Methodology
Quotes that age, and the close rate underneath them
A pile of unanswered estimates is not revenue. What it is worth depends on a rate you can measure — and on being honest about which quotes were actually lost.
- Value of quotes sent >30 days ago, still unanswered
- Accepted value ÷ all decided value
The pile is not the number
Add up every quote nobody replied to and you get a big, satisfying figure. It is also meaningless. You were never going to win all of them, and presenting the pile as revenue at stake is the oldest overstatement in this category.
What the pile is worth is the pile multiplied by the rate at which your quotes actually close. Everything interesting is in measuring that rate honestly.
Thirty days, deliberately generous
A quote counts as stale after thirty days without a decision. That is longer than most follow-up advice suggests, and the length is the point: a shorter window would flag quotes that are genuinely still in play and inflate the total with work you have not lost.
Quotes dated in the future are dropped too. They appear in real exports as timezone slips and data-entry errors, and treating them as fresh would quietly shrink the stale pile.
A rejection is not silence
This is the distinction that most determines whether the figure is trustworthy, and it is easy to get wrong.
A quote marked Rejected, Declined, Lost or Archived reached a decision. The customer answered; the answer was no. It belongs in the denominator when computing your close rate, because it tells you what share of quotes convert.
It does not belong in the stale pile. Counting decided-and-lost quotes as unanswered opportunity is how a follow-up report becomes fiction — you would be told to chase money that a customer already declined to give you.
So the two populations are separated: accepted and expired quotes rate the close rate, and only quotes still genuinely awaiting a reply form the pile that rate is applied to.
The bars it will not clear
At least twenty aged quotes must have reached a decision before a close rate is computed from them, and at least five must be sitting stale before we call it a pattern rather than one forgotten job.
Below either bar the detector stays silent. A close rate computed from four quotes is not a rate, and one neglected estimate is not a leak in your process.
What to do with it
Sort the stale pile by value, oldest first, and work down it. Most shops recover a meaningful share on the first pass simply because the customer assumed the job was no longer available.
Then watch the close rate rather than the pile. The pile shrinks the week you chase it; the rate is what tells you whether the follow-up habit stuck.