Sent quotes go cold because nobody follows up.

The quote went out. The customer said thanks. Then nothing, and the follow-up never happened, because the person who'd make that call was back on a job site the next morning. Electrical quote follow-up tends to lose to field work.

Book a call

An electrician in a hard hat and safety glasses looking down at their phone on site, still waiting to hear back on a quote — Photo by Emmanuel Ikwuegbu on Unsplash

Sound familiar?

You come home, do a few more hours of estimates and emails, and the follow-ups never make the list.
Open quotes aren't written down in one place. You remember one only when the customer calls to say they went with someone else.
Bids you sent to GCs disappear, and you never find out who got the work or how close you were.
Some of the quiet ones are the jobs you wanted most: a service upgrade, a generator hookup, a whole-house rewire.

What it costs you

The work you already did goes to waste. The walk-through, the drive, the estimate written on your own evening. A quote nobody checks on throws most of that away.

You lose jobs you were close to winning. A customer weighing your quote against another may just need an answer to one small question, and whoever calls back gets to answer it.

You can't see what's coming. Without knowing which quotes are likely to land, you won't know whether next month is full or thin until it's here.

And on bids, silence teaches you nothing. If you never ask how your number landed, the next bid goes in just as blind.

Why it keeps happening

The person who sent the quote is out running work, and the follow-up loses to whatever goes wrong that day.

Sent quotes live in an email outbox, a folder on the desk and a few text threads. Nothing tells you which ones are due for a call this week.

Chasing feels awkward. Nobody wants to sound like they're begging for work.

On the commercial side, a bid goes to a GC with a long list of subs to sort through, and the answer rarely comes back on its own.

Who you'll talk to

Kevin Kirchner smiling, in black glasses, a black cap and a green plaid shirt — Kevin Kirchner

It's me, Kevin Kirchner, on the call. I'll ask what happens to a quote after you hit send, who owns it from there, and how you'd pull up every open one today.

Tracking quotes after they go out is the kind of chasing that no longer has to come out of your evenings. It gets fit to the way your shop sells, so we start with a conversation.

Questions

How often should I follow up on an electrical quote?

There's no magic count, and every customer is different. Often the real gap isn't how often. It's that nobody at the shop owns the follow-up, so it doesn't happen at all.

Why do customers go quiet after a quote?

Usually not because they hated your number. They're busy, they're waiting on another quote, or they have a question they never got around to asking. A short check-in tells you which.

Should I follow up on bids to general contractors too?

Plenty of electrical shops do, even if it's only to learn whether they won and how their number compared. Whether it's worth it for your bids is something we can talk through.

What exactly do you build?

It depends on how you work today; we figure that out on the call.