Quoting without feedback is not selling. It is filing.
Every price you send out has an answer attached to it. Won, lost, or still sitting with the buyer. Most of us never go and collect it. We send the next quote instead, and the one after that. Skip that answer long enough and the customer files you too. You become a price source: the number they check against, not the name they buy from.
Here is the part most people miss. That answer is information you have already paid for. You paid for it in the hours spent building the price, checking the spec and chasing lead times. Not collecting it is like paying for a report and leaving the envelope sealed on your desk.
And the answer is never just "lost". You lost on price, on lead time, on payment terms or on trust. Those are four different problems, and they need four different fixes. A sharper price does nothing for a lead time problem. Faster delivery does nothing for a trust problem. Send the next quote blind and you repeat whichever one you got wrong.
So I have a rule for one situation in particular. When a buyer keeps sending me requests and will not take a call, I stop quoting. I do not send the next price. I ask for a meeting instead, so I can hear what happened to the prices I already sent.
That request settles it one of two ways. Either he meets me, and I learn why I am losing and which of the four problems I am actually facing. Or he will not meet me, and I learn that I am a price check, not a supplier. Then the hours I was about to spend on the next quote go to a buyer I can win. Both are answers. Both are worth more than another quote sent into silence.
Why does this work? Picture someone at a shooting range who never walks down to look at the target. He keeps firing. He keeps missing in the same direction. He calls it practice. One look at the paper would tell him to adjust left, right, up or down. The quote is the shot. The feedback is the paper. Without the paper, more shots only means more of the same miss.
Your one action before tomorrow: open the last quote you sent, and ask the buyer what happened to it.
The deal did not die. It was forgotten.
Every quiet deal gets blamed on something big: the market, the price, the product. Most of the time the cause is smaller and more embarrassing. Nobody wrote down what was agreed. Nobody followed up. The other side simply forgot. That is a cost you chose, not one the market handed you. Before you touch the strategy, fix how you keep your word on the small things.
Take the small order first
Everyone chases the big order first. I want the small one first. A small order tells you in thirty days whether a customer actually pays. A big order tells you the same thing in six months, at ten times the exposure. Same customer, same question. The only thing that changes is how much you can lose while you wait for the answer. Prove collection before you scale exposure.
One question for you. The last quote you lost: was it price, lead time, payment terms or trust? Hit reply with one word.
Nazem
P.S. Weighing a new market right now? The scorecard I use before I commit to one is free for readers: seven questions, about fifteen minutes, and it ends in a verdict, go, no, or tender only. Open the scorecard. The full method is in my book, Do not be fast to sell, a Hard Markets book, a Skill to Scale publication: see the Complete Edition.