Ask any plumber, electrician or builder how many quotes they send out in a month. Then ask how many of those they follow up on. The gap between those two numbers is where revenue disappears.
The pattern is consistent: a quote goes out on Tuesday, the client means to reply, life gets busy, and by Friday they have either forgotten or called the next name on the list. Not because your price was wrong. Just because you were not in front of them at the right moment.
Following up manually sounds simple until you are running a team, juggling active jobs, ordering materials and handling everything else that fills a trade business day. It does not get done consistently, which means it effectively does not get done at all.
Automated follow-ups solve this without requiring discipline or spare time. Once set up, the system runs every time a quote is sent, without you thinking about it.
What a basic automated quote follow-up looks like
The simplest version is a three-touch sequence triggered the moment a quote leaves your system:
- Day 3: A short SMS or email checking whether the quote arrived and whether there are any questions. Friendly, not pushy. Approximately eight words.
- Day 7: A slightly warmer message noting the quote is still open and you are happy to talk through anything. If the job has a seasonal angle ("before the wet season", "before Christmas") this is where you mention it.
- Day 14: A final message letting them know the quote will expire and you are about to move on. This creates a soft deadline and often generates a reply from people who were genuinely interested but procrastinating.
If the client accepts or declines at any point, the sequence stops automatically. You only hear from the system when someone responds.
Trades businesses running this sequence typically see quote conversion rates improve by 20 to 35%. The improvement comes almost entirely from the third follow-up, which recovers jobs that would have quietly expired.
What tools are involved
The exact setup depends on what you already use for quoting. The most common combinations in Australian trades businesses:
ServiceM8 users
ServiceM8 has built-in job follow-up functionality, but it is limited to single messages and does not sequence or stop automatically on acceptance. A custom automation pulls quote status via the ServiceM8 API, manages the timing logic externally, and sends messages through your existing SMS gateway or email provider. The whole thing runs in the background and writes the outcome back to the job record.
Tradify users
Tradify exposes quote data via webhook. When a quote moves to "Sent" status, the webhook fires an automation that queues the follow-up sequence. Responses are parsed and used to update the Tradify quote status automatically.
Spreadsheet-based quoting
More common than it sounds. A small script monitors a shared Google Sheet for rows where "Date Sent" is filled and "Response" is empty. It runs the follow-up logic against those rows each morning. Not elegant, but it works and costs almost nothing to run.
Still following up quotes manually?
We build automated quote follow-up systems for Australian trades businesses — integrated with ServiceM8, Tradify, or whatever you already use. Book a free 45-minute call.
Book a free call ↗What the messages should actually say
The biggest mistake is writing follow-ups that read like marketing copy. They should sound like a text from a busy tradie, because that is what they are.
Day 3 example: "Hi [name], just checking the quote for [job] came through okay. Let me know if you have any questions. — [your name]"
Day 7 example: "Hi [name], following up on the quote I sent last week. Happy to talk through anything or adjust scope if needed."
Day 14 example: "Hi [name], the quote for [job] is still open but I have a few jobs coming up that will affect my availability. Let me know either way and I will mark it off."
Short. No marketing language. No exclamation marks. Personalised with the job type and their name, both of which your quoting system already holds.
How long does setup take
For a business with a reasonably modern quoting tool, a working follow-up sequence takes one to two days to build and test. The variables are how cleanly your quoting system exposes its data and whether you already have an SMS or email provider set up.
Once running, the maintenance requirement is near zero. The only thing you might adjust over time is the message timing or text, based on what you observe in your conversion data.
The part most people skip: measuring it
An automated follow-up sequence is also a measurement system. For the first time, you will have clean data on how many quotes you send, how many go cold at each stage, and which follow-up message generates the most responses. That data is worth having even beyond the immediate conversion improvement, because it tells you where else in the quoting process to focus.
Common questions about quote follow-up automation
Can the system tell the difference between a cold quote and an accepted one?
Yes. The automation reads the status field in your quoting platform in real time. When a quote is marked as accepted, declined, or archived, the follow-up sequence stops immediately. The system only continues messaging clients who have not yet responded either way. You will never send a follow-up to someone who already said yes.
What if a client replies to the SMS but does not formally accept in the system?
This is handled at the reply-parsing layer. When a client replies to a message with a positive intent (words like "yes", "let's do it", "go ahead"), the automation flags the conversation for manual review rather than continuing the follow-up sequence. The same happens for ambiguous replies. You get notified and can update the quote status yourself. Only clear non-responses continue through the sequence.
Does this work if we use email instead of SMS?
Yes. The channel is configurable per contact or per quote type. Some businesses prefer SMS for residential clients and email for commercial jobs. Others use both — an initial SMS and a follow-up email if there is no response. Open rates for SMS in Australia consistently run above 90%, so it tends to perform better for the time-sensitive Day 14 message, but email is perfectly viable as the primary channel.
What happens to quotes that are genuinely the wrong fit?
The Day 14 message does some useful filtering here. Clients who were never going to proceed tend not to respond. Clients who were interested but procrastinating often respond to the soft deadline, either to proceed or to honestly say the timing is not right. Both outcomes are useful — you either win the job or clean up your quote pipeline. Over several months, this pattern also tells you which job types have the longest decision cycles, which can inform how you structure future quotes.
How does this compare to what Fergus or simPRO offer natively?
Both Fergus and simPRO have basic reminder functionality for jobs and quotes. The limitations are similar to ServiceM8: single-touch reminders, no conditional logic, no automatic cancellation when a quote is accepted, and no customisation of message timing or content beyond the platform defaults. A custom automation adds the multi-touch sequence, the conditional logic, and the ability to connect the follow-up data to your own reporting rather than keeping it siloed in the job management platform. If you are already using Xero for invoicing, the same infrastructure that runs your quote follow-ups can also handle accounts payable automation, which tends to reduce the overall build cost.
For a broader look at what can be automated in a trades business, see our automation use cases page.
Want this running in your business?
We build quote follow-up automations for Australian trades businesses. Fixed scope, working system, yours to keep. Book a free 45-minute discovery call and we will tell you exactly what is involved for your setup.
Book a free call ↗Written by Zakaria Cheurfi, founder of Zigital Automations. Zigital builds RPA and AI automation systems for Australian small and medium businesses.