Your close rate is probably fine. Your follow-up is the problem.
Walk into almost any shop doing between one and ten million a year and you will find the same pattern. Quotes go out quickly, because that part feels urgent. Then nothing happens. Not because anyone decided to stop, but because Tuesday happened, and then a warranty call happened, and by Friday the quote from Monday is buried in a thread nobody scrolls back to.
The customer is not angry. They have not chosen your competitor on price. They simply moved on, and you were not there at the moment they were ready to decide.
The quote is not the finish line
There is a habit of treating the sent quote as the end of the sales process. It is closer to the middle.
At the moment you send it, the customer is comparing. Maybe two other companies, maybe three. Maybe they are also deciding whether to do the job at all this year. The information in your quote barely changes that decision. What changes it is whether you are still present, politely, when they stop deliberating.
Presence is a timing problem. Timing problems are the easiest thing in the world to automate, and the hardest thing in the world to do by hand.
What the sequence actually looks like
The version that works for most trades is unglamorous. Five touches, spread over about two weeks, mixing text and email, and every one of them stops dead if the customer replies.
Within the hour. A short text confirming the quote landed and naming the job. Not "just checking in". Something like: quote for the panel upgrade is in your inbox, any questions text me here.
Day two. Answer the objection they have not raised yet. For most trades that is timeline, not price. Tell them when you could start.
Day four. One piece of proof. A photo of a comparable job, a note about the warranty, the license number. Something that makes the decision feel safe.
Day eight. The honest nudge. Ask whether it is still on the table, and give them permission to say no. This message recovers more jobs than the other four combined, because it is the only one that asks a real question.
Day fourteen. Close the loop. Tell them you are going to stop following up and they can reach out whenever. Then actually stop.
That is the whole thing. No funnel diagram, no drip campaign with nineteen branches.
Why it has to be automated
Read that sequence again and notice what it requires: someone tracking five separate dates per quote, across every open quote, forever, while also running the business.
Nobody does that. Not because they are lazy, but because it is genuinely impossible to hold in your head alongside a crew schedule. This is the specific job automation is good at. The system watches the clock, the human writes the words once, and the messages stop the instant a real conversation starts.
The mechanics are not exotic. Quotes are tracked in your CRM, the sequence triggers off the send date, and a reply from the customer flips the record to a stage that halts everything. If you want to see how the messaging layer works underneath, Twilio's messaging documentation is readable even if you never touch the code.
Want this checked against your own numbers?
Fifteen minutes, and you get the three gaps costing you the most. No deck, no pitch.
The consent part, briefly
Because this involves texting customers, it is worth being clear-eyed about the rules rather than hoping.
US business texting sits under the TCPA, and the FCC maintains current guidance on telemarketing and robocall rules. The practical shape of it: a customer who handed you their mobile number while asking for a quote is in a different position from a cold list you bought. Transactional follow-up about a request they made is the safest ground there is. Opt-outs must work immediately and permanently, and you need to be able to show when consent was captured.
Build the opt-out handling first, before you build the sequence. It is five minutes of work and it is the part that matters if anyone ever asks.
Run the math on your own numbers
Take the quotes you sent last month. Count how many got a second contact from a human. For most shops the honest answer is under half.
Now take your average job value and your close rate on quotes that did get followed up, and apply it to the ones that did not. That gap is not a marketing problem or a lead generation problem. It is revenue you already earned and then dropped.
If that number is uncomfortable, the fix is a two-week build, not a new sales hire. Our lead follow-up system is exactly this sequence, wired into whatever CRM you already run, handed over with your own logins.
Where to start this week
Pick your last twenty open quotes. Send every one of them the day-eight message, by hand, today. Ask whether it is still on the table and let them say no.
You will recover one or two, which pays for the build. More usefully, you will find out how many were still winnable, which tells you whether this is worth systematizing at all.
Then automate it so you never have to do that by hand again.