60% of trade quotes are won or lost in the first 72 hours. Most tradies never send a second message.
How long do you actually have to win a trade quote?
About 72 hours. Roughly 60% of residential trade quotes are decided inside that window, and most homeowners have stopped reading new quotes by Day 4. If your only touch is the email with the PDF attached, you've handed the job to whichever competitor sent a follow-up text on Day 1.
The 72-hour window is shorter than it sounds.
Picture a Brisbane homeowner pricing a switchboard upgrade. She sends three enquiries on Monday morning. By Tuesday afternoon, two of you have come out, measured up, and emailed quotes. The third hasn't replied yet. She skims your PDF, opens the other one, and parks both in a tab she means to come back to.
That tab stays open for about a day and a half. On Wednesday night she's tired. On Thursday she's annoyed it's still on her list. By Friday she wants the decision off her plate so she can go to the kids' soccer on Saturday. Whoever feels easiest to deal with on Friday wins. The cheapest quote doesn't necessarily win. The one that feels lowest-friction does.
If your last contact with her was the email at 4:47pm on Tuesday with a 6-page PDF attached, you are not the low-friction option. You are the quote she has to re-open and re-read. The sparky who texted her on Wednesday morning saying "got your quote across, happy to walk through any of it, can lock in a Monday start if it suits" is the low-friction option. He wins. You lose, and you don't know why, because she never replies to tell you.
Four reasons your quotes go cold before Day 4.
The 4-touch sequence that wins inside the window.
A working follow-up sequence is four touches across seven days, and none of them are clever. The first runs at Day 0, the moment the quote leaves your outbox. A short SMS confirming the quote has been sent and asking her to text back if it doesn't land. That single touch removes the "did it arrive" anxiety and gets your number into her phone, which matters on Day 3 when she's looking for someone to ask a question. Day 1 is a soft check-in, a single line asking if she has any questions or wants you to walk through the scope on the phone. Day 3 is the decision nudge, a short message saying you're closing your week and wanted to know if she's still considering you. Day 7 is the slot-close, polite, firm, no chasing after.
A Palm Beach electrician we worked with had been running on touch one only. He sent the PDF, then waited. Across the prior 18 months we counted 614 quotes sent and 87 won. Once we put the 4-touch sequence in via SMS, the same volume of quotes produced a recovered $342k inside 11 months, without changing his pricing, his website, or the quote itself. The only thing that changed was that the customer heard from him three more times before she made her decision.
The sequence is plumbing. It's not the answer. The answer is owning the 72-hour window, and most trade businesses don't own it because they don't think of it as a window at all. They think of the quote as a single event. They send it, they wait, and they call it lost when nobody replies. The work isn't lost. The follow-up is missing.
If you fix one thing in your business this quarter, fix the gap between "quote sent" and "decision made." It's the cheapest piece of revenue you have, sitting in your outbox, waiting for a second message that never goes out.
Manual follow-up is the reason 71% of tradies skip it.
Talk to a sparky in Logan or a plumber on the Gold Coast and ask why they don't follow up. The answer is the same every time. Quoting day finishes at 8pm. Wednesday morning is back on the tools. By Friday the quote from Tuesday has slid off the front of the brain, replaced by Thursday's three new enquiries. The follow-up doesn't happen because nobody is sitting at a desk on Wednesday at 9am, calmly going through Tuesday's quote list with a coffee.
An automatic sequence solves that problem because it doesn't care that you're up a ladder. SMS goes out on Day 0 the moment you mark the quote as sent. The Day 1 check-in fires at 9:14am whether you're in a roof cavity or not. Day 3 lands at lunchtime. Day 7 closes the loop. You see the replies on your phone between jobs and answer the live ones. The dead ones stay dead, but at least you stopped paying for them with your silence.
This is the same logic as the missed-call revenue loss problem. The job isn't lost because you're a worse tradie. It's lost because the back-office side of the business has a leak in it, and the leak runs while you're on the tools. Plug the leak and you don't need more leads. You need to stop bleeding the ones you have. The same pattern shows up in operational handover gaps across most of the trade businesses we audit.
If you're building this in-house, start with Day 0 and Day 3.
If you read this and want to do something on Monday, you don't need a full system. You need two SMS messages. The Day 0 receipt and the Day 3 decision nudge. Those two touches alone will recover most of the slippage, because the Day 0 message gets your number into her phone and the Day 3 message catches her before she signs with someone else. Day 1 and Day 7 are upgrades. Day 0 and Day 3 are the spine.
Keep the messages short. Two sentences each. Use her first name. Reference the job, not the quote number. "Hi Sarah, sent your switchboard quote across, give us a yell if it doesn't land in your inbox" beats "Dear Customer, please find attached quote ref #4471 for your review at your earliest convenience." The first message sounds like a human. The second sounds like a debt collector.
Track win rate per quote, not per lead. Lead-to-quote is a marketing number. Quote-to-job is the one that pays for your ute, your apprentice, and your weekend. If you don't know your quote-to-job conversion rate today, that's the first number to find. Until you can see it, you can't see whether the follow-up is working.
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