Every shop we set up asks the same question in the first week: when should the first follow-up go out? Most owners guess a week. A few say never, because they don't want to look desperate. Our starter cadences send the first text on day 2, and this issue is about why.
What happens after the estimate leaves
Picture quote 001047. Dev walks Marisol's basement on Monday afternoon and sends the quote from the truck at 7:02 the next morning. She opens it on her phone at 7:40, on the way out the door. That night she sits down with a laptop and reads the options for six minutes. By Wednesday morning she has opened it three times.
Those opens are the quote doing its job. They are also the window. Marisol has questions: how long is the power off, does the car charger have to go in now, is Better really better. If nobody answers them, she will ask the next contractor who comes by, and that contractor will be standing in her basement when he answers.
By day 4, the conversation has moved on
On a big home job the customer usually gets two or three bids. The first one sets the scope, the second one gets compared to it, and somewhere around the third visit the household starts deciding. A follow-up that lands after that point is asking about a decision that already has momentum somewhere else.
Day 2 lands while your quote is still the one they are measuring the others against. It doesn't have to sell anything. It only has to make it easy to ask the question they already have.
Day 2 means the second calendar day after sending, at a sensible hour. A quote sent Tuesday morning gets its text Thursday at 9:00. Weekends move to Monday unless you turn weekends on.
What the day 2 text should say
Short, from a person, with one question and the link. The starter text reads: "Hi Marisol, it's Dev from Pellwick Electric. Any questions on quote 001047? Happy to walk you through it." Then the link. That's it. No "just checking in", no discount, no deadline.
- Use the rep's first name, not the company's. People answer people.
- Ask one question. "Any questions?" gets more replies than "Are you ready to move forward?"
- Keep it under 160 characters so it arrives as one text.
- Include the link, every time. The reply often comes after they open it again.
How not to be a pest
The fear behind waiting a week is a fair one. Nobody wants to be the contractor who texts every day. That is what stop rules are for. The moment Marisol replies, signs or says no, the cadence stops. If she opens the quote three times in a day, the next step is a phone call from Dev, not another automated text.
Most customers never see more than two messages. The ones who see all three are the ones who haven't answered anything, and for them the third message is usually the one that gets a "sorry, we went another way". That is worth knowing too: a quote marked lost with a reason is better than one that sits in Opened until spring.
Try it on next week's quotes
If your cadence starts on day 5 or later, move the first step to day 2 for a month and watch which slips move out of Opened. Change it back if it doesn't suit your customers. It is your cadence, and the call is yours.