From the blog
The quote's gone quiet: what to send, and when to stop
· Robert McLaggan
Wait about three days, then send one short follow-up asking something the customer can answer in a single word — not 'just checking you got this', which gives them nothing to reply to. At about a week, send one more saying plainly that it's the last. Then stop: two unanswered messages is already an answer, and a third is a judgement about your standing rather than a way of learning anything. Silence is not a verdict on your price, and you cannot tell what it means until somebody replies, which is the entire case for asking rather than reminding. The strongest device isn't a follow-up at all, though — it's a real expiry date on the quote when you send it, which turns an open-ended decision into a dated one and lets you close the job off instead of carrying it around.
You send a quote you're happy with. Then nothing.
No haggling, no "that's more than I hoped", no reply at all. A week goes by and the job sits in the back of your mind taking up space, and you're not sure whether to ring them or let it go.
This is the most common way a job dies, and it's worth being clear about what's actually happening — because the instinct to send another polite reminder is usually the wrong move.
Silence is not a no. It's also not a maybe.
The trap is reading silence as a verdict on your price. It might be. But silence tells you nothing about the reason, and a customer who genuinely thinks you're too dear has an easy, face-saving thing to say — that it's more than they hoped — which is why plenty of them say it rather than going quiet.
So treat the four explanations below as the possibilities you're choosing between, not a diagnosis. You cannot tell which one you've got until somebody replies, and that's the whole argument for asking a question rather than sending a reminder.
They're still collecting. You were the first of three, and they're waiting on the other two before they answer anybody. Nothing has gone wrong. You're just early.
They need to talk to someone. A partner, a landlord, a parent whose house it actually is. The person who asked for the quote often isn't the person who signs it off, and the delay is a conversation happening somewhere you can't see.
The job's been deferred. The boiler limped through, the money went on the car, the extension got pushed to spring. The job is real but it isn't now, and they feel awkward saying so.
It never reached them. Wrong address, spam folder, opened on a phone in a car park and never thought about again. This one is more common than people think and it's the only one where a nudge is straightforwardly the fix.
Those four need different things from you, and only the last one is solved by "just checking you got this". Which is why that particular sentence, which is what almost everybody sends, does so little.
Send two. Not one, not five.
Two is a practical default rather than a law, and it's worth moving to suit your trade and your customers. The reasoning behind it: one is under-doing it, because the likeliest explanation of all is the mundane one — they meant to answer and life happened. Past two, you're making a judgement about your own standing rather than gathering information, and in a trade where your reputation walks around the same few streets you do, that's a judgement worth making cautiously.
The first, at about three days. Long enough that you're not hovering over them. Short enough that the job is still live in their head and they can remember what was in the price.
The second, at about a week from sending. This one says it's the last one. Not as a threat — as information, so they're not waiting for another prompt and you're not waiting for permission to stop.
Then you stop. Two unanswered messages is an answer.
Ask something they can answer in one word
Here's the whole technique, and it's the difference between a follow-up that works and one that just sits in another inbox.
"Just checking you got the quote" is a statement dressed as a question. There's nothing to reply to. Answering it requires the customer to compose a whole update on their own decision-making, which is exactly the effort they've been avoiding all week.
Give them something they can dispatch in four words while walking to the car.
Not this:
Hi Sarah, just following up on the quote I sent last week for the bathroom. Let me know if you have any questions or would like to discuss anything. Looking forward to hearing from you.
This:
Hi Sarah — that bathroom price went over a week past Thursday. Are you still hoping to get it done before Christmas, or has it shifted into the new year? Either's fine, I just need to know whether to hold the week.
— Dave
The second one is answerable with "yes", "no", or "March, sorry". Every one of those is worth having. It also does something the first doesn't: it gives them a way to say not now that doesn't feel like rejecting you, which is the thing a lot of customers are quietly stuck on.
Three things to keep out of it. Don't apologise for sending it — you quoted for work they asked you to quote for. Don't mention the price. And don't stack it with new information, extra options or a revised figure; that's a different conversation and it muddies this one.
The second message is shorter still:
Hi Sarah — I'll leave this one with you rather than keep emailing. The price holds till the 30th; after that I'd need to re-look at it. If it comes back round later, drop me a line.
— Dave
That's it. No guilt, no last-chance urgency. You've told them where things stand and you've stopped, and a surprising number of jobs come back weeks later from exactly that message, because it's the one that didn't make them feel chased.
The thing that works better than following up
If you take one practical change from this, it's this one: put a real date on the quote when you send it.
Not as a pressure tactic. As a fact. Materials move, your diary fills, and a price you worked out in September genuinely isn't a price you can honour in January. Saying so is honest and it changes the customer's problem from should I do this — which can be deferred forever — to should I do this by the 30th, which can't.
It also does something for you that's worth more than the odd extra job. It ends things. Without a date, a quote sits open indefinitely, and you carry a dozen of them around wondering. With one, the job closes itself and your list is a list of things that are actually live.
Two conditions on it. The date has to be plausible — three or four weeks is normal for domestic work, and a 48-hour expiry on a kitchen rewire reads as a sales trick and will be treated as one. And it has to mean something. If someone comes back on day 45 and you quietly honour the old price without mentioning it, you've taught them the date was decoration. You don't have to be harsh about it — "that one's lapsed, but let me re-check the materials and come back to you" costs nothing and keeps the device working.
A no is worth more than a maybe
Nobody enjoys being turned down, so it's worth being blunt about the arithmetic: a customer who tells you no on Thursday is more valuable to you than one who never replies at all.
