Every shop has a folder of estimates that were written, sent and never mentioned again. Nobody decided to abandon them. The tech moved to the next job, the office moved to the next day, and the customer, who had been ready to buy on Tuesday, found it easier to do nothing.
Ask an owner what their close rate on estimates is and you will get a number. Ask how many estimates from last quarter never received a second contact and you will usually get silence, because nobody has counted. When they do count, the share can be larger than they expected.
Why estimates go quiet
Three reasons, and none of them is laziness:
- There is no owner. The tech wrote it, the office sent it, and the question of who follows up was never assigned to anyone.
- There is no trigger. The estimate has a date on it but nothing happens when that date passes. It does not appear on anyone’s list.
- Following up feels like selling, and most people in a home-service office did not sign up to sell. So the call that should happen on day three happens never.
A cadence that does not need a sales team
The fix is a schedule, not a personality. For an estimate over a threshold you choose, say $1,500:
| When | What | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Confirm it arrived and ask if anything was unclear | Office, or automated |
| Day 3 | Answer questions; offer a time to walk through it | Office |
| Day 7 | Check whether anything changed on their side | Office |
| Day 21 | One last touch; close it out as won, lost or later | Owner or lead tech |
Four contacts over three weeks. Each one has a script that is a question, not a pitch. The point is to make it easy for the customer to say yes, ask something, or tell you they went elsewhere, all of which are better than silence.
The first touch is the one worth automating, because it is the one most often skipped and the one that needs the least judgment. A call the day after the estimate, confirming it arrived and asking whether anything needs explaining, does not require a salesperson. It requires that the call happen.
Counting it
Before changing anything, count three things for the last full quarter:
- Estimates sent over your threshold.
- Estimates that received at least one follow-up contact.
- Estimates that closed, split by whether they were followed up.
The gap between the first two numbers is the leak. The difference in close rate between followed-up and not is the argument for fixing it. Owners who run the count may find the second number embarrassing and the third motivating, which is the right order to find them in.
One check comes before all of this: that the estimates went out at all. Some never leave the truck, which we covered in estimates that die in the truck.