The context
A manufacturing SME making products to customer specification, with a network of multi-line agents. Every sale starts from a quote, often negotiated over weeks.
The challenge
Agents worked without a clear budget, and open quotes lived in their inboxes and their heads. No one in the company knew how many quotes were in play, for what value, or which ones were going cold. Everything came to light at month-end, once orders were won or lost: too late to act on a deal still open.
What we did
- We defined a budget per agent, built on historical data and shared, so everyone knew what was expected and why.
- All quotes were brought into a single dashboard, with value, status and last-contact date: for the first time the pipeline was visible at a glance.
- Alongside outcome KPIs we introduced process KPIs (quotes issued, follow-ups done), because those can be acted on before the order is won or lost.
- The mid-month check became the moment to recover quotes stalled for too many days, instead of waiting for the month-end report.
I didn't know I had twenty quotes stuck for three weeks. One phone call was all it took, and nobody was making it.
The owner
The result
Within a quarter the quote-to-order conversion rate went from 22% to 31%. Not because they sold more overall, but because they stopped losing deals for the simple lack of a timely follow-up. The agents, for their part, stopped seeing the dashboard as surveillance and started using it to avoid leaving money on the table.
Cases are anonymised to protect client confidentiality.