Quote win rate for trades: how to measure it honestly

Your quote win rate is quotes won divided by quotes decided, over a fixed period: won ÷ (won + lost). Count a quote as sent only when the customer actually received a priced document, and as won only when they accepted it in writing. Quotes still open at month end belong to neither number yet, so leave them out until they resolve. Most trades firms land somewhere between 3 and 6 in 10 of the quotes they bother to price, but the figure on its own tells you almost nothing: a win rate climbing past 70 per cent usually means you are the cheapest bid in the pile, not the best firm in the pile. The number only earns its keep once you cut it by job type, by lead source and by loss reason. That is where the money is.

The formula, and the three definitions that break it

The arithmetic is trivial. The definitions are where every firm quietly cheats itself.

Win rate = won ÷ (won + lost). If 40 quotes reached a decision last month and 18 came back signed, that is 18 ÷ 40 = 45 per cent.

1. Sent means a priced document left your hands

A phone call where you said "probably around eight grand" is not a quote. A site visit is not a quote. A text saying "I will get you a price this week" is not a quote — it is a quote you never sent, which is a different problem with a different fix. Count only documents with a scope, a price and a date on them, delivered to a named customer.

The strict version matters because the sloppy version flatters you. If you only write a proper quote when you already know you have the job, and fob off the rest with a verbal ballpark, your win rate will read 85 per cent while your revenue reads flat. You have measured your instinct, not your business.

2. Won means accepted in writing, not "he sounded keen"

Pick one acceptance event and use the same one every month: a signature, an e-signed approval, a clear written go-ahead by email, or a paid deposit. A verbal yes on a doorstep is not a decision, it is optimism in a hard hat. Count doorstep yeses and your win rate becomes a mood ring.

3. Decide what happens to the ones that never resolve

This is the biggest source of nonsense in trades reporting. Four different things get lumped together as lost:

• Lost — the customer decided, and decided against you. Stays in the denominator.
• Open — sent, still live, no decision. Out of both numbers until it resolves.
• Expired or ghosted — no reply past your validity date, usually 30 days. Auto-close it as lost, reason "no response". It is not a neutral event. It is a loss you did not investigate.
• Withdrawn or cancelled — the job itself died: planning refused, funding gone, customer moved, or you pulled out. Remove it from the denominator entirely. Nobody won it.

Dump withdrawn jobs into "lost" and your win rate drops for reasons that have nothing to do with your pricing or your selling. Then you fix a problem that does not exist by cutting your prices.

Count-based or value-based? Track both

Win rate by count treats a £400 consumer-unit swap and a £40,000 rewire as the same event. They are not.

The gap between the two win rates is a diagnosis. Count 55 per cent, value 25 per cent means the big-ticket quotes go elsewhere — usually because the quote is thin where it needs to be reassuring, not because your day rate is wrong.

Why a high quote win rate for trades often means you are too cheap

This is the part nobody wants to hear. A win rate near 100 per cent is not excellence. It is a pricing signal: you leave money on the table on every job you win, because nobody ever pushes back.

Run it on your own numbers. Say you send 40 quotes a month, average value £4,000, average direct cost (materials plus labour) £3,000. Gross margin per job: £1,000.

• At a 50 per cent win rate you win 20 jobs. Gross profit: £20,000.
• Raise prices 10 per cent. Value £4,400, cost unchanged, margin per job £1,400.
• Your win rate drops to 40 per cent. You win 16 jobs. Gross profit: £22,400 — and you did four fewer jobs to earn it. Four fewer vans out, four fewer chances for a warranty call.

The break-even is worth memorising, because it is the whole argument in one line:

Break-even win rate = old win rate × old margin ÷ new margin.

Here: 50% × 1,000 ÷ 1,400 = 35.7 per cent. Anything above that and the price rise made you more money with less work. That is why "we win nearly everything we quote" is a symptom, not a boast. A firm losing something like a third to a half of its decided quotes on price is usually priced about right for the market it is in.

