What Are Cold Quotes Costing You?
You have already done the hard part, taken the call, driven out, measured up, worked out the price. Then the quote goes out and nothing happens. Most tradies never chase, and most of the work they lose was lost to silence rather than to price.
This is the cheapest revenue in your business. The customers already know you and already have your price.
Quote Follow-Up Value Calculator
Work you have already quoted. The cheapest revenue there is.
A 5 to 15 point lift is realistic. Set it conservatively.
Across the whole sequence, not one message.
Same quotes, same customers, just followed up properly.
An estimate based on the figures you entered. The uplift depends on how consistently you follow up now, businesses already chasing every quote will see a smaller gain than those doing it only when they remember.
Why Follow-Up Works So Well
Chasing quotes converts better than almost any other activity a trade business can do, for reasons that have very little to do with sales technique.
The expensive work is already done
You have paid the cost of the enquiry, the travel, the site visit and the pricing. A follow-up costs a text message. There is no other activity in a trade business with that ratio of effort to potential return.
Silence is not a no
Most people who do not reply are not rejecting the quote. They got busy, they are waiting on a partner, they are saving up, or they simply forgot. A prompt at the right moment restarts a job that was never actually dead.
Consistency beats persuasion
What lifts conversion is not a cleverer message, it is that every quote gets followed up instead of only the ones you happen to remember. Doing it the same way every time is the whole trick.
How It Is Worked Out
Straightforward arithmetic over your own quoting numbers, with a deliberately modest uplift assumption.
Quotes issued per year
Quotes per week multiplied across fifty-two weeks. The total pool of work you have already priced.
Revenue at your current win rate
Quotes won at your existing conversion rate, valued at your average quote.
Revenue at your target win rate
The same volume at the conversion rate you would reach with consistent follow-up on every quote.
The gap, plus the time it takes
The revenue difference between the two, and the hours a manual follow-up process would consume.
A Follow-Up Sequence That Works
Four contacts over a fortnight recovers most of what is recoverable. Beyond that you are annoying people rather than converting them.
Day one: confirm it landed
A short message confirming the quote has been sent, when it is valid until, and inviting questions. This catches the surprisingly common case where the quote went to spam or the wrong address, and it sets the expectation that you will be in touch again.
- Confirm the quote was sent and how to find it
- State the validity period, which creates a natural deadline
- Invite questions explicitly, many people will not ask unprompted
- Keep it short; this is a receipt, not a sales pitch
Day three, ask a real question
Not "just following up" but something specific and useful: whether the scope matched what they wanted, or whether they need it broken down differently. A question invites a reply in a way that a nudge does not.
- Ask something specific rather than checking in vaguely
- Offer to explain any part of the quote they are unsure about
- Mention a timeframe you could start, which makes it concrete
- A reply of any kind restarts the conversation
Day seven: availability, not pressure
Let them know what your calendar looks like. This is genuinely useful information and it creates a reason to decide now without applying artificial pressure, which trades customers see straight through.
- Tell them realistically when you could fit the job in
- Avoid invented urgency: people notice and it costs trust
- Reference anything specific about their job to show it is not a blast
- Make saying yes as easy as replying with one word
Day fourteen, close it out cleanly
A final message noting the quote is about to expire and asking whether to keep it open. This recovers a surprising number of jobs and, when it does not, tells you clearly that it is dead so you can stop thinking about it.
- Reference the expiry rather than inventing a deadline
- Ask directly whether they would like it held open
- Accept a no gracefully. It often comes back months later
- Stop after this one; further chasing damages more than it wins
Next Steps
Missed Job Calculator
The other leak: what the calls you never answered are costing you.
Check missed calls →Tradie Lead Response Scorecard
Twelve questions covering the whole path from enquiry to booked job.
Score your setup →Quote Follow-Up Automation
How an automatic sequence runs without you having to remember any of it.
See how it works →Frequently Asked Questions
It varies enormously by trade, job size and how you get your work. Emergency and repair work, where the customer needs it fixed now and often has no competing quote, converts far higher than large planned jobs where three or four quotes are standard. Referral work converts higher than cold enquiries from a directory. Rather than benchmarking against a general figure, track your own rate for a couple of months and use follow-up to move it. Your own trend is far more useful than any industry average.
A five to fifteen percentage point improvement is a defensible expectation for a business going from inconsistent chasing to a systematic sequence on every quote. The gain is largest for businesses currently doing nothing, and smallest for those already following up reliably. The calculator lets you set your own target rather than assuming one, and it is worth setting it conservatively, a modest improvement applied to every quote you issue is still a substantial annual number.
Not if you stop at four contacts over a fortnight and each one is genuinely useful. What irritates people is repeated identical "just checking in" messages with no content, and chasing that continues for weeks after they have gone quiet. A confirmation, a real question, availability information and a clean close-out are all reasonable, and most customers appreciate the last one because it lets them say no without feeling awkward. The people who find four polite messages annoying were not going to book anyway.
Text works best for most trade customers. It gets read, it is easy to reply to, and it does not demand an immediate conversation the way a call does. Email suits larger jobs where the quote itself is detailed and the customer may want to forward it to a partner. Phone is worth reserving for high-value quotes where a conversation genuinely helps. Most tradies do well with text as the default and a phone call only on the bigger jobs.
Around five minutes per quote to do it properly across the full sequence, once you include finding the quote, checking whether they replied, and writing something relevant rather than generic. That sounds trivial until you multiply it by your quote volume. The calculator shows the annual hours. The bigger problem is not the total time but that it competes with being on the tools, which is why manual follow-up gets skipped exactly when you are busiest and have the most quotes outstanding.
Then you have learned something useful and the follow-up did its job. A clear no is genuinely more valuable than silence, because it lets you stop wondering and, over time, tells you whether you are losing on price or on responsiveness. Many tradies discover through follow-up that they were not losing on price at all. The customer simply forgot, or went with whoever contacted them again first. You cannot learn that from a quote that goes quiet and never gets chased.
Every Quote, Every Time
Tell us how many quotes you send a week and what happens to them now. We will tell you what a proper follow-up sequence would be worth to you.