Why customers go quiet after an estimate, and what to do about it
Silence after a quote almost never means no. It usually means not yet, and nobody asked again.
Updated
You drove out. You measured, you worked out the numbers, you wrote it up in the evening because there was no time during the day. You sent it. And then nothing, and you never find out why.
Almost every trade does free estimates and almost nobody enjoys the part that comes after, which is ringing someone up to ask whether they have decided. It feels like begging for work you already did the hardest part of. So mostly it does not happen, and the job goes to a company that was not better, only less shy.
What silence actually is
The instinctive reading of silence is rejection, and that reading is what makes the follow-up feel humiliating. It is also usually wrong. Silence after an estimate is almost always one of four things, and only one of them is no.
- They have not read it properly yet. It arrived while they were at work, they meant to look at it that evening, and then a week went past. This is the most common one by a distance.
- They are waiting on somebody else. A partner, a landlord, an insurer, a second quote that has not arrived. Nothing to do with you.
- They have a question they are slightly embarrassed to ask. Usually about the price, sometimes about why one line is what it is. People would rather say nothing than look like they do not understand.
- They have gone with someone else. Real, and the smallest of the four.
The reframe that makes this easy
A follow-up is not asking someone to justify themselves. It is giving three of those four people a low-effort way to move, and giving the fourth an easy way to tell you so you stop wondering. Both of those are favours.
What a good follow-up looks like
Short, specific, and easy to decline. Those three, and the third one is the one people leave out.
Short enough to read on a phone in one glance
Three sentences. A long follow-up reads as a sales letter and gets archived. The goal is a reply, not a case.
Specific to their job
Reference the actual work and the actual number. A generic "just following up" makes it obvious nobody looked at the file before sending it, which tells them how the job would go.
With an easy way out
One line saying that if they have gone another way it is genuinely fine to say so. This is counter-intuitive and it is what raises reply rates, because most non-replies are people avoiding an awkward conversation rather than avoiding you.
On a rhythm, then stopping
A small number spread over two or three weeks, and then it ends. A sequence with no end is the thing that earns a reputation, and it is entirely avoidable.
Why doing it by hand does not work
It is not that following up is hard. It is that it is the easiest thing in the week to postpone, and postponing it has no immediate cost. There is always another estimate to drive to, and the follow-up on last week's never announces itself.
The businesses that do this well are almost never more disciplined. They have made it not require discipline.
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A reply from the customer stops the sequence immediately, which matters more than it sounds. The fastest way to undo the goodwill is to send message three after they already said yes.
Fix the front of it too
Follow-up recovers estimates you have already written. The other half of the problem is how many you write that were never going to convert, and how long it takes to produce each one.
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Collecting the scope properly before you drive out does two things: it filters out the jobs that were never a fit, and it means the estimate you write is based on information rather than on a voicemail saying call me back. There is more on where to draw that line in the guide to putting prices on your website.
A reasonable first month
- 01Write the three messages once. Day two, day seven, day fourteen. Keep each to three sentences and put the easy way out in the last one.
- 02Turn it on for new estimates only. Do not blast the back catalogue; a follow-up on something from March reads as a mailing list, not a conversation.
- 03Read the first ten replies. The objections you get back are the most useful market research you will do this year, and they usually change the estimate itself rather than the follow-up.
- 04Only then decide whether to add a fourth touch. Most businesses find they do not need one.
If you are not sure whether follow-up is your biggest leak or whether it is something earlier in the path, the free Growth Score scores follow-up against five other things without asking for your details up front.
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