The Average Contractor Loses $4,000 a Month in Unanswered Quotes. Here's Why
By QuotePilot Team
You send the quote. You do a good job putting it together. You follow up once, maybe twice. Then nothing. The homeowner goes quiet and you assume they went with someone cheaper.
That’s probably not what happened.
Most unconverted quotes aren’t lost because of price. They’re lost because the homeowner got busy, compared a few options, and hired the contractor who stayed top of mind. That contractor wasn’t necessarily better or cheaper. They just showed up more consistently.
The math on what this costs you is uncomfortable.
What the numbers actually say
The average home service business converts somewhere between 5 and 10 percent of its quoted work into jobs. That sounds low, and it is, but it’s the industry norm, not an outlier. HVAC contractors average a 43 percent close rate on replacement proposals according to a survey of over 1,000 contractors by the Air Conditioning Contractors of America. Roofing sits around 27 percent for most operations. General trades vary, but most owner-operators hovering below 30 percent are leaving real money on the table.
Here’s the thing about those numbers: top performers aren’t better technicians. They close more because they follow up more. WebFX’s 2026 home services benchmarks show the gap between high and low performers is about 3X on close rate, not because one group is dramatically more skilled, but because one group has a system and one doesn’t.
Do the math on your own business. If you’re sending 20 quotes a month at an average job value of $3,000, that’s $60,000 in monthly opportunities. At a 10 percent close rate, $6,000 converts. At a 20 percent close rate, still nothing impressive, $12,000 converts. That’s $6,000 a month, or $72,000 a year, from the exact same lead volume. No additional marketing spend. No new truck. Just better follow-up.
For an HVAC contractor sending quotes in the $7,500 to $15,000 range, those numbers get bigger fast.
Homeowners aren’t ignoring you on purpose
This is the part most contractors misunderstand. When a quote goes cold, it feels like rejection. It usually isn’t.
A 2022 ArcSite survey of over 1,000 homeowners found that 95 percent of them get more than one bid before hiring a contractor. Most get three or more. They’re not being difficult, they’re doing what feels responsible for a significant purchase. An HVAC replacement or a new roof is a $5,000 to $20,000 decision. Of course they’re shopping around.
What actually determines who wins that job is simpler than most contractors think. A Service Direct survey of 559 homeowners found that 60 percent make their hiring decision within 72 hours of receiving quotes. A 2025 study of 422 verified homeowners found that 69 percent said price was NOT the most important factor. They prioritized feeling informed, trusting the contractor, and being respected through the process.
That last point is worth sitting with. Homeowners are anxious about home projects. Angi’s 2024 State of Home Spending report found that home repairs were the single most stressful budget item for Americans last year, ahead of healthcare, childcare, and debt. A contractor who follows up with a friendly, professional message isn’t being pushy. They’re reducing that anxiety. They’re the one who seems reliable.
The contractor who sends a quote and disappears is sending an unintentional message: I’m probably too busy to care about your project.
The follow-up problem is simpler than you think
If follow-up is this valuable, why don’t more contractors do it?
The honest answer is time. You’re a one- or two-person operation. You’re on job sites during the day and handling scheduling and invoicing at night. Sitting down to send a personalized follow-up to every open quote isn’t realistic. You write the follow-up to the big roofing job because the stakes are obvious. The $800 gutter cleaning quote sits in Jobber with no response and eventually you forget about it.
Multiply that across 20 quotes a month and the math starts making sense.
Here’s what the research says about follow-up persistence, and it’s a little alarming: 48 percent of salespeople never make any follow-up attempt at all after the first contact. 44 percent give up after a single try. Yet 80 percent of successful sales require five or more follow-up contacts. Not five calls. Five total touches: texts, emails, a call. Five moments where you reminded the customer you exist and you’d like the job.
Most contractors do one. Top performers do five or more. That gap is almost entirely the reason for the 3X close rate difference.
Speed matters as much as persistence
There’s a landmark study from MIT, published in the Harvard Business Review, that analyzed 2.24 million sales leads. The finding that contractors should print out and put on their wall: responding to a quote inquiry within five minutes makes you 21 times more likely to qualify the lead compared to waiting 30 minutes. Waiting longer than an hour drops your chances by 60 times compared to responding within the first minute.
