The enquiry that never becomes a job still costs you a morning

An unpriced cost that arrives every week

Every enquiry consumes something before it is worth anything. Reading it, replying, a call, a site visit perhaps, working out what the job involves, writing the quote, following up. For a job of any size that’s easily half a day, and none of it appears on an invoice.

Won often enough, that time is simply the cost of selling and it is fine. The problem is the proportion that was never going to convert — enquiries from people with no budget, no authority, no timescale, or no real intention beyond finding out what things cost.

Nobody tracks this, because there is no document produced at the end of it. It is one of the few significant business costs that leaves no trace whatsoever in the accounts.

Qualifying is not gatekeeping

The word makes people uncomfortable, as though it involves interrogating strangers or acting as if you’re in demand. It means something more ordinary: establishing, before investing several hours, whether this is a job you can do, that they can pay for, on a timescale that suits both sides.

Done well it is indistinguishable from being helpful, because the questions are the same ones a good supplier would ask anyway. A person genuinely intending to buy is generally pleased to be asked, since it suggests they are dealing with somebody who has done this before.

Three questions that do most of the filtering

What are they trying to achieve, and by when. A vague answer to the second half is the most reliable single indicator that nothing is going to happen soon, because real projects have dates attached, even loose ones.

What have they budgeted, or what range were they expecting. This is the question people find hardest to ask and it saves the most time. Asked plainly and without apology it is answered more often than not, and where somebody refuses entirely, that is itself informative.

Who else is involved in the decision. Discovering at the quote stage that a partner, a committee or a head office has to approve explains a delay that would otherwise look like disinterest, and it tells you who the quote actually has to convince.

Say what things cost, early and roughly

A great deal of wasted effort comes from both sides avoiding the number until the end. The supplier does not want to frighten anybody; the client doesn’t want to reveal their budget. Then a quote lands that is a multiple of what was expected, and half a day has gone.

Giving an indicative range early — with the honest caveat that it depends on specifics — resolves this cheaply. Some people disappear, which is the desired outcome, since they would have disappeared later at greater cost. The rest continue with a shared sense of the scale, which makes every subsequent conversation easier.

This is also why publishing starting prices works well for reasonably standard work. It does the filtering while you are asleep.

Charge for the part that is really work

Some enquiries cannot be quoted without genuine investigation — a survey, an audit, a diagnostic session. Doing that free, as part of the sales process, is how suppliers end up giving away the most valuable thing they have.

Selling it as a small, well-defined piece of paid work solves two problems at once. You are paid for the thinking, and only serious buyers proceed, which improves the conversion rate of everything downstream. The client also gets something of value even if they go no further, which makes the arrangement easy to propose.

Decline early, briefly, and without a story

When an enquiry is clearly wrong — the wrong work, the wrong budget, a timescale you can’t meet — the useful reply is a short one, sent quickly. A sentence saying it is not something you can help with, and where possible a pointer to somebody who might.

Long explanations invite negotiation, and a slow no wastes more of their time than a fast one. Suppliers who decline gracefully and promptly get recommended by the people they declined, which sounds improbable and is nonetheless common. What people remember is that you were straightforward.

It is worth keeping a rough count of how enquiries turn out, even if only as a tally. How many arrived, how many were quoted, how many were won, and which sources produced which. After a few months that record answers questions no amount of reflection will: whether a particular listing or referral route is worth the effort, whether the quotes are being lost on price or on something else, and how much of the week the whole process is quietly consuming.