Your quotes go quiet because nobody has the afternoon

A quote goes out on Tuesday. The customer says they will think about it. Nobody calls them back, because the person who would call them is on a job, and then it is Friday, and then it is three weeks later. The quote is not lost. It is just quiet. Most quote lists are full of these.

What the research says

The most cited study on response time was published in Harvard Business Review in 2011. James Oldroyd, Kristina McElheran and David Elkington audited 1.25 million online sales leads received by 42 companies, 29 of them selling to consumers. Firms that tried to contact a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify it as firms that waited even an hour longer, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or more.

The same audit found the average response time across the companies was 42 hours. Only 37% responded within an hour. Nearly a quarter never responded at all.

Oldroyd's earlier work, the 2007 Lead Response Management study, looked at more than 15,000 leads and over 100,000 call attempts at six companies. The odds of reaching a lead when the call went out within five minutes were 100 times higher than at 30 minutes, and the odds of qualifying it were 21 times higher.

What it does not say

Both studies are about new inbound leads, mostly web forms, in businesses with sales teams. A quote for a reroof that the customer already has in hand is a different object. Nobody has measured trade quote follow up with that kind of rigour, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. What carries over is the shape: interest decays fast, the first business to call back tends to win, and most businesses do not call back at all.

How to work a quote list

• Start with the oldest and the largest. A $14,000 reroof quoted 90 days ago protects more money than a $900 repair quoted last week.
• Offer a real time, not a question. "We have Tuesday the 17th open, same price as quoted" gets a yes or a no. "Are you still interested?" gets silence.
• Count it when the money lands. A booked job is not a recovered job until the invoice is paid. Keep the two numbers apart so you know which one you are looking at.
• Do it every week. The list does not stay worked. It fills back up.

Max does this on the phone, in the order above, and reconciles the result against the invoices every night. Booked and collected are kept as two figures on purpose. Collected is the one that matters.