The inquiry-state glossary: 11 states from "new" to "booked" or "lost with a reason", with exit rules

An inquiry state is the single position an inquiry holds at a given moment, defined by what has already happened and what must happen next. This glossary defines 11 states, from New to Booked or Lost with a reason, and gives each one an exit rule, a person who moves it, a clock and the line the customer sees. The reason to bother is measurable: Pied Piper's 2026 mystery-shop of 3,211 home-services inquiries found that 72% received no follow-up at all and only 28% were offered an appointment¹. That distribution is what a pipeline with entry rules and no exit rules produces.

The glossary is written for owners, small agencies and anyone configuring a CRM. It works in a spreadsheet. The state sheet near the end is the part to copy.

What is an inquiry state?#

An inquiry state is a label with four properties: an entry condition, an exit rule, an owner and a clock. A label without those four is a tag, not a state. "Contacted" is the usual example: it records that something happened, says nothing about what happens next, and has no condition under which an inquiry leaves it.

The symptom of a tag-based pipeline is a growing middle column. New inquiries get a first reply and move to "Contacted" or "In progress". Nothing moves them out. After 90 days the column holds a mix of customers who booked elsewhere, customers waiting on a price, and customers waiting on you, and the system cannot tell them apart.

Three properties make a state set usable:

• Exclusive. An inquiry is in exactly one state. "Answered" and "Waiting on customer" cannot both be true.
• Exhaustive. Every inquiry fits a state, including spam (excluded before New) and silence (Waiting on customer, then Lost with a reason).
• Terminating. Every non-terminal state has a rule that forces an exit within a known time.

Where do inquiries stall? What the 2024–2026 counts show#

Inquiries stall in two places: before the first real reply, and between the first reply and a booked time. Three independent counts locate the loss.

The misleading signal is first-reply time. A business can post a good median reply time and still lose most inquiries in the Answered state, because reply time is measured at the first transition and the loss happens at the second. Belkins' 2026 analysis of 7.53 million outbound B2B emails found the first message drew 41.4% of replies and later steps drew 58.6%⁵. That is cold outbound email, not inbound inquiries, so read it as direction: most of the response a sequence produces arrives after the transition most pipelines never make.

Three state models that do not close the loop#

Three common fixes add labels or effort without adding exit rules. Each was worth testing against the counts above; none changes the distribution.

More pipeline stages#

A CRM with nine stages and no exit rules has nine places to stall instead of three. Stages such as "Interested", "Warm" and "Hot" describe the owner's guess about the customer, not an event. They cannot be audited, because no message or calendar entry proves an inquiry is "warm".

Rules of thumb such as "3-3-3" or "10-3-1"#

"What is the 3-3-3 rule in sales?" and "What is the 10-3-1 rule in sales?" appear in Google's related questions for follow-up searches (observed 1 October 2026). We found no primary source that defines either, and no version we saw includes a stop condition. A cadence without an exit leaves every unanswered inquiry in an open state.

"Never stop until they say no"#

The opposite policy removes the exit entirely. A top answer in an r/weddingvideography thread (9 comments, about seven years old) reads: "I never stop contacting them until they say no." The state never terminates, the customer becomes the termination mechanism, and the inquiry is lost with no reason recorded.

Root cause: states without exit rules#

The root cause is a state machine with no terminal state for silence and no distinction between a reserved time and a confirmed one. Two defects follow.

The first defect is that silence has nowhere to go. A customer who stops replying is not lost on day one and not active on day 60. Without a Waiting on customer state that expires into Lost with a reason, silence accumulates in Answered. A thread in r/smallbusiness (150+ comments, about two years old) shows the owner's side of the timing problem: three weeks after a quote, "there is no longer room on the calendar". The quote expired; the state did not.

The second defect is that Held and Booked are merged. A thread in r/WeddingPhotography titled "Clients ghosting AFTER saying they are ready to book" (60+ comments, about seven months old) describes customers who agreed in principle and then went quiet. If "ready to book" is logged as Booked, the calendar shows revenue that does not exist and nobody follows up. Held, with an expiry, keeps that inquiry in the active set until the customer confirms or the hold lapses.

The 11 inquiry states, defined#

The 11 inquiry states fall into four groups: active states that the business moves, states that wait on someone, terminal states, and one re-entry state. Definitions first; the state sheet with exit rules follows.

Active states#

• New. A real inquiry has arrived and has had no answering reply. An auto-acknowledgement does not exit New.
• Answered. A reply has answered the question, or asked the one detail needed to answer it, and named a next step.
• Time offered. The business has proposed one or more specific times from its real calendar. A booking link alone is not a specific time.
• Held. A specific time is reserved on the calendar for this customer, with a stated expiry, pending confirmation.

Waiting states#

• Waiting on customer. The business has sent something that needs the customer's answer. The follow-up clock runs here.
• Needs owner. The inquiry needs a decision only the owner can make (a discount, a refund, a complaint, a contract term), and the customer has been told when the owner will reply.

Terminal states#

• Booked. The customer confirmed, and a calendar event with an invite exists.
• Deposit paid. Money has been received against the booking. Optional; only for businesses that take deposits.
• Attended. The appointment, tour, call or job took place. Optional; it separates bookings from no-shows.
• Lost with a reason. The inquiry is closed and one reason from a fixed list is recorded: chose someone else, over budget, date taken, wrong fit, or no response after follow-up.