The reverse is also true. A win rate under 20 per cent rarely means you are expensive. Usually it means you quote the wrong enquiries — anyone who calls, including the three-quotes-for-the-insurer crowd — or your quotes go out too slowly to be first.

Break it down by job type and channel, or do not bother

An overall win rate is one number covering a dozen different businesses you happen to run out of one van. Split it two ways.

By job type. Consumer callouts, planned domestic work, small commercial, contract or new-build. These behave nothing alike. A typical shape: callouts convert very high (they wanted it fixed today and you answered the phone), planned domestic sits mid-range (three quotes, kitchen table, a fortnight of thinking), tendered commercial sits low (you are one of eight and the spec is fixed). One blended figure hides all three, and it moves whenever your mix moves, which makes it useless as a trend.

By channel. Where the enquiry came from predicts the outcome more strongly than anything you write in the quote. Referrals and repeat customers reliably outperform cold directory and lead-portal enquiries, because the price argument was half settled before you turned up. Once you know win rate and average value by channel, you can work out what a lead is actually worth, and stop paying a portal for enquiries you convert at 8 per cent.

You need volume for the split to mean anything. Under about 20 decided quotes in a segment, treat the percentage as a hint and read the individual jobs instead.

The six loss reasons worth recording

A win rate with no loss reasons is a thermometer with no medicine cabinet. Record exactly one reason per lost quote, from a short fixed list. Free text ruins it — you cannot count "dunno, went quiet".

Ask the reason properly. One message a week after the loss: "No problem at all — was it the price, the timing, or something in the quote itself?" Most people answer, because it costs them nothing and it is plainly not a sales pitch. A fair share will tell you the number they went with, which is worth more than any market survey you could buy.

Time to quote is the metric hiding underneath

Before you touch your prices, measure the hours between enquiry and quote sent, and take the median rather than the average — one holiday week will wreck a mean. Speed is the cheapest lever on the board. On domestic work, being first with a competent price often beats being cheapest with a late one, because the customer has already started rationalising a decision by the time your PDF lands on the Sunday night. If your no-response losses are stacking up, look at time to quote before you look at your rates.

A twenty-minute monthly routine

1. Pull every quote with a decision date in the month.
2. Close out the expired ones. Past validity with no reply becomes lost / no response.
3. Strip out withdrawn and cancelled jobs. They are not in the denominator.
4. Calculate the count win rate and the value win rate. Write both down. Compare with last month, not with someone else's benchmark.
5. Split by job type and by channel.
6. Read the loss reasons, pick one — the biggest, or the cheapest to fix — and change one thing for next month.
7. Check your price losses. If they are under roughly a third of decided quotes, test a price rise on your next ten quotes and watch the break-even, not the win rate.

Do not chase someone else's number. Your win rate depends on your trade, your area, your mix and how hard you filter enquiries. The only comparison that means anything is you against you last quarter.

Why this is countable in 2026, and why most firms still get it wrong

Quotes are digital now. They go out from a system, get opened at a timestamp, get accepted with an e-signature. Everything the calculation needs — sent date, value, status, decision date, source — already exists as a field somewhere. The excuse ran out. What has not caught up is the definition: most firms that do track a win rate are quietly comparing one month's strict count against another month's generous one. That is worse than not measuring, because it produces confident decisions from noisy data.

The fix is boring. Write your definitions down once — what counts as sent, what counts as won, what happens to expired and to withdrawn — and do not change them mid-year. If the quote lives where the enquiry, the acceptance and the invoice also live, the numbers fall out of the system instead of out of a spreadsheet you rebuild every month. OdinTask works that way: intake forms tagged with a source, quotes with e-signed acceptance and a real decision timestamp, and the invoice hanging off the same job, so quoted-versus-invoiced is a fact rather than a guess.

Start with one honest month. The definitions matter more than the tooling, and a disciplined tally on paper beats a dashboard built on soft numbers. More on quoting and pricing on the blog, or run a month of quotes through a free trial and let the counting happen by itself.