For a home service business, speed matters in two places. First, when a homeowner submits an inquiry. Second, after you send the quote.
On the second one, the data from Hatch, which serves thousands of home service contractors, is clear: 78 percent of jobs go to the first contractor who responds and stays responsive. Not the cheapest. Not the most experienced. The most responsive.
The average lead response time across industries is 42 to 47 hours. That means if you follow up on your quotes within a day, you’re already ahead of most of the market.
What a real follow-up sequence looks like
You don’t need to be aggressive to be effective. The contractors who close more aren’t the ones who won’t leave homeowners alone. They’re the ones who show up at the right moments with the right message.
A simple sequence that works for most trades looks like this:
The same day you send the quote, confirm it went through with a short text. Something like: “Hey [name], just sent over your quote for [project]. Let me know if you have any questions or want to walk through anything.” That’s it. Two sentences. It opens the door without pressure.
Two days later, a brief check-in. “Following up on the quote, want to make sure you received it okay.” Again, low pressure. You’re making sure they’re not stuck on something.
Five days after sending, another touch, this time with a bit more context. Mention your availability, a warranty detail, or something specific to their project that shows you were paying attention. This is where you start differentiating from the contractor who sent a quote and vanished.
Nine days out, one more text. Something like: “Still happy to answer any questions on the [project] quote. No rush, just didn’t want it to fall through the cracks.”
At two weeks, a final check-in and then you move on. If they haven’t responded by now, they’ve either hired someone else or life got in the way. A last message like “I’m going to close out this quote in my system, but if the timing works out later, reach out anytime” leaves the door open without chasing.
That’s four to five touches across two weeks. Most contractors do zero to one. That sequence alone, applied consistently to every quote, is what separates contractors with 10 percent close rates from contractors with 25 percent close rates.
Why SMS beats email for follow-up
If you’re following up by email only, you’re fighting an uphill battle. SMS open rates sit at 98 percent while email averages 20 to 28 percent. The average text message is read within three minutes. The average email takes 90 minutes to get a response, if it gets one at all.
This matters for contractors specifically because your customers are often homeowners who aren’t sitting at a computer checking email during the day. They’re picking up kids, running errands, or in meetings. A text reaches them where they actually are.
Jobber’s own data shows that sending quotes via text improves win rate by 16 percent compared to email only. That’s not a small number. One in six additional quotes won just from changing the delivery method.
For quote follow-up, the right approach is text-first with email as backup. A short, conversational text gets read. A detailed email with the full breakdown gets filed and forgotten.
The automation argument
Here’s the real reason most contractors don’t follow up: it requires sitting down, pulling up the contact, writing a message, and sending it. When you multiply that across 15 or 20 open quotes, it becomes a job in itself. It competes with every other thing you need to do to run your business.
The contractors who consistently close at 20 to 30 percent aren’t manually sending five texts per open quote. They have a system, either a process a team member owns or software that handles it automatically.
Automated follow-up isn’t impersonal. A text that says “Hey Dave, just checking in on the HVAC quote from last Thursday, let me know if you have questions” feels personal to Dave even if the system sent it. He doesn’t know the difference. He just knows you followed up.
What he definitely notices is when you don’t.
The ROI is real
One recovered job covers months of investment in any follow-up system. A roofing contractor recovering one additional $12,000 job per month from better follow-up earns $144,000 in additional annual revenue from the same marketing spend, the same truck, and the same crew.
An HVAC contractor picking up two additional replacements per month at $8,000 each is looking at $192,000 in recovered revenue annually.
These aren’t inflated projections. They’re what happens when a contractor goes from a 10 percent close rate to a 20 percent close rate, a change that’s achievable without a single new lead.
The opportunity cost of not following up isn’t zero. It’s the jobs you’re already paying to generate that you’re handing to competitors who remembered to send a text.
QuotePilot connects to Jobber and Housecall Pro and automatically sends SMS and email follow-up sequences the moment a quote goes into “awaiting response” status and stops the second it’s approved or closed. No manual work. No missed quotes. Setup takes about ten minutes.
If you’re sending more than ten quotes a month and closing less than 30 percent, the follow-up gap is probably your biggest revenue lever. Try QuotePilot free for 14 days.