A Quote Register with Win Rate — Why Most SMEs in Thailand Cannot Tell You What Percentage of Quotes They Win

This article covers internal sales-management principles. It is not accounting, tax, or legal advice.

Three questions almost no business owner can answer

Ask yourself: how many quotations did you send this year · what percentage did you win · and what is the most common reason you lose?

Most SMEs cannot answer a single one — not because they sell badly, but because quotations are never recorded in one place. The quote comes out of Word or an accounting program, neither of which has a "status" field, and gets sent as a PDF into LINE — which is the main channel of Thai B2B selling, a point the banks' own social-commerce research (Krungsri Research) makes consistently. If you are new to doing business here, this is the first surprise: serious six-figure B2B deals in Thailand are routinely negotiated inside a chat app. And once the PDF is in the chat, it sinks into the history, leaving nothing but a vague feeling that "things are quiet lately."

The result is three things nobody can see: which quote is due for a follow-up · which quote's price validity is about to expire · and, when a deal is lost, nobody counts whether it was lost on price, credit terms, spec, or an incumbent supplier — so your pricing never receives a single round of real feedback.

You can manage activities, not results — the one idea that moves win rate

One of the most-cited books in sales management, Cracking the Sales Management Code (Jordan & Vazzana, 2012), draws a sharp line between layers of metrics: win rate is a "result," and results cannot be commanded directly — nobody can order themselves to win more often. What you can command are "activities": how fast the first follow-up happens, how many times you follow up, and whether a lost reason is recorded on every lost quote. Do that, and the result moves on its own.

Which means the right tool is not a pretty end-of-month report. It is a register that forces the activities to happen every day: send a quote today, log one row today · open it any morning and see who to chase first · and closing a quote (won or lost) always requires a date and a reason attached.

The correct definition of win rate — and the two traps that make the number lie

Win rate = won ÷ (won + lost), decided quotes only.

The first trap is counting quotes still awaiting an answer in the denominator — that makes win rate swing with the rhythm of quote-sending, not with your ability to close. The second trap is counting "cancelled" quotes (the customer killed the project and bought from no one) as losses — a project that collapsed entirely does not tell you who out-sold you; it only tells you the market changed its mind. The formula must keep cancelled as a separate status.

And always read it from two angles at once: by count (how often you close) and by value (what percentage of the money you quoted came back). A business that wins the small quotes and loses the big ones will see these two numbers far apart — and that gap is itself the diagnosis.

Lost reasons: five words that turn pricing from guesswork into data

A good register forces every lost quote to pick a reason from a locked set — for example: price · credit terms / payment conditions · spec mismatch · incumbent supplier / relationship · went silent. Locking the set matters more than it looks: leave the field free-text and this month someone writes "too expensive," next month "couldn't match the price," and the system can never total them — the quarterly summary turns into an essay.

Once data accumulates, the lost-reason table settles arguments the company has been having for years: what percentage is genuinely lost on price (usually less than the sales team feels) · how much is lost on credit terms (fixable with finance policy, not price cuts) · and "went silent" — which in a great deal of Thai business culture is a face-saving rejection of your price. A Thai customer will often go quiet rather than say "too expensive" out loud, because a blunt refusal feels like making you lose face. If you never record silence as an outcome, it has no existence in your data at all.

A follow-up cadence that is a system, not a memory

Vendor-side statistics from several firms (ZoomInfo, Salesgenie — read with care, since these are vendor compilations rather than academic work, but multiple sources point the same way) agree on two things: the supplier who follows up fastest after sending a quote holds a significant advantage, and most deals need more than one follow-up — while most salespeople stop at one.

A system that actually works in the Thai context must count the cadence in working days — calling a customer on Songkran or a royal birthday holiday is a genuine breach of business etiquette here. A good register therefore has to know the Thai official holiday calendar and compute the "next follow-up date" skipping weekends and public holidays automatically — not rely on anyone remembering.

The tool that does all of this in one file

Quote Register + Win Rate is an Excel file built from everything in this article: enter one row per quotation and the system computes the price-validity expiry date, the next follow-up date counted in Thai working days (the official holiday calendar for 2026–2027 — B.E. 2569–2570 in the Buddhist-era calendar Thai official documents use — comes seeded, with slots to add later years yourself), a chase-today screen that orders who to talk to first, 12 status lights including an incomplete-data warning, win rate by both count and value, monthly / per-salesperson / per-customer summaries, a lost-reason table with 6 locked reasons comparable month to month, and win-weighted pipeline value — plus a 30-case live self-test sheet that computes in front of you. One purchase includes both the Thai edition and the English (Thailand) edition.

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