Dead
follow-up.
You did the hard part. You measured up, you priced it, you sent it. Then you never mentioned it again.
(02 — FOUR USUAL SUSPECTS)Still warm. One call now and this is probably yours.
Why quotes die quietly
Follow-up is the strangest leak of the four, because the expensive work is already finished. You have driven to the property, spent an hour measuring and talking, gone home, worked out materials and labour, and written the thing up. All the cost has been incurred. The only step left is the cheapest one — asking — and it is the step that gets skipped.
It gets skipped for a reason that has nothing to do with laziness. Chasing feels like begging. Nobody starting a trade business wanted to become a salesperson, and a polite reminder feels uncomfortably close to pestering someone who has your number and hasn't used it.
What the customer is actually thinking
Almost always, nothing. They are not sitting in judgement on your price. They got three quotes, they meant to discuss it at the weekend, one of the kids was ill, and the whole thing slid down the list. Silence from you reads as one of two things: you are busy and don't need the work, or you weren't that bothered. Neither helps you.
Meanwhile the decay is steep. A quote's realistic chance of converting roughly halves for every week it sits untouched, because the other two trades who quoted are not all being equally quiet. By the fourth week you are not competing on price any more — you're competing with a job that's already been done by someone else.
What actually closes it
A sequence, decided once, that runs whether or not you feel like it. Something close to: a short message two days after sending to check it arrived and read clearly, a call at day seven, and a final light message at day twenty-one that closes the loop honestly — still happy to do this, otherwise I'll take it off my list. That last one recovers far more work than people expect, because it gives the customer an easy moment to say yes.
Set up properly it is automatic, it sounds like you, and it stops the decision being made by whoever happened to feel brave that afternoon.