How to Audit Your Sales Pipeline in 90 Minutes

Most owner-operators I talk to don't have a pipeline problem. They have a pipeline-visibility problem. The quotes are out there — sent, half-remembered, sitting in a customer's "deal with it later" pile — but nobody has looked at the whole list in one place since the day each one went out.

Here's the number that should make you block the time. B2B sales-cadence studies consistently find that most deals need five or more touches to close, yet most quotes never get a single follow-up after they're sent. Most deals need persistence; most quotes get none. That gap is your pipeline leak, and it has a dollar value.

Below is a 90-minute, time-boxed audit — a spreadsheet and your Sent folder, no tool required. By the end you'll have a ranked list of recoverable revenue and recovery emails ready to fire. Set a timer. Four blocks. Go.

0–20 min: Pull every open quote from the last 90 days

Open your Sent folder, filter to the last 90 days, and pull every QuickBooks estimate or invoice in the same window — the two lists rarely match, and the mismatch is itself a finding.

For every quote whose outcome you can't recall, drop one row into a spreadsheet capturing: customer, date sent, value (approximate is fine), days since sent, last touch ("sent quote" / "they replied" / "I followed up"), and outcome (open / won / lost / unknown).

Don't analyze. Just capture — a complete list, not a clean one. Twenty minutes is enough for most shops to log 20–50 quotes. Blow past 50 and you've found leak number one: you're quoting more than you're tracking, so every deal lives or dies on whether you happen to remember it.

20–50 min: Bucket by stage and last touch

Now sort. Two columns do the work — days since sent and last touch — and every quote lands in one of four buckets.

• Open — touched. The conversation is live. Leave them.
• Open — cold. Sent 14+ days ago, zero follow-up, no reply. The big bucket, and the one you're here for.
• Lost — stated. The customer explicitly said no.
• Lost — assumed. You think it's dead, but the only evidence is silence.

While bucketing, watch for three leaks:

• Slow quotes. If the gap between request and send runs more than a day or two, you're losing deals to whoever quoted first.
• No follow-up. A cold quote with last touch = "sent quote" and nothing after is a deal you abandoned, not one that died.
• Vague pricing. Mushy line items ("misc. labor and materials") are the ones customers stall on. Vague price, easy "no."

50–75 min: Flag the recoverable ones

Not every cold quote is worth a touch. This block is triage — separating the re-engageable from the genuinely dead. Mark each cold or assumed-lost row:

• Re-engage now (warm-cold). There was back-and-forth before it went quiet — the interest was real. Highest yield in the audit. A value-anchored check-in to a previously-interested buyer commonly pulls a 20–30% response rate, and roughly half of responders move forward.
• Close-out (dead-cold). Sent, no engagement, 30+ days of silence. Lower yield, but a graceful close-out still recovers a few percent — and the "no" is worth having.
• Re-quote (changed conditions). A price moved, the season turned, the scope changed. These get a fresh number, not a follow-up, and convert best because the customer sees a new deal.

75–90 min: Send the recovery touches

Don't save this for later. Later is how the graveyard formed. Send now.

"Hey [name] — circling back on the [project] quote. If this lands on the schedule in the next two weeks I can hold the material pricing before vendor costs update on the first. Want me to pencil you in?"

"Hey [name] — closing this one out on my end. If the timing or scope changes, the quote terms are good for another two weeks — just hit reply. Either way, good luck on the project."

For changed conditions, send a fresh number with a one-line note that pricing has moved.

Ninety minutes in, you've got money in motion. Which quote gets which touch lives in The Quote Graveyard Audit, and the cadence that keeps the pile from re-forming is in The 7/14/30 Follow-Up Cadence.

The audit works once. The leak comes back.

You can run this every quarter and recover real money each time — but it's remediation, not a fix. The cold pile exists because your follow-up depends on you remembering, and you're running a shop, not a CRM.

That's the gap Setell closes. It drafts the quote from the inbound email, runs the 7/14/30 follow-up on every quote automatically, and syncs to QuickBooks so the lists you reconciled by hand stay reconciled — so the cold pile stops forming. You set the autonomy: Watch, Trust, or Auto. For how follow-up ties into same-day quoting and one-click pay, the Cash Cycle Scorecard is free.

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