How to follow up on a quote (the 3/7/14 day cadence)

Three touches, then stop

Follow up on a quote three times: a short nudge on day 3, something genuinely useful on day 7, and a clean close-out on day 14. If you still hear nothing, mark it cold and move on. That is the whole system. Three touches is enough to catch the buyer who got busy, and few enough that you never feel like a telemarketer.

The reason this works is boring. Most quotes do not die because the price was wrong. They die because the person who asked for the number got pulled into their own Tuesday, and nothing brought your quote back to the top of the pile. A quote sitting in someone's inbox is like a pump running without a vibration sensor. It fails silently. Nothing flashes red. You find out when you close the books and wonder where the month went.

What each touch says

Each touch has one job, and none of them is "just checking in."

• Day 3 is a receipt check. Keep it short. Confirm the quote landed and ask if anything needs clarifying. No pitch. You are reading the gauge, not opening the valve.
• Day 7 is a value add. Give them something they did not ask for, like a lead time note, an option at a smaller scope, or the answer to the question buyers usually raise at this stage. The goal is a reply about the project, not about your email.
• Day 14 is the close-out. Say you are planning your schedule and ask whether the project is still live. Offer an easy no. A fast no beats a slow maybe, and the easy exit is often what finally produces the yes.
• Keep every touch shorter than the last. If the follow-up takes longer to read than the quote took to approve, you have written a second pitch, and a second pitch is the fastest way to teach someone to ignore you.

Why it dies at touch one

Almost every owner sends touch one. Almost nobody sends touch three. It is not a knowledge problem. Follow-up feels like pestering, and there is no alarm panel for a silent quote. Your sent folder does not beep on day 7. So the follow-up joins the pile of things you will do when things calm down, and things do not calm down.

I spent years around industrial equipment where a silent sensor meant a bad week, and I still let quotes go quiet. Not because I did not know the cadence. Because nobody schedules follow-up the way they schedule maintenance. On a plant floor, the fix is never to try harder to remember the bearing grease. The fix is a schedule that does not depend on anyone's memory. Quotes deserve the same.

Put it on a maintenance schedule

The free version works fine. The moment you send a quote, create three calendar reminders, day 3, day 7, day 14, each with a short note about what that touch says. Or keep a spreadsheet with a sent date column and check it with your morning coffee. The tooling does not matter. What matters is that the trigger is a date, not your memory.

The version I sell is called The Chaser. It watches every quote, lead, and invoice so nothing sits silent. When a quote hits day 3, 7, or 14 without a reply, it drafts the right touch and queues it for your approval. Nothing sends itself. You read the draft, you approve it, and the cadence runs whether or not you remembered it existed. It is a fixed-price build, $5,000 to $15,000 depending on what your quoting setup looks like.

If you would rather start smaller, the audit is $2,500 flat, credited toward a build within 60 days, and it maps exactly where your quotes and invoices are going quiet before anything gets built. The rest of the numbers are on the pricing page. And if you never hire anyone at all, set the three reminders today. The cadence is the product. Everything else is convenience.