Re-entry state#

• Revived. A closed inquiry has reopened because the customer wrote again or a date they set ("ask me in March") arrived. It keeps its history and its original loss reason.

Booked is the terminal state for the inquiry. Deposit paid and Attended are terminal states for the booking. Keeping them separate stops a no-show or an unpaid deposit from being counted as a lost inquiry.

The state sheet: exit rules, owners, clocks and what the customer is told#

The state sheet below is the artifact. Each row answers five questions: how an inquiry enters, what forces it out, who moves it, how long it may sit, and what the customer has been told. The clocks are defaults to adjust, not measured optima. Jobber's 2026 survey of 1,050 home-service owners reported that more than 70% of their customers expect a same-day response⁴, which is why New carries a same-day clock.

State	Enters when	Exits when (exit rule)	Who moves it	Clock	Customer has been told
New	A real inquiry arrives (spam excluded)	A reply answers the question or asks the one missing detail → Answered; owner-only topic → Needs owner	Whoever answers the inbox	Same day	Nothing yet, or an acknowledgement
Answered	First answering reply sent with a next step	Times proposed → Time offered; reply needs their input → Waiting on customer	Whoever answered	Same reply; Answered should not persist	The answer and the next step
Time offered	Specific real times proposed	Customer picks or you reserve one → Held; no pick → Waiting on customer	Business	Until the follow-up clock starts	The times, in their time zone
Held	A time is reserved, with an expiry	Customer confirms → Booked; hold expires → Waiting on customer or Lost with a reason	Business	The hold expiry you stated	Which time is held and until when
Waiting on customer	You sent something that needs their answer	Customer replies → back to the matching active state; cap reached or offer expired → Lost with a reason	Business (sends nudges)	Your follow-up cap, e.g. two useful nudges	What you need from them, and when an offer expires
Needs owner	A decision only the owner can make	Owner decides → the matching active state, Booked, or Lost with a reason	Owner	The reply-by time the customer was given	When the owner will reply
Booked	Customer confirmed; event and invite exist	Terminal for the inquiry. Booking moves to Deposit paid or Attended	Business	None	The confirmation and invite
Deposit paid	Money received against the booking (optional)	Terminal; booking moves to Attended	Owner	None	Receipt of payment
Attended	The appointment or job took place (optional)	Terminal	Owner	None	Nothing further required
Lost with a reason	Declined, cap reached, or offer expired	Terminal; customer writes again or set date arrives → Revived	Business	Close the same day the stop condition occurs	A last message that makes declining easy, if the cap was reached
Revived	A closed inquiry reopens	Next reply sent → Answered (history kept)	Whoever answers	Same day	An answer that shows you kept their details

Loss reasons (fixed list): chose someone else · over budget · date taken · wrong fit · no response after follow-up. Clocks are Valet's suggested defaults, not benchmarks.

How to run the state sheet in a spreadsheet or CRM#

The state sheet runs in any tool that holds one row per inquiry. The implementation has five steps, and the order matters because each step depends on the previous column existing.

1. Add four columns. State, Next step, Due by, and Loss reason. Restrict State and Loss reason to drop-down lists so nobody types "warm".
2. Set Due by on every non-terminal row. A row in an active or waiting state with an empty Due by is a defect. Filter for it weekly.
3. Write the follow-up cap down. Decide how many nudges an inquiry gets in Waiting on customer and what each must contain. The reasoning and a policy table are in how many times to follow up with a lead before you stop.
4. Record a reason on every close. A Lost row with no reason cannot be counted. If you did not follow up, the honest reason is not "no response after follow-up".
5. Count terminal states monthly. Booked, Lost with a reason, and anything still open past its clock. Those three counts are the inputs to follow-through rate.

For a backlog, start with a review rather than a migration. The Lost Lead Audit sorts 90 days of past inquiries into five outcomes that map onto these states, so the history and the live sheet measure the same thing.

Trade-offs and residual risk#

An 11-state model has costs, and a business should take only the states it will maintain. Three trade-offs are worth naming.

• Granularity costs upkeep. Time offered and Held are separate because the second carries an expiry and a calendar reservation. A solo owner who never reserves times can merge them. Merging Held into Booked is the one shortcut to refuse.
• Needs owner can become a black hole. Gorgias' analysis of AI-touched tickets (October 2025 to April 2026) found that one-third of tickets handed to a human never received a human reply⁶. A Needs owner state with no reply-by clock reproduces that failure inside a small business.
• Loss reasons are self-reported. "Chose someone else" is often an inference. The list keeps the inference honest by forcing a choice among a few defined options, but it is not ground truth.

One question remains open: the right clock for Waiting on customer differs by vertical, and nobody has published inbound-specific data that settles it. Treat the cap as a policy you set, then review it against your own Lost with a reason counts.

Where Valet fits#

Valet runs a subset of this glossary on every inquiry it handles. The Valet Inquiry States are New, Answered, Time held, Followed up and Booked, or closed with a reason logged; each inquiry carries a next step and a time. Valet offers real times from the owner's calendar, holds them and sends invites, and stops after the Valet follow-up cap (two follow-ups by default, each with something useful) and tells the owner why. Deposits, discounts and complaints go to the owner, and the customer is told when the owner will reply. Deposit paid, Attended and Revived stay on the owner's own sheet.

To see how your current inquiries distribute across these states, the free lead check takes 10–20 recent inquiries and shows what went unanswered, what stopped after one reply, and what it was worth.