Why did we lose the quote? Rejection reasons on sales quotes

When a sales quote does not become an order, you want to know why: price, lead time or a competitor. Standard Business Central has no status for a rejected quote and no fixed rejection reason. This article shows which statuses quotes have, and three ways to record the reason today, so you can learn from the lost quotes. You also get a few rules that make the figures usable.

Which statuses does a sales quote have

A sales quote has the same statuses as other sales documents: Open, Released, Pending Approval and Pending Prepayment. The status says something about how far the document has got in processing, not about whether the customer said yes or no.

The statuses Draft, Sent, Accepted and Expired exist in the Business Central API for quotes. They are used for integration and are not available as choices on the quote page. So you cannot mark a quote as rejected on the quote itself.

Three solutions with standard features

Use a reason code on the quote. The sales header has a field for a reason code, and you create the codes yourself. You can create codes such as Price, Lead time and Competitor. The field is not necessarily visible on the quote page, so check whether it needs to be added through personalisation.
Use opportunities. If you work with Opportunities, an opportunity can be closed as won or lost, and the close opportunity code and a date are mandatory. You create the codes yourself, and they have a type and a description. This gives you a proper report on loss reasons, but it requires the quotes to belong to an opportunity.
Archive the quote. In Sales & Receivables Setup, archiving of quotes can be set to Never, Question or Always when the quote is deleted. With Always, the lost quote is kept, so you can see it afterwards.

What you do not get

The reason code on the quote and the close opportunity code on the opportunity are in two different places. If half the salespeople use one and half use the other, no report can combine the figures. Decide on one place, and write it down.

When a quote becomes an order, the quote is archived. This means the archive contains both won and deleted quotes, and you have to filter if you only want to see the lost ones.

Remember, too, that a quote can expire without being rejected. Here the reason is missing entirely, so agree what a salesperson should record when the customer simply does not reply.

Small rules that make the figures usable

It also makes a difference when the manager uses the figures. When the sales manager asks about the reasons, they get filled in.

Keep the list of reasons short. Five to eight reasons are enough to see patterns.
Make the field or action mandatory in the process, not only in the guidelines.
Record the reason when the quote is deleted or expires, not months later.
Review the reasons every month with the sales department.

An example of a simple process

A simple process could look like this. The salesperson follows up on the quote after an agreed time. If the customer says no, the salesperson chooses a reason code and deletes or closes the quote. Archiving is set to Always, so the quote can be found. Each month a list is pulled from the archive and compared with the reason codes.

The process requires no development, but it does require discipline. The most important thing is that everyone uses the same codes, and that nobody can delete a quote without choosing a reason.

The idea of rejection reasons

We have the idea Quote Rejection Reasons on our list of possible apps. It corresponds to an idea on Microsoft's ideas portal for a new Rejected status, which has about 142 votes. The thought is a proper status and a reason on the quote, plus an overview. It is an idea we are considering, and not something you can download or buy today.

See the other ideas on the page if you want to help set priorities.