The quotes you didn't follow up

You already know the one we mean. A good job, the kind you're glad to be asked for. You looked at it properly, worked out what it would take, spent an evening getting the price right, and sent it over the next morning. That was three weeks ago. You never heard back, and you never chased it.

You didn't chase it because Wednesday happened. Then something urgent came in, then something else went wrong, and by the time you had a clear hour it was Friday afternoon — and the last thing anyone wants to do at five o'clock on a Friday is email a customer to ask whether they've thought about your price.

That quote is still sitting there. So are the others.

It isn't laziness. The job belongs to nobody

In a business of one to ten people, every other task has an owner. Pricing the work is yours. Invoicing belongs to whoever does the books. Scheduling belongs to whoever answers the phone. Chasing quotes sits in the gap between selling and admin, and it's the only thing on that list where nothing bad happens today if you skip it.

An unpaid invoice chases itself, because sooner or later you notice the money isn't there. A missed appointment rings your phone. An unchased quote does nothing at all. It just goes quiet, and quiet never interrupts anybody's day.

Larger companies solve this by employing someone whose whole job is to follow up and ask. You're not going to hire a sales administrator for it, and you shouldn't have to — but that doesn't make the work disappear. It just means nobody does it.

What silence actually means

Here's the part worth being honest about: silence is almost never a no. When a customer goes quiet on a quote, it's usually one of these.

• They're waiting on somebody else — a partner, a landlord, a budget holder, a payday.
• They asked three firms and haven't sat down to compare them yet.
• They read it on their phone, meant to reply properly later, and later never came.
• It went to junk and they never saw it at all.
• They've half-forgotten which one you were, because you're the one who never came back.

A no is fine. A no is information — you close the file and get on with your week. Silence is the expensive one, because you can't act on it and you keep half-hoping, and eventually the work goes to somebody else and you never find out why.

Do the sum on your own numbers

We're not going to throw a statistic at you. You know your own numbers better than any survey does. So think about last month.

How many quotes went out? How many of those never came back with anything at all? And what's a job worth to you, on average?

Say it was twelve quotes, five went quiet, and a job is worth about £1,400. That's £7,000 sitting in silence, from one month. Nobody wins all five and you wouldn't have. But turn one of them around and that's £1,400 from an email that takes a minute to write.

Then do the same for the other eleven months. That's the real number, and it's yours — not one we've invented for a landing page.

“I don't want to pester people”

This is the real reason, and it deserves taking seriously rather than being talked out of. Nobody wants to be the pushy one. In a business where a lot of the work comes from word of mouth, being remembered as a nuisance is a genuine risk.

But think about it from the other side. When you've been the one waiting on a price, and the company sent a short note a few days later to check you'd got it — how did that land? For most people, it's mild relief. It reads as “this lot are organised and they'll do what they say”, which is not a small thing to communicate before anybody has committed to anything.

Pestering is five emails in a week with the price knocked down each time. Three short notes over a fortnight, and then stopping, is service. And when somebody finally does sit down to choose, the firm still politely in their inbox has an advantage that has nothing to do with being cheapest.

What good follow-up looks like

If you take nothing else from this, take these five. They matter more than what the emails actually say.

• Three, not one. Most people who do eventually reply don't reply to the first nudge. One and done is barely better than nothing.
• Spread them out. Roughly three days, then a week, then a fortnight. Then stop. A sequence that stops is what separates following up from hounding.
• Reply in the same thread. Not a fresh email. The quote is right there above your message, so nobody has to go looking for what you charged.
• Two or three sentences, no more. “Just checking the quote reached you — happy to talk it through if anything isn't clear.” That's the whole email. No marketing language, no deadline, no discount.
• Stop the second they reply. This is the one that really matters. Nothing undoes the good work faster than a chaser landing the morning after somebody has already answered you.

You could do this yourself

You don't need software for it. Here's a method that genuinely works:

• At the end of each day, write down any quote that went out, with a date three days later beside it.
• Put half an hour in the diary — Friday morning is as good as any — and work the list.
• Keep two or three saved replies on your phone so each one is a twenty-second job, not a writing exercise.
• Cross a job off the moment the customer answers.

Do that for a year and you'll win work you would otherwise have lost. If you'll actually do it, do it.

But be honest for a second. None of this is news to you. You've known these quotes need chasing for a long time, and you've probably promised yourself more than once that you'd get on top of it. It still isn't happening. Not because you're disorganised — because it's the one job that never becomes urgent, and there is always something in front of it that is.

So next month will look like last month. The weeks when following up matters most are the busy ones, and those are exactly the weeks nobody gets to it.

That's the whole reason QuoteRanger exists. It's £49 a month, it works out of the mailbox you already use, and it does the chasing whether you get round to it or not.

The quotes are already sent. The pricing is already done. The only thing missing is the second email.