French deals are rarely lost on price; they are lost in the silence after the devis
Ask a French sales manager where the pipeline leaks and the answer is almost never the quotation itself. The work went in, the pricing was defensible, the document was sent. Then the client mentioned a committee, a budget cycle or a colleague on leave, and the relance that should have happened eight days later happened never.
This is a process failure rather than an effort failure. The information needed to chase properly sits in one person mailbox, competing with everything else that arrived this week. A pipeline makes the same work visible: every devis is a deal with a value, an owner and a dated next action, and anything with neither shows up on a list somebody actually reads.
