What to do about quotes nobody replies to

Most people running a small service business cannot say how many quotes are sitting unanswered right now. Not through carelessness. Through busyness: there are four or five things on the go, none of them talk to each other, and the joining up happens in your head at nine at night.

So the quotes that go quiet tend to stay quiet. Here is what is worth doing about them, in the order it is worth doing it.

Silence is not usually a no

It is worth assuming the person who asked for the quote is as busy as you are. A quote nobody has replied to is more often a quote nobody has got back to than a quote somebody has decided against, and the two want completely different things from you.

The trouble is that from where you are sitting they look identical. You pressed send, and then nothing.

You cannot chase what you cannot see

A quote sent as an attachment tells you nothing after it leaves. You cannot tell who has seen it and who is stalling, so every follow-up is a guess, and guessing feels like pestering.

A quote sent as a link rather than an attachment can tell you when it was opened. That does not tell you the answer, and it does tell you which of two conversations you are in. Quotes works this way.

• Not opened. Nothing has happened yet. It may not have arrived, or it may be sitting under forty other emails, and a short nudge is doing them a favour rather than pressing them.
• Opened, and nothing since. They have read it. Something is holding it up, and it is as likely to be a date or a decision they have not made as it is to be your price.

That is a small piece of information and it changes the tone of everything you send next.

Send one follow-up, not a sequence

Chasing feels rude, which is why most quotes never get chased at all. The way out of that is not to steel yourself and send five. It is to send one, politely, in words that sound like you wrote them, and then let it go.

One reminder is easy to defend to yourself and easy to receive. You have been on the end of a five-email sequence and you know exactly what it made you think of the sender.

Then stop carrying it around

The real cost of a quiet quote is not the lost job. It is the remembering: the follow-up you meant to send, sitting in your head alongside the invoice you have not raised and the customer you have not called.

That is the part worth handing over. Automations can chase a quote that has gone quiet on its own, daily, without you deciding to each morning. You set it up, you can see what ran, and nothing goes out that you did not switch on. You can turn it off whenever you like.

The short version

• Assume silence is busyness until you have a reason to think otherwise.
• Send the quote as a link, so you know whether it has been read.
• Send one follow-up rather than a sequence.
• Set that follow-up up once, so it stops being something you have to remember.

If you want to see how that fits together, what BSK View does is the short tour.