The quote nobody answered is not a lost job.
How long should you keep following up on a quote?
Longer than most contractors do. Across 432,000 contractor quotes analysed by Level CFO, the ones that get accepted come back in about two days, while the ones that die sit for roughly a month before anyone gives up on them. A quote that has gone quiet for a week is therefore not lost — it is waiting. Leadmend totals up unanswered quotes free, from a read-only Jobber connection.
When a customer says no, you learn something and you move on. When they say nothing, you learn nothing at all — and the job is usually still there, sitting behind somebody who got busy, went away, or is waiting on their partner. Most contractors chase once, maybe twice, from memory, at the end of a day that already ran long.
Why quotes go quiet, and why that is good news
Silence reads like rejection and almost never is. The reasons are boring, which is exactly why the work is still winnable.
- They are waiting on a partner, a payday or a landlord
- Your quote arrived on a day that got away from them
- They meant to reply, and the message moved up the screen
- They are comparing, and nobody has followed up to stay in front
What it is costing, in your own numbers
This is arithmetic rather than a claim, and you can do it on the back of an envelope: count the quotes you sent last quarter that never got a yes or a no, and add up what they were worth. On the numbers in the study above, roughly a third of quotes never convert and most of those were never turned down — they were simply never chased.
Why nobody does it
Not laziness. Following up properly means remembering who, remembering when, and writing something that does not read like a form letter — at six in the evening with a van to unload.
- The fifteenth polite chase of the week is the one that does not get sent
- A reminder in a calendar is not a message in their inbox
- "Just checking in" gets ignored, so it feels pointless, so it stops
- The quotes worth the most are usually the oldest, and the most awkward to raise
Start by finding out the number
Before automating anything, it is worth knowing the size of it. If you run Jobber, Leadmend will read your account read-only and total up every quote you sent that nobody replied to — how much, how many, and how long the oldest has been waiting. It takes about a minute, costs nothing, and needs no signup or sales call.
Where this sits on the platform
The audit is free and always will be — no account, no card, and nothing sent to your customers. The chasing is the part you pay for: quotes followed up for you with your job software connected is the Complete plan, $399 USD a month. If all you want is every website enquiry answered instantly, that is Starter — free for 14 days, then $99 USD a month. Both are month to month and cancel from the dashboard in one click.
Where these claims are checked
Nothing on this page asks to be taken on trust. The rules the reply engine follows — never quoting a price, never promising a time, never claiming to be a person — are put under messages written to break them, thirty times each, and the last run is published rule by rule, including anything that did not hold. Every routine writes out what it will do before it runs, and you can switch a setting off and watch our own demo break. The speed on this page is measured the same way — every timed call is published, with the date and the spread rather than a rounded word.
More on how this works
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