Stop Chasing More Leads: Turn Your Quote Backlog Into Revenue

Summary

About this episode

<p dir="ltr">Sales organizations often assume that revenue growth starts with finding more leads. Kevin Lawson and Sean O'Shaughnessey challenge that assumption in this episode of Two Tall Guys Talking Sales. For manufacturers, distributors, and other B2B companies that generate a high volume of quotes, substantial revenue may already sit in the existing pipeline—buried under unanswered proposals, unclosed opportunities, and customers whose buying behavior has never been analyzed. Kevin and Sean break down how disciplined sales management, internal service-level agreements, quote follow-up, and wallet-share analysis can turn an overlooked quote backlog into a practical revenue generation strategy.</p> <h2 dir="ltr">Key Topics Discussed</h2> <p dir="ltr">Sometimes You Don't Need More Leads—You Need to Manage the Ones You Have — 01:01<br /> Before spending more money on lead generation, examine the opportunities already sitting inside the business. Existing customers and prospects have already raised their hands, requested pricing, or engaged with the sales process. Sean explains why even modest improvements in follow-up and wallet share can create meaningful sales success without adding another prospect to the top of the funnel. The issue may not be lead volume. It may be sales process discipline.</p> <p dir="ltr">Sending a Quote vs. Presenting a Quote — 02:21<br /> Not every quote deserves the same sales strategy. A simple transactional request may warrant sending pricing and establishing a follow-up reminder. A larger opportunity involving a buying committee, multiple stakeholders, or a more complex decision should be handled very differently. Sean argues that sellers should present significant proposals rather than merely emailing them, using the conversation to reinforce value selling, business impact, and the reasons the customer should choose their company. Most importantly, the AE should leave that conversation with the next meeting already scheduled.</p> <p dir="ltr">Build Internal SLAs Around Quote Response and Follow-Up — 05:09<br /> Kevin challenges sales leaders to establish clear internal service-level agreements for quote handling. How quickly should an inbound request be acknowledged? When should the salesperson respond? At what dollar value does a quote require a presentation instead of an email? When should operations, delivery, or finance become involved? These rules create measurable sales processes instead of relying on individual habits. With CRM, email, and phone activity connected through the sales tech stack, leaders can measure response time, conversion, staffing requirements, pipeline velocity, and coaching opportunities rather than managing by anecdote.</p> <p dir="ltr">Stop Being a Quote Factory: Measure the Cost of Customers Who Rarely Buy — 08:43<br /> One of Kevin's favorite measurements exposes a hidden revenue management problem: customers who consume enormous quoting resources but rarely purchase. He describes a client whose supposedly valuable customer requested roughly 30 quotes per day, each requiring about 15 minutes of work, while converting only a tiny percentage into orders. That data changed the conversation. Instead of assuming the account was valuable because it was active, leadership could see the administrative burden it created and ask the customer how the supplier could become a stronger vendor partner. This is exactly the kind of analysis that can expose opportunities to reduce non-selling activities while improving revenue.</p> <p dir="ltr">Use Quote Win Rates to Estimate Wallet Share and Find Growth Opportunities — 10:52<br /> Many companies cannot answer a basic account-management question: what percentage of the customer's category spend do we actually receive? Sean builds on Kevin's example to show how quote activity can provide an important clue. If a customer asks for dozens of quotes but awards very few orders, competitors are probably capturing much of that spend. At the opposite extreme, if the company wins nearly every opportunity it receives but is never invited to quote other product categories, that can signal another kind of growth opportunity. Both conditions deserve deliberate account strategy from the VP of Sales or sales leader.</p> <p dir="ltr">Turn Quote Data Into Better Sales Leadership Decisions — 12:20<br /> The objective isn't merely cleaner CRM data. Quote conversion patterns can tell a sales leader where coaching is needed, which customers deserve more attention, which accounts consume disproportionate resources, and where cross-sell opportunities may exist. That creates a more informed approach to enterprise sales and account development: identify the anomaly, understand why it exists, and decide what the sales team should do differently.</p> <h2 dir="ltr">Key Quotes</h2> <p dir="ltr">Kevin Lawson — 01:01</p> <p dir="ltr">"Sometimes you don't need any more leads. Let that sink in. Sometimes you don't need more leads. Sometimes you need to do a better job of managing the ones you have."</p> <p dir="ltr">Sean O'Shaughnessey — 02:44</p> <p dir="ltr">"There's a big difference between sending a quote and presenting a quote."</p> <p dir="ltr">Sean O'Shaughnessey — 03:42</p> <p dir="ltr">"You do not leave until you say, 'Can you open your calendar and check when I can see you next to follow up on this?'"</p> <p dir="ltr">Kevin Lawson — 08:43</p> <p dir="ltr">"My favorite metric bar none…for my existing customers, who's using me as a quote factory and consuming a lot of my resources versus who's actually buying from me?"