Follow up the quote before the job quietly dies

First, the distinction that changes the tone: quote, not invoice

Chasing a quote and chasing an invoice are different jobs. An unpaid invoice is money you're owed for work you've done — you're entitled to be firm, and there's a separate playbook for it in payment reminders and following up an overdue invoice. A quiet quote is money you'd like to earn from someone who owes you nothing yet. Pressure that's fair on a debtor is off-putting on a prospect. This page is about the second case.

Why quotes go quiet (it's rarely a no)

Silence feels like rejection, but most of the time it's one of these:

• They're comparing. Yours is one of three quotes and the other two haven't landed yet.
• Life got in the way. The bathroom matters less than the sick kid and the work deadline.
• They lost it. The email's under forty others, or the text scrolled away.
• One line worried them — a price, an exclusion, a date — and they haven't got around to asking.

Every one of those is fixed by a short, friendly message that puts the quote back on top of the pile and opens the door to questions. None of them is fixed by waiting.

Timing and tone

Timing: first follow-up 3–5 days after sending — long enough not to crowd them, short enough that the site visit is still fresh in their mind. If that gets nothing, one more around two weeks, ideally with something new in it: an updated start date, an option to trim scope, an expiry on the price. After that, let it rest; a third chase rarely wins the job and can cost you the next one.

Tone: “Any questions about the quote?” beats “Have you decided?” every time. The first is an offer of help; the second is a demand for a verdict. You want to sound like a tradie with a full book being professional — not one refreshing his inbox.

Say the situation, review the message, send it yourself

The reason follow-ups don't happen isn't that they're hard to write — it's that they're one more writing job at 7pm. With TradieCue, you say the situation and Timmy drafts the message from the job's context:

Notice the draft did the arithmetic-checking kind of work for you: your $5,800 plus GST became $6,380 inc. GST, the customer-facing figure, and the message leads with help rather than a demand. If Timmy's missing something it needs — which job you mean, or what start date to offer — When an important detail is missing (a price, a customer, a scope item), Timmy asks rather than making it up.

Before you hit send

Nothing is sent automatically. Every quote, variation and follow-up is a draft the user reviews, edits and shares themselves. There's no scheduled or automatic reminder here, and that's deliberate — a follow-up from a robot reads like one. Ten seconds of review before you send it yourself:

• Name and job are right — a follow-up addressed to the wrong customer ends the conversation.
• The number matches the quote you actually sent, GST included.
• There's one clear next step — a question to answer or a date to grab, not three.
• Nothing sounds like pressure. Cut any line you'd bristle at receiving.

The manual alternative

Most tradies don't follow up at all — not from laziness, but because at the end of a physical day, composing a message that's friendly-but-not-desperate is real work, and it loses to dinner. The ones who do often reach for the same recycled “just touching base” text, which reads exactly like what it is. The quote you laboured over dies in an inbox for want of two sentences. If you'd rather start from wording and adapt it yourself, there's a free quote follow-up message template — and the quality of the quote itself, which decides whether there's anything worth chasing, is covered in how to write a professional trade quote.

Common questions