Why hasn't my customer replied to the quote?
Silence is usually not a no. Most of it is a customer collecting the other two quotes they were always going to get, waiting on somebody else — a partner, a mortgage, another trade — or an email they never saw. Give it a few working days, then follow up once, with a specific reason to reply rather than “just checking in”: the valid-until date is the reason, and it does the asking for you. Then leave it. Chasing harder does not convert; a clearer quote does.
Silence is not usually a rejection
It feels like one, because you have done the work of pricing it and heard nothing back. But put yourself on the other side. Somebody has asked three people for a price on something expensive. Yours arrived first. They are now waiting on two more, and they have no comfortable way of telling you that without sounding like they are haggling — so they say nothing.
The other common reasons are just as ordinary. They need to talk to a partner who has not been home. They are waiting on money, or on a decision about something else entirely. The work depends on another trade finishing. Or the email went to spam, or to an address with a typo in it, and as far as they know you never sent anything at all.
How long to wait
Match the wait to the size of the decision. A small job — a day's work, a few hundred pounds — is one somebody can decide on in a day or two, so three or four working days is a reasonable point to follow up. A boiler, a rewire, an extension is a conversation at a kitchen table, sometimes more than once; a week is not slow.
What you should not do is follow up the next morning. It reads as pressure on a decision they have not had time to make, and pressure is what people associate with the salespeople they are trying to avoid.
Follow up once, with a reason to reply
“Just checking in” asks the customer to do the work of restarting the conversation. Give them something specific to respond to instead, and the most natural one is already on the document: the date the price is good until.
Something like: “Just so it is on your radar — the quote holds until the 10th, and I have space that week if you want it. Happy to go through any of it if something is unclear.” That does three things in two sentences. It reminds them there is a deadline without inventing one. It tells them the diary is real. And it offers to explain, which gives a customer who is hesitating about one line somewhere to put that hesitation.
Once is usually enough. If the date passes and you have heard nothing, the quote has expired on its own and you have a clean reason to make contact later without it being a chase — see how long a quote should be valid for.
Check they actually received it
Before you read anything into silence, rule out the boring explanation. Quotes sent as email attachments go to spam more often than people realise, particularly with a PDF on them. An address taken down on site with wet hands is wrong more often than you would like. And if you sent a link, it is worth knowing whether it was ever opened.
This is one practical advantage of sending a quote as a link rather than an attachment: it lands as a normal message, the customer does not have to download anything, and there is a button to accept rather than a reply to compose. Quotes sent from Speak to Quote are marked in your history when the customer accepts, and the acceptance is stamped with the date and time, so what you are waiting on is visible instead of guessed at.
Make the quote easier to say yes to
The quotes that go unanswered longest tend to have something in common: the customer cannot tell what they are buying. One line and a total gives them nothing to agree with, so agreeing feels like a risk. A few things reliably help:
- Itemise it, so they can see what the money is for — and so they can ask about one line instead of going quiet about all of it.
- Say what is not included, which sounds like it invites objections and actually removes the fear of a surprise bill.
- Put your registration on it — it is the thing a careful customer checks before saying yes.
- Make accepting one action, not a reply they have to draft.
If you are not yet in a position to give a firm price, an estimate is a better document than a vague quote: it says plainly that the figure may move, which is easier to respond to than a fixed price the customer suspects is not really fixed.
When it is a no, ask why — once
If they tell you they have gone elsewhere, it is worth one short, genuinely unbothered question about what decided it. Some will not answer. The ones who do will tell you something useful, and it is very often not the price — it is that somebody else could start sooner, or explained the job better, or turned up when they said they would.
Take it as information rather than an argument to win. A customer who felt no pressure from you is also a customer who comes back when the cheaper option does not work out, and that happens more often than most trades expect. The builder page shows what a quote that answers the usual questions up front actually looks like.