A four-step quote follow-up sequence that closes the loop

A follow-up sequence should help someone make a decision and make it easy to respond. The four-step method below uses electrical quotes as examples. Adapt the wording and timing to your product, project or proposal, using the general templates linked in the article.

Quotes die of silence, not price. The customer meant it when they said they'd think about it. Then the week happened. Four touches on days 0, 3, 7 and 12, three texts and one email, keep you in the room without chasing anyone by hand. I call it the 0-3-7-12. Templates below, plus when to do it by hand, when to let software send it, and the texting rules in the US and UK.

Why quotes die after the site visit

I'm a plumber, not an electrician. But I've sat at the same kitchen table. You turn up, look at the panel, listen, explain what it will take. For that hour you are the expert in their hallway. Then you drive off, write it up that evening, send it, and become a PDF.

Here is what happens on their side. In the US it's an electrical contractor quoting a panel upgrade or an EV charger install. In the UK it's a sparky quoting a consumer unit change, an EICR or a charger. Either way the customer has three quotes coming. They open all three, feel the total, and park the decision until the weekend. The weekend has kids in it. By the following week the urgency that made them call has faded. Nothing is sparking. The car still charges off the wall socket, slowly. The job isn't dead. It's just not urgent, and not urgent is where quotes go to die.

Then one of the three follows up. Not the cheapest one. The one who texted on day 3 asking "any questions on the quote?" Answering that was easier than opening three PDFs again. That electrician got the job. The other two never found out why.

The best data I've found isn't about electricians, and I'll say that plainly. It's a Harvard Business Review study of how fast companies answer web enquiries, but the shape matches a quote sitting in an inbox. HBR audited 2,241 US companies: 37% replied within an hour, 24% took more than a day, and 23% never replied at all. In a second study of 1.25 million leads, firms that tried to reach the customer within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that tried an hour later. Speed wins. And almost a quarter of businesses lose by default, because they never send anything.

Pull up your last twenty quotes. Count how many you followed up on at all. That number is the problem, and it's fixable this week.

The 0-3-7-12, with the templates

Four touches. Three texts, one email. Each one fits on a phone screen and asks a single thing. The moment they reply, the sequence stops and you pick up the phone. No exclamation marks, nothing that sounds like a marketing department. It should read like you typed it in the van, because that is what it's replacing.

Day 0, text, within an hour of the quote going out. It confirms the quote arrived and asks one question that moves the job forward.

Hi [name], [your name] from [company]. Your quote for the [job] is in your inbox now. Quick one so I plan it right: is there a date you need this done by?

Day 3, text. The whole message is a question.

Hi [name], any questions on the quote? If a line doesn't make sense, call me and I'll walk you through it. Five minutes.

Day 7, email. A two-line recap and one thing they may not have considered.

Subject: [Job] quote, one thing to check

Hi [name],

Quick recap: [job] at [address], the price as quoted on [date], [number] days on site, [permit or certificate] included.

One thing worth knowing before you decide: [the one thing].

If you've gone with someone else, no hard feelings. A one-word reply saves us both another message.

[Your name]

The "one thing" is where you earn the job. It's the sentence you'd say if you were standing in the hallway again. The panel has room for the charger without an upgrade, which is why your price is lower than one they may have had. If the utility (the DNO in the UK) needs three weeks' notice to pull the meter, booking now means done by the date they mentioned. It's specific to their house, and a competitor's follow-up won't have it.

Day 12, text. The honest close-out. People answer this one. It's the first message where staying silent costs them something, even if it's only manners.

Hi [name], last message from me about the [job] quote. Shall I take you off my list, or do you want a start date? Either answer is fine.

Then stop. If they don't answer the fourth one, they weren't going to. A fifth message costs you the call you'd have got next year when the kitchen gets done.

Two rules make it work. The sequence stops the moment they reply, on any channel, and a human takes over. Nothing kills a warm reply like a scheduled text landing after it. And every text carries a way out. "Reply STOP to opt out" is the law in most places, and it's also good manners.

Say you send ten quotes a week and six go quiet. Suppose the 0-3-7-12 turns one of those six into a yes. That's one more job a week, call it fifty a year. If your average job is $1,500 (about £1,200), that's $75,000 a year of work you already drove out to look at. Run the sum with your own average, not mine. Even if it only recovers one quiet quote a month, the templates took twenty minutes to set up.

By hand first, then your software, then a build

Here's the honest version: most of you can run the 0-3-7-12 without buying anything from anyone, including me.

By hand. When a quote goes out, set three reminders on your phone: plus 3, plus 7, plus 12 days. Name each one after the customer and the job. Keep the four templates in your notes app. When the reminder fires, copy, change the name, send. That's the whole system, and it holds up to about a dozen quotes a week. Past that, reminders pile up on Monday mornings and the day 7 email, the one that needs a real sentence about their house, gets skipped because it takes thought. That's where it breaks, and it's the point where it's worth the most.

Software you may already pay for. Jobber's quote follow-ups are on the Connect plan and up: up to two automatic reminders, you set how many days after the quote each one goes, and they go out the same way the quote did, text or email. Housecall Pro's Pipeline automates three estimate follow-ups and lets you change both the timing and the message. Tradify sends automatic quote reminders before the quote expires. ServiceTitan does it through Marketing Pro's unsold estimate campaigns, by text or email, if you have that module. On Simpro or ServiceM8, check the notification settings first. Two follow-ups instead of four, or fixed wording, still beats zero. Switch it on this week.

Where a build makes sense. The built-in tools mostly send the same reminder again. The 0-3-7-12 changes channel on day 7, asks a different question each time, stops dead when the customer replies on any channel, and closes the file on day 12 so your open-quotes list stays honest. If your software can't do that shape, I build it as a fixed-price automation from $4,500 on top of whatever you already run: it reads new quotes from your software, sends the four touches, stops on reply, and writes the outcome back. That's the implementation work I do. I'll also tell you if your software already does enough, because that's a shorter conversation and you'll trust me next time.