</p> <p dir="ltr">Sean O'Shaughnessey — 12:20</p> <p dir="ltr">"You as the sales leader, as the company owner, owe it to your salespeople, your sales team to guide them to say, 'This client needs more of our attention.'"</p> <h2 dir="ltr">Additional Resources</h2> <p dir="ltr">B2B Sales Lab — 13:32<br /> Sean discusses the B2B Sales Lab as a community where salespeople and sales leaders can bring real sales challenges, participate in office hours, learn from Sean and Kevin, and hear how sales professionals from other companies and industries have handled similar situations. Learn more at b2b-sales-lab.com.</p> <p dir="ltr">The episode also points listeners to a resource they already have in their sales tech stack: open opportunities and quote history in their CRM or ERP. Rather than treating those records as administrative clutter, sales leaders can use them to analyze quote volume, win rates, customer behavior, wallet share, follow-up discipline, and opportunities for additional revenue generation.</p> <h2 dir="ltr">A Significant Actionable Item from this Podcast</h2> <p dir="ltr">Run an open-quote analysis and create an internal quote SLA.</p> <p dir="ltr">Set aside 60 minutes this week with the people responsible for sales, operations, and quote fulfillment. Pull every open quote or opportunity that has not been marked closed-won or closed-lost. Don't begin by debating whether the CRM data is perfect; the messy data is part of the problem you are trying to expose.</p> <p dir="ltr">Segment those opportunities by age, dollar value, customer, salesperson, and status. Then establish a simple set of internal rules: how quickly every quote request must be acknowledged, how quickly a complete response must be delivered, how often an outstanding quote must be followed up, and the threshold at which a salesperson must present the proposal rather than simply send it.</p> <p dir="ltr">Then look one level deeper. Calculate quote-to-order conversion by customer. Accounts requesting large numbers of quotes while awarding very little business deserve investigation. So do customers where you win nearly everything you quote but receive opportunities for only a narrow portion of what you could sell them. Those two extremes can reveal overlooked wallet-share opportunities, unnecessary administrative burden, and very different conversations your sales team should be having.</p> <p dir="ltr">This is basic workflow automation and sales enablement at its most useful: not adding technology for its own sake, but using your existing CRM, ERP, and sales processes to make the next action visible and measurable.</p> <h2 dir="ltr">Summary</h2> <p dir="ltr">Before you ask marketing for another campaign, hire another SDR, or pour more money into prospecting, look closely at the business already sitting in your quote file. Kevin and Sean make the case that one of the fastest paths to stronger B2B sales pipeline predictability may be hiding among customers who already know you, opportunities your team already quoted, and follow-ups that never happened.</p> <p dir="ltr">This episode of Two Tall Guys Talking Sales is especially valuable for sales leaders in manufacturing, distribution, services, and other quote-intensive businesses where hundreds—or even thousands—of opportunities can accumulate without a disciplined process for resolving them. You'll hear how to distinguish transactional quotes from complex deals, establish internal SLAs, prevent ghosting by scheduling the next conversation before the current one ends, identify customers who are turning your team into a quote factory, and use conversion data as a practical proxy for wallet share.</p> <p dir="ltr">The bigger lesson is about sales management discipline. More leads will not repair weak follow-up, inconsistent sales processes, or accounts whose economics nobody has examined. Better data will not help if nobody acts on it. But when sales leaders combine clear operating rules with thoughtful analysis of customer behavior, an ordinary quote backlog can become a map showing where revenue, efficiency, and account-growth opportunities have been hiding.<strong id="docs-internal-guid-0b5ddac4-7fff-eaff-d356-6637dd0efe44"></strong></p>

Key Insights

• Kevin argues that organizations with large quotation backlogs often lack accountability systems because salespeople are overwhelmed with normal duties, making it difficult for leaders to enforce quote management processes.
• Sean claims that the difference between sending and presenting a quote fundamentally changes deal outcomes: presenting quotes with scheduled follow-ups in the customer's calendar significantly reduces the likelihood of being ghosted compared to simply emailing quotes.
• Kevin discovered through client analysis that customers with very low quote-to-order conversion rates (such as 6-7%) are actually consuming resources disproportionate to their value, and strategic conversations with these customers about the vendor relationship can reverse the dynamic and increase their spending.
• The hosts assert that wallet share—the percentage of a customer's category spend a vendor receives—can be calculated by analyzing quote conversion rates, revealing whether a vendor is winning 90% of opportunities or only 10%, which directly indicates competitive position and cross-sell potential.
• Kevin argues that establishing internal SLAs requires coordination with operations, delivery, finance, and accounting teams because quoted deals above certain thresholds create downstream implications for capacity planning and credit management beyond just the sales commission structure.

Topics

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