math. It doesn’t need optimistic assumptions to work; it needs the silent pool to exist, and the sent folder says it does.

The second-order costs (no multiplication available)

Three costs don’t fit in the formula but show up in real shops:

Estimating waste. Every silent quote consumed an hour or two of your scarcest skill. With no feedback on why quotes die, the estimator can’t calibrate — pricing, lead-time promises, and which RFQs to decline all stay guesses. Shops that close the loop quote better, not just more.

Forecast blindness. When 60% of outcomes are “unknown,” the pipeline number in the owner’s head is fiction. Capacity planning, hiring, and machine purchases all lean on that fiction. The follow-up habit is what turns the pipeline into a measurement — which is the entire premise of a sales command center once the basics run.

Buyer-side signal. A shop that follows up reads as a shop that wants the work and runs an organized front office. Buyers extrapolate: if the quoting process is loose, what’s the on-time delivery like? Silence after a quote is also a message.

Run it on your own numbers

The whole worksheet, in checklist form:

  1. Count quotes sent per month (3-month average).
  2. Compute average or median quote value.
  3. Classify one quarter of quotes: won / lost-with-reason / silent.
  4. For the silent ones, check the sent folder: how many ever got a real follow-up?
  5. Multiply: quotes × value × silent% × unworked% = your monthly unworked silent pool.
  6. Apply a modest recovery rate (try 5% and 8%) and compare against what fixing it would cost.

If step 5 produces a small number — congratulations, your follow-up discipline is genuinely unusual and your time is better spent on RFQ speed. For everyone else: the pool is real, it’s measurable in an afternoon, and working it is a process problem with a known fix. A quote recovery sprint is one way to install that process in two weeks; a spreadsheet and a protected Friday hour is another. What doesn’t work is what most shops currently run: quoting hard, and letting the sent folder decide what happens next.