A follow-up is a brief reminder sent after a quote, to a customer who has neither accepted nor declined it. It is not a sales pitch and not a new offer. It says the quote is still there, gives the customer an easy way to answer, and invites questions. Follow-ups work because most quotes that go unanswered have not been rejected. The customer is waiting on a partner, a payday, a second quote or simply a quiet ten minutes, and a reminder arrives at the moment they have it.
A good follow-up is short, carries the quote or a way to accept it, and stops as soon as the customer answers. Two or three, spaced out over about ten days, cover most quotes. Beyond that the messages start to cost goodwill rather than earn answers.
In practice
A fencing contractor sends 30 quotes in a month. Eleven are accepted within two days without any reminder. Of the 19 left, a reminder at two days and another at five bring answers from ten customers: four accept and six decline, three of them giving a reason. The other nine never reply. With follow-ups, the month ends with 15 jobs won from 30 quotes instead of 11, and six reasons for losing that the contractor would never otherwise have heard.
What a follow-up should not do matters as much. It should not drop the price, because a discount in a reminder teaches customers to wait for one. It should not ask why the customer has not answered. And it should not reach a customer who has already said yes, which is what happens when reminders are kept in a diary and the yes arrives by text. The guide to following up without being a pest goes into the wording.
In Quote Desk
On Starter and Crew, pressing Follow up automatically on a sent quote schedules three reminder emails, two, five and ten days later, each with the accept link. Any answer from the customer cancels the reminders still to go. The Free plan has no follow-ups; how follow-ups work has the detail.