Most of the people who did not book you never chose someone else. They got busy, the decision went cold, and nobody followed up more than once. That graveyard of open estimates is the highest-return thing in your business, and nobody is touching it.
One polite call three days later, maybe a voicemail, and then it falls off the list because there is real work to do. The estimate sits in the system at full value, and it is worth nothing until somebody works it.
You drove out, measured, priced it and wrote it up. That cost is sunk whether they book or not.
Half of these people were never a no. They were a not-yet, and nobody was there when the yet arrived.
The deals that close on the fifth touch are invisible to a business that stops at the first.
Count last quarter\u2019s unsold estimates, multiply by your average ticket, take even a small percentage. That is the number.
From your CRM, your spreadsheet, or a pile of PDFs. Every one gets tracked to an outcome.
Text and email over weeks, not days, spaced so it reads like a person checking in rather than a machine nagging.
The actual roof, the actual unit, the actual price. Never “just checking in on that quote.”
Booked, declined or asked for time — the sequence ends and you get the thread with a reason attached.
Further than feels comfortable. Estimates from six months ago still convert, especially for work that gets worse if ignored — a roof, a failing unit, a drainage problem. We usually start with the last twelve months.
A no closes the record permanently. The sequence only works estimates that never got an answer either way, which is almost always the bigger pile.
Then a spreadsheet works, or we pull them out of your invoicing software. Plenty of contractors we talk to are running on paper and memory, and that is usually where the most money is hiding.
Better, if anything. A $14,000 job deserves more than one call, and it is the category where buyers most often go quiet while they think about the money.
Bring that number to the assessment. Multiply it by your average ticket and you will see why this is usually the first thing we build.
Book a free assessment