You spent an hour at the house. You wrote it up properly. You sent it Tuesday.
It is now Friday and there is nothing. No question, no objection, no rejection. Just silence, which is somehow worse than a no because there is nothing to respond to.
The instinct is to assume the price was wrong and move on. That instinct costs more money than any pricing mistake you will make this year.
Silence is not a decision
Almost none of these people have decided against you. They have not decided at all.
Their week got away from them. They are waiting on a spouse, or a tax refund, or the other two quotes. The job is real, the intent is real, and the thing standing between you and it is that nobody has done anything.
There is a useful signal in the timing. Analysis of contractor quote data found that converted quotes tend to close in around two days, while lost quotes linger for roughly twenty nine. So a quote sitting untouched for a week is not neutral, it is drifting, and the window where a nudge changes the outcome is narrower than it feels.
The gap almost every contractor is standing in
Widely cited sales research holds that around 80% of sales require at least five follow-up contacts, while about 44% of salespeople give up after one.
Contractor-specific figures point the same way. Estimates put the average close rate on sent quotes somewhere in the twenties to mid-thirties, with the top performers well above that, and the difference is attributed far more often to follow-up consistency than to price.
Worth a caveat: a large share of the statistics in this area are published by companies selling follow-up automation, and some of the more dramatic figures should be read as marketing. But the direction is consistent across independent restatements, and it matches what most owners will recognise from their own experience. Almost nobody follows up five times. Almost nobody is competing with you past the second attempt.
That is the actual opportunity. Not being better at sales. Being the only one still there in week two.
A cadence that is not annoying
Five touches over about three weeks, each one short, each one giving the homeowner a reason to re-engage rather than a demand for an answer.
Day one, the same day you send it. A short text confirming it arrived and offering to walk through anything. This does real work: email quotes disappear into spam and promotions folders constantly, and this catches that without accusing anyone of ignoring you.
Day three. A brief check that the numbers made sense, phrased as an offer to explain rather than a request for a decision.
Day seven. Add something. A photograph of a similar job you completed, a note about a material lead time, an answer to the question they did not ask. This is the touch that separates useful from pestering.
Day fourteen. The clearest one. Confirm whether they still want to go ahead, and if timing is the issue, offer to revisit in a specific month.
Day twenty-one. Close it out, and say so plainly. "I will stop chasing, but the door is open, just say the word." This one gets more replies than any of the others, because it removes the pressure entirely.
Then actually close the quote in your records as won, lost, or expired, with no ambiguous middle category. A pipeline full of maybes tells you nothing about your real conversion rate.
Text beats email, by a lot
One reported comparison puts response rates around 45% for text follow-ups against roughly 6% for email. Treat the precise numbers with care, but the gap is large enough and consistent enough across sources to act on.
Use the phone for high-value work where a conversation genuinely adds something. Use text for everything else. Use email mainly to carry the document.
The message that wastes the touch
"Just following up on that estimate, let me know if you have any questions."
Every contractor has sent it, and it does almost nothing. It puts the entire burden on the homeowner, it adds no information, and it makes the fifth one identical to the first.
Compare that with something that carries its own reason to exist. A photo of the same job type finished last week. A note that the part you specified has moved to a three week lead time, so the decision now affects the schedule. An offer to split the work into two phases if the number is the obstacle.
Each touch should be able to answer the question "why are you contacting me today" with something other than "because it has been three days."
Fix the front of the funnel first
Follow-up is downstream, and there is no point optimising it if the leak is earlier.
Reported answer rates for contractors sit somewhere around half of inbound enquiries receiving a meaningful response, with average response times measured in tens of minutes. The research on speed is consistent and dramatic: contact within about five minutes rather than thirty makes a lead many times more likely to convert, and a large majority of buyers hire whoever responds first.
If half your enquiries never get a real reply, a five touch follow-up sequence on the ones that do is polishing the wrong thing.
What this is worth
Run it on your own numbers rather than mine. Take the estimates you send in a month, your average job value, and your current close rate. Then run it again with the close rate ten points higher.
For most local service businesses that difference is larger than anything a marketing budget would buy in the same period, and it costs five text messages per quote.
The quotes are already in your pipeline. These people already invited you into their home. The only thing between you and a meaningful share of that work is whether anyone follows up more than once.