Ask a trade business owner what their quote win rate is and you'll usually get a shrug and a guess. Ask what happens to a quote after it's sent and you'll get something close to nothing. It goes out, and then either the phone rings or it doesn't.
That's an expensive way to run a business, because the quote is the most costly thing you produce. Someone found you, rang you, took up an hour of your day at a site inspection, and then you spent an evening pricing it properly. By the time that PDF leaves your outbox you've already paid for the lead, the drive, the measure-up and the maths. Everything after that point is margin on work you've already funded.
And most of it is sitting in a folder, going quiet.
Silence is almost never a no
This is the part owners get wrong, and it's a psychological problem, not a business one. When a quote goes unanswered, the story we tell ourselves is that we were too dear. So we don't follow up, because following up feels like begging, and because we don't want the confirmation.
In my experience the price is rarely the reason. The reasons are duller than that. They're still waiting on the third quote. The job depends on something else — a settlement, an insurance decision, a partner who hasn't looked at it yet. They read it on the phone at 9pm, meant to reply, and the message slid up the screen. Or they don't actually understand what they're comparing, so they've deferred the decision rather than made a bad one.
None of those are a no. All of them look identical from your side of the inbox. And every one of them is fixed by a follow-up that isn't a nag.
Why the quote itself invites silence
Before you fix the chasing, fix the document. Three things make a quote easy to ignore.
The first is a bare number. A single figure with a line of description gives the customer nothing to evaluate except price, which guarantees they go and find another price. If the quote doesn't explain what's included, what's excluded, and what you're doing that the cheaper mob isn't, you've handed them a spreadsheet exercise and you will lose it to whoever is hungriest.
The second is no options. One price is a yes-or-no decision, and yes-or-no decisions get deferred. Two or three options — the fix, the fix done properly, the fix plus the thing you'd regret not doing while the walls are open — change the question from whether to which. That's a much easier question for someone to answer, and it's also where your margin lives. It sits alongside how you set the numbers in the first place, which I've covered in how to price your services so you actually make money.
The third is no next step. Most quotes end with a total and a bank account. Nothing tells the customer what happens if they say yes, how soon you could start, or what you need from them. A quote that ends with "if you're happy to go ahead, reply to this email and I'll lock in a start date — I've currently got space the week of the 25th" is doing work that a total never does.
The follow-up sequence
Keep it simple enough that it survives a busy week, because a system you abandon is worse than none.
Day one, when you send it: tell them when you'll follow up. One line. "I'll give you a call Thursday to walk through it if you haven't come back to me." That single sentence converts every later contact from a chase into a kept appointment.
Around day three, make the call you promised. Not "have you had a chance to look at the quote" — that invites "not yet" and ends the conversation. Ask something that gets you information: whether the scope matched what they had in mind, or which option they're leaning towards. You're not asking for the decision, you're finding out what's actually blocking it.
Around day seven to ten, a short written follow-up with something in it. A note that the price holds until a date. A question about timing. A photo of a similar job you finished last week. The point is that it isn't the same message again with more urgency.
Then, roughly a fortnight out, the honest one. Tell them you're closing the file, ask if the job is still live, and say you'll happily requote if things change. It is remarkable how often that message gets an immediate reply, because it removes the pressure and gives the customer permission to be honest with you.
After that, they're not a lost quote. They're a past enquiry, and past enquiries are a list worth mailing — which is the same argument I make about your past customers being your cheapest lead source.
Gold nugget. Put a real expiry date on every quote and honour it. Not "valid for 30 days" in six-point type at the bottom, but a line near the price: "This price holds until the 24th. After that I'll need to requote — material costs have been moving." It does three things at once. It gives you a legitimate, non-pushy reason to make contact before the date. It protects your margin, which matters when supplier pricing is drifting under you. And it creates a deadline where none existed, which is the single most common reason a decision gets made at all. The customers who were never going to buy will ignore it. The ones who were drifting will ring you the day before.
You can't fix what you don't count
None of this survives if it lives in someone's head. You need two numbers: how many quotes you sent last month, and how many you won. That's it to start with. Once you've got a few months of that, split it — by job size, and by where the enquiry came from.
The splits are where the money is. A business winning 60% of small jobs and 15% of the big ones has a completely different problem from one with the reverse pattern, and both look like "our win rate is about a third" until you separate them. Same with source: if the enquiries from one channel convert at half the rate of another, you're not looking at a quoting problem, you're looking at a targeting problem, and no amount of follow-up will fix it.
This is also where automation earns its place. Not AI writing your quotes — just a system that reminds you which quotes are three days old, sends the follow-up when you don't get to it, and logs what happened. When we worked with Maslec Electrical, automated follow-up was a core part of the outbound engine we built, precisely because consistent follow-up is the thing that gets dropped first when the work gets busy. The technology is trivial. The discipline is what's rare.
And it starts earlier than the quote. How quickly you answer the original enquiry sets the frame for everything that comes after, which is worth reading about in how fast you reply decides whether you win the job.
If you're generating enquiries and can't say what happens to them after the quote goes out, that gap is usually worth more than any new marketing spend. It's one of the first things we pull apart in the Business Health Check — a fixed-price review of how work comes in, what it's priced at, and where it's leaking, with a written plan of what to fix first.