Sales - Handling an Inbound Sales Inquiry

Record the lead in your system within the same business day: contact name, company, email, phone, inquiry channel, and date received.

Send a confirmation with a specific response timeframe. Confirm receipt and tell the prospect exactly when they will hear back with pricing.

Confirm the product or service, quantity or scope, delivery deadline, budget indication, and decision-making process. Schedule a call or site visit for complex requirements.

Determine whether the job meets your capability, capacity, and margin requirements. Decline politely and record the reason if it does not.

Name a single person responsible for building and sending the quote. Prevents duplicate quotes and ensures accountability on the response.

Build the quote from confirmed qualification notes. Reference the customer's actual requirements - not a generic price list.

Send the quote with an explicit expiry date, your direct contact details, and a named date to invite a response.

Log the sent quote against the lead record and set a follow-up reminder for three to five business days later if no response is received.

Inquiries arrive by phone, email, and web form with no single place to log them, so some prospects are followed up days late or not at all.

Sales team members quote from memory or partial information, leading to prices that do not match what the customer asked for and rounds of rework.

Sent quotes disappear into email outboxes with no follow-up reminder, so warm leads go cold while the team is busy on active jobs.

How quickly should you respond to an inbound inquiry?

Send an acknowledgment within two hours of receiving the inquiry, even if full pricing is not ready. Confirming receipt and giving a specific response timeframe - for example, pricing by end of the next business day - keeps the prospect engaged and signals that your business is organised. Studies consistently show conversion rates drop sharply when response time exceeds 24 hours.

When should you qualify before quoting rather than just sending a price?

Always qualify when any of the following are unknown: the exact specification or scope, the delivery or completion deadline, who makes the buying decision, or the realistic budget range. Sending a quote without this information risks building something the customer did not ask for - or quoting a price they cannot accept - wasting time on both sides.

What should you do if the inquiry is not a good fit for your business?

Decline promptly and politely rather than quoting low to win a job you cannot deliver profitably. Record the reason in the lead record so you can track patterns over time - for example, consistently receiving inquiries from a sector you do not serve, or at price points below your cost floor. That data helps you adjust how you attract and qualify inquiries in the first place.