Automate Your Quote Follow-Ups (Before Your Competitors Do It for You)

Here’s a statistic that should bother you: the average trades business follows up on fewer than 30% of the quotes it sends. The other 70% just sit there — in someone’s inbox, on someone’s kitchen bench, in a folder called “Quotes to Review” — slowly going cold while the business that sent them assumes the customer isn’t interested.

Most of the time, the customer is interested. They’re just busy. They meant to call back. They got distracted. And by the time they get around to it, they’ve already received a follow-up call from your competitor.

Quote follow-up is the single highest-leverage improvement most businesses can make to their quoting process. Not better templates, not faster pricing — just actually checking in after you send the thing.

Why Follow-Up Falls Apart

Nobody sets out to ignore sent quotes. The problem isn’t laziness — it’s that follow-up is the first task to get dropped when things get busy. Your estimator sends 8 quotes on Monday. Tuesday is site visits. Wednesday is quoting again. Thursday they remember they should follow up on Monday’s quotes, but now it’s been three days, some of those customers have already made decisions, and the window has closed.

The root cause is simple: follow-up relies on memory and spare time, and field service businesses have neither in abundance.

The Follow-Up Timeline That Works

There’s no universally perfect timing, but after working with dozens of businesses on their quoting processes, a clear pattern emerges. Here’s the sequence that consistently produces the best results:

2-4 hours after sending: A quick, low-pressure check-in. “Just wanted to make sure the quote came through okay — let me know if you have any questions.” This isn’t a sales call. It’s a courtesy. But it puts you top of mind while the customer is still thinking about the job.

24 hours after sending: If no response, a slightly more substantive follow-up. “Happy to walk through the quote if anything needs clarifying, or adjust the scope if your requirements have changed.” This gives the customer an easy way to re-engage without feeling pressured.

3-4 days after sending: A final follow-up with a gentle close. “Just checking whether you’d like to proceed or if the timing isn’t right at the moment. Either way, no pressure — the quote is valid for 30 days.” This acknowledges that not every quote converts, and it’s fine. But it also reminds them you exist.

7 days after sending: If still no response, mark the quote as cold and move on. Optionally, one last email: “I’ll close this quote off for now, but feel free to reach out anytime if you’d like to revisit.”

What to Say (and What Not to Say)

Follow-up messages should be helpful, not pushy. The goal is to make it easy for the customer to say yes — or to tell you they’ve gone another direction, which is valuable information too.

Good follow-up messages:

• Reference the specific job, not a generic “following up on your quote”
• Offer to clarify or adjust — this invites conversation
• Include a clear next step: “Would you like me to lock in a start date?”
• Keep it short — three sentences maximum for email or SMS

What to avoid:

• “Just touching base” — says nothing, feels like spam
• Multiple follow-ups on the same day — one per touchpoint is enough
• Discounting in the follow-up — if you immediately offer a lower price, you’ve taught the customer to wait for the discount every time
• Guilt-tripping — “We put a lot of work into this quote” is never the right tone

When to Escalate

Not every cold quote should get the same treatment. Build escalation rules based on value:

• Quotes under $2,000: Standard automated sequence. If no response after 7 days, archive it. These aren’t worth chasing manually unless the customer has shown strong intent.
• Quotes $2,000-$10,000: Standard sequence plus a phone call at the 48-hour mark. A quick conversation often uncovers objections that email can’t.
• Quotes over $10,000: Personal attention. The estimator or business owner should be following up directly, ideally with a phone call within 24 hours and a meeting offer if needed. These are the jobs that move the needle.

This isn’t about treating small customers worse. It’s about allocating your limited follow-up time where the return is highest. An automated SMS sequence handles the $800 quotes beautifully. A $25,000 commercial job deserves a human conversation.

Tracking Win Rates (and Why It Matters)

Automated follow-up isn’t just about chasing customers. It’s about building a dataset that tells you how your quoting process is actually performing.

Once you’re tracking follow-ups systematically, you can answer questions that were previously impossible:

• What’s your overall win rate? Most businesses guess. The real number is almost always lower than the guess.
• Does follow-up timing affect conversion? You’ll often find that quotes followed up within 4 hours convert at double the rate of quotes followed up after 48 hours.
• Which job types convert best? You might discover that residential jobs convert at 35% but commercial jobs convert at 15% — which should change how you allocate quoting time.
• Which estimator has the best close rate? This isn’t about blame. It’s about learning what the best performer does differently and replicating it.
• What’s your average quote-to-close time? If customers typically take 5 days to decide, your follow-up sequence should be designed around that window.

Start Simple, Then Build

You don’t need a custom system on day one. Here’s how to build toward automated follow-ups:

This week: Start tracking every quote in a spreadsheet. Columns: date sent, customer, value, follow-up date, status, outcome. Just having visibility is a massive improvement.

This month: Set up automated SMS or email reminders. Tools like Jobber, Tradify, or even a simple Zapier connection to your email can handle basic follow-up sequences.

This quarter: Build escalation rules. Route high-value quotes to personal follow-up. Track win rates by job type, estimator, and follow-up timing. Start using the data to refine your process.

When you outgrow that: If your follow-up needs to pull from CRM data, adjust timing based on customer history, route to different team members based on job type and value, or feed into reporting dashboards — that’s when a purpose-built system pays for itself. Not because the tools are fancier, but because they match how your business actually works.

The businesses that win the most quotes aren’t the ones with the best prices. They’re the ones that show up consistently — with the right message, at the right time, every single time. Automation makes that possible without hiring another person to do nothing but chase quotes.