The dead-quote problem: how much revenue is sitting in your "maybe" pile

If you run quotes through any job-management system (ServiceM8, Tradify, simPRO, or just a spreadsheet) you've got a pile of jobs sitting in a status that isn't "won" and isn't "lost" either. They're just there. Quoted, sent, and never followed up because you got busy and the next job came in.

That pile is usually bigger than people expect, and it's rarely worth zero. Some of those jobs are genuinely dead: the client went with someone else, or the work isn't happening. But a meaningful share are just waiting on a follow-up that never happened, because chasing quotes competes with actually doing the work, and the work always wins.

Why "went quiet" isn't the same as "said no"

A client who explicitly declines tells you something. A client who never replies tells you nothing, and most people who ask for a quote and then go silent aren't rejecting you, they're just slow, distracted, comparing options, or waiting for their own funding to line up. Treating silence as a no means you're leaving a call or a follow-up email on the table for every one of those jobs.

A rough way to size the pile yourself

1. Pull every quote from the last 6-12 months that's still sitting at "quoted" status, not won, not marked unsuccessful.
2. Drop anything you already know is genuinely dead (job cancelled, client told you no, scope changed).
3. Add up what's left. That number is your dead-quote pile.
4. Multiply by your historical quote-to-win rate for jobs you do follow up on. That's a rough floor on what re-chasing is worth.

That last step matters: the honest answer for some businesses is "not much," and that's a useful answer too. It tells you the gap isn't in old quotes, it's somewhere else in the pipeline.

Where this gets harder than a spreadsheet formula

Different job-management platforms model "quoted but not converted" differently, and the field that looks like a decision date isn't always one. There's a field-by-field breakdown of what ServiceM8, Tradify and simPRO exports actually contain in the companion post on trade-software exports if you want to do this analysis yourself. If you'd rather someone just do it: that's the free audit offer below: send the export, get the number, no obligation either way.