Where the money goes
The quotes you never follow up
Quoting is the expensive part of your business, and it's the part nobody bills for.
You drive across town. You spend forty minutes measuring up and talking through options. You come home, work out materials and labour, and write it up properly. Then you email it.
And that's where most trades stop.
The job doesn't come back. You assume they went with someone cheaper. Six weeks later you're still not sure, and the quote is sitting in a folder you never open.
What a quote actually costs you to produce
Before the follow-up question, be clear about what you've already spent.
A site visit is typically an hour or two door to door once you count the drive. Pricing it up properly is another thirty to sixty minutes. So each quote costs you the better part of half a day's earning capacity — and you've paid that whether the job lands or not.
If you quote eight jobs a month and win three, you've absorbed the cost of five site visits that returned nothing. That's not a marketing expense. It's unpaid work.
Which makes the quote you've already sent the cheapest lead you will ever have. Everything expensive about it is already spent.
"No news is no" is usually wrong
The instinct is to read silence as rejection. It rarely is.
People go quiet after a quote for ordinary reasons. They're waiting on a second or third price. They need to talk to their partner. They've got a job on and haven't opened their personal email since Tuesday. They meant to reply and it slid down the inbox.
Almost none of those people are thinking "I've decided against them." They're thinking about something else entirely.
A follow-up isn't pestering someone who said no. It's reaching someone who never got round to saying anything — which is most of them.
The window closes faster than it feels
There's a genuine body of research here. Harvard Business Review published work by Oldroyd, McElheran and Elkington in 2011 — The Short Life of Online Sales Leads — whose central finding was that most businesses respond to enquiries far more slowly than the customer's decision actually allows.
The practical version, for a trade: the person who asked for your quote is asking two or three others at the same time. Whoever gets back to them while the job is still front of mind has an advantage that has nothing to do with price.
The quote you send on the day beats the quote that arrives Thursday. The follow-up on day three beats the one on day fourteen, when they've already booked someone.
What people try, and why it doesn't hold
Send it and hope
The default. It's not a strategy, it's the absence of one — and it means your win rate is decided by whichever customers happened to be organised enough to come back to you.
A mental note to chase it
You will forget. Not through carelessness — because you're on a job, and the job in front of you always wins against the quote from last Tuesday.
A spreadsheet or a reminder in your phone
Better. It works for about three weeks, until a busy fortnight breaks the habit and it never comes back. Every trade has one of these somewhere, last updated months ago.
An AI Employee
Follows up every quote on a schedule you set — a few days out, then a week, then once more. In your tone, not a template. Answers the questions that come back, and books the job in when they say yes. It doesn't get busy and it doesn't forget.
Work out your own number
Three questions:
- How many quotes did you send last month?
- How many turned into jobs? That's your conversion rate.
- What's an average job worth?
Now ask what a ten-point lift would be worth. If you quote eight a month at $1,200 and convert three, you're at roughly 38%. Getting to 48% is one extra job a month — around $14,000 a year — without quoting a single extra job or spending anything on advertising.
That's the whole argument. You're not buying more leads. You're stopping the ones you've already paid for from going cold.
Common questions
Two to three days for most jobs. Sooner if it was urgent when they called. Waiting a fortnight means arriving after they've already decided.
Three is reasonable — a few days out, about a week later, then a final one. After that you're not being persistent, you're being a nuisance.
It reads as organised, not desperate, provided the tone is right. Most customers assume you've forgotten about them, not that you're keen.
Usually because they're comparing prices, waiting on someone else, or simply busy. Outright rejection is far less common than silence suggests.
Yes, if it's trained on how you actually talk and can handle a real reply rather than just sending reminders. A sequence that can't answer "can you do it cheaper?" isn't follow-up, it's nagging.
Find out what it's costing you
Twenty minutes, no pitch deck. Tell us how many quotes you send and how many land, and we'll put a number on what the gap is worth — then tell you honestly whether an AI Employee is worth it. That call is our free AI Assessment: five targeted questions, and one fix you can act on. If you'd rather see every opportunity across the business, the AI Deep Dive maps and ranks them in a full report — $890 one-time. How the Assessment and Deep Dive work.