Back in the day, in our offices, there was paper everywhere.
Everything we needed to do was piled up on our desks. We knew exactly what was outstanding and what needed attending to. The pile was honest. Its height told us how busy we were. A cleared desk was a satisfying accomplishment. A teetering stack was an accurate reflection of how the week was going.
Now everything is up in the Cloud or stored on a server. The screens we sit in front of look the same whether there is £10 worth of work stored on them or £10 million. Unlike a filing cabinet, the computer doesn’t creak under the weight of information stored on it.
We explored this invisible weight problem in the Qualities of Paper piece elsewhere in the Hub. This post is about a specific and very common consequence of that invisibility: the open quote or proposal that quietly slips off the radar, and the lapsed client relationship that drifts into silence because nobody quite got around to following up.
The mystery of the open quote #
Most businesses with any volume of outbound activity have them. A proposal sent in good faith, a quote submitted after a promising conversation, a follow-up email that was opened and never replied to. Time passes. Other priorities arrive. The quote sits on a server somewhere, neither won nor lost, neither closed nor actively pursued.
In the old paper world, the physical presence of an outstanding quote folder would have nagged at you. The folder existed. It occupied space. It was visible every time you opened the filing cabinet. In the digital world, the same outstanding proposal sits silently on a server, generating no cognitive friction whatsoever, until someone runs a report, or until a competitor follows up instead.
Research we have explored in the List of 250 piece confirms that at any given moment, only around 5% of a target market is actively ready to buy. But the prospect who received your quote last quarter and went quiet is not necessarily in the 95% who have no current requirement. They may be in the 5% who are ready and simply waiting for someone to ask.
The frustrated detective’s job, as we describe it at New Era, is to solve the mystery. Did the client want to do the work and forget to reply? Did the work go to a competitor and if so, when might the next opportunity arise? Is there a new project on the horizon that a brief conversation might surface? None of these questions answer themselves. They require a conversation which is precisely why most businesses never get the answers.
The lapsed client problem #
Lapsed clients are a different challenge with a similar cause.
A client relationship ends; not badly, simply naturally. The project concluded, the contract expired, the budget cycle moved on. The relationship was positive. There was genuine mutual respect. And then, gradually, contact thinned and eventually stopped, not because either party decided to end the relationship, but because nobody actively maintained it.
The lapsed client is one of the most valuable and most underused assets in any business’s data. They already know the quality of your work. They have already made the judgement that you can be trusted. The sales cycle with a returning client is a fraction of the length of a new client acquisition, and the relationship starts from a position of established credibility rather than cautious evaluation.
What they need is not a pitch. They need a conversation; a genuine, unhurried enquiry about where they are now, what has changed, and whether there might be anything on the horizon where you could be useful.
The Ehrenberg-Bass research we referenced in the List of 250 piece found that companies change their service providers roughly every five years which means a lapsed client from three years ago may be approaching exactly the window when a well-timed conversation becomes a re-engaged relationship.
What a clean up involves #
The practical process is straightforward, even if the consistent execution requires discipline.
For open quotes: identify every proposal or quote sent in the past twelve to eighteen months that has not been formally won, lost, or withdrawn. Prioritise by value and recency. Make contact, not with a chasing email, but with a curious, unhurried phone call that acknowledges the time passed and asks a simple question: is this still something they are thinking about, and if not, is there anything else on the horizon?
For lapsed clients: identify every client relationship that has been inactive for more than twelve months. Prioritise by the warmth of the original relationship and the potential for renewed engagement. Make contact with the same curious, unhurried approach, not selling, but genuinely interested in where they are now.
Both exercises benefit from the same disposition: the frustrated detective who approaches each conversation not with an agenda but with genuine curiosity about what the other person is thinking.
If you are looking for help over the coming months to follow up open quotes or proposals, or to re-engage with lapsed clients, the presentation below gives a fuller picture of how New Era approaches this work and the sectors we have experience in.
We are always happy to meet, run through what you are looking to achieve, and learn more about you, your business, and your markets.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