You get the slot back — properly, not the half-held version where you'd probably squeeze them in. You stop spending attention on it. And if you ask, you often get the one thing nobody will ever sell you: a straight answer about why you didn't get the job.
Ask it plainly and without any edge, because you genuinely want to know:
No problem at all — thanks for coming back to me. Do you mind me asking what swung it? Helps me price better.
Most people tell you. Sometimes it's price, and then you know whether you're actually adrift or whether they took a number you'd have been mad to match. Often it isn't price at all — it's that someone could start sooner, or the other quote explained the job better, or their neighbour used somebody. That's the sort of thing you can act on, and it costs you one sentence.
What not to do at this point is come back with a lower number. If the price was genuinely the sticking point, that's a conversation about what's in the job and what could come out of it — which is a different problem, worth handling on its own terms. Cutting the figure to rescue a job you've already lost teaches the next customer that your first price is a starting position.
When to pick up the phone instead
Email suits follow-ups because it's low-pressure and leaves a trail. But there are two cases where it's the wrong tool.
If it's a big job — the sort where the quote runs to pages and the number has a comma in it — the second follow-up is better as a call. Not to push. To ask whether anything in the quote needs explaining, because on jobs that size, silence is often confusion rather than refusal, and confusion doesn't survive a two-minute conversation.
And if it's a repeat customer, skip the formality entirely. You've done work for them. A text saying "still fancy doing that garage?" is the right register, and an email that sounds like a template is the wrong one.
What this looks like when it isn't you remembering
All of the above assumes you know which quotes are outstanding and how long each has been sitting there. That's usually where it falls down. Not the wording — the getting round to it, on a Tuesday when the quote went out a fortnight ago and nothing anywhere brought it back to your attention.
In grafter.ly, the follow-ups go on their own. A quote that's still unanswered three days after you sent it gets one; if it's still quiet at seven days, it gets a second, and that one says plainly it's the last. Then it stops — two, and no more. Each shows up in the job's activity, so you can see what went out and when.
They stop the moment the quote is settled: marked accepted, marked rejected, or past the date you set. If the customer rings you rather than clicking anything, marking it accepted on your phone is what calls the chase off.
Now the honest part, because it matters to how much weight you put on this.
The automatic wording is not the wording above. The three-day one checks the quote reached you, invites questions and shows the total; the seven-day one says the quote is still open and that it's the last reminder. Both are deliberately plainer than the question-asking version earlier in this post, because they go out unattended, to every customer, without anyone reading the room first. A message that asks "are you still after this before the end of the month?" is better — and it's better precisely because you chose to send it, to that person, about that job. Treat the automatic pair as the floor that stops a quote dying of silence, and send the good one yourself when the job's worth it.
They're sent under your business name, not from your address. Your business name is in the subject line, the header and the sign-off, and if you've added a business email in settings, that's the reply address, so an answer lands in your inbox. But the sender itself is our shared address rather than yours — worth knowing before you assume a customer sees your name in their inbox list.
It does not tell you when the customer opened the quote. There's no read receipt and we don't pretend to one — open tracking is guesswork at the best of times, and a "they've seen it and ignored you" that turns out to be wrong is worse than knowing nothing.
Marking it accepted or rejected is the only way to stop the sequence early. There's no separate off switch for a quote you'd rather just leave alone.
That's the trade. It handles the two messages you'd have meant to send, and it leaves the judgement — whether this one wants a phone call instead, whether this customer wants chasing at all — where it belongs.
You can try it free for 30 days, no card to start.
The short version
- Wait three days, then send one short follow-up with a question in it they can answer in a word.
- Wait until about a week from sending, then send one more that says it's the last.
- Stop. Two unanswered messages is your answer.
- Put a real expiry date on every quote when you send it — it does more than either follow-up, and it closes the job off when nothing comes back.
- Ask the ones who say no what swung it. It's the cheapest information you'll ever get.
- Don't drop the price to break a silence. You don't yet know that price is the problem.
Quoting well in the first place is most of this problem solved before it starts — how to quote so you actually get paid covers what goes on the document. And when a job that did go ahead starts growing, getting paid for work you didn't quote for is the other half.
Common questions
- How long should I wait before following up on a quote?
- About three days. Sooner reads as anxious on a job the customer is still thinking about, and much longer lets the quote go cold — by two weeks they've usually either booked someone else or forgotten what your price covered. Three days is long enough that you're not hovering and short enough that the job is still a live thing in their head.
- How many times should I chase a quote?
- Twice. One at about three days, one at about a week, and the second one says plainly that it's the last you'll send. After two unanswered messages you already know what you needed to know — this is either dead or parked — and a third message doesn't change that. It just makes you the tradesperson who keeps emailing.
- What should I say in a quote follow-up?
- Ask something they can answer in one word. "Just checking you got this" invites no reply, because there's nothing to reply to. "Are you still looking to get this done before the end of the month?" gets a yes, a no, or a date — and all three are useful. Keep it to three or four lines, don't apologise for sending it, and don't mention the price.
- Should I drop my price if the customer doesn't respond?
- No. You don't know yet that price is the problem, and an unprompted discount tells them two things you'd rather they didn't know — that your first number had room in it, and that silence is a way to get a better one. If it turns out the price genuinely is the issue, that's a conversation about what's in the job, not a sale.
- Does a quote expiry date actually work?
- It works better than a third reminder, as long as it's real. A date gives the customer a reason to decide rather than defer, and it gives you a clean point to close the job off instead of leaving it open in your head for a month. It has to mean something, though — if you honour an expired price without a word, the date was decoration and the next one won't work either.