Saturday morning, a 1930s semi. You spent an hour there: the old back boiler, the flue route, the gas run, where the condensate can go, a chat about combi or system with a cylinder. You priced it on Sunday night and sent it before bed. That was nine days ago. No yes, no no, not even a thumbs-up. Most owners read that silence as a no. Usually it isn’t one yet.
Why they’ve gone quiet
A new boiler or a bathroom is one of the bigger cheques a household writes, and nobody signs it on a Tuesday evening between tea and bath time. The usual reasons for silence have nothing to do with you:
They’re waiting on the third quote. They were told to get three. Two of you turned up. The third keeps rescheduling, and they don’t want to decide until they can compare.
It’s money. They’re waiting for payday, a bonus, a word with the bank, or a conversation with someone else in the house who hasn’t seen the quote yet.
The old one still works. It’s noisy and the pressure drops, but there’s heat. “We’ll do it before winter” is a plan, just not a date.
They can’t compare the quotes. Three different boilers, three guarantee lengths, one with a filter and controls, one without. Faced with that, a lot of people simply do nothing.
You can’t fix the first three. You can fix the fourth, and a good follow-up gently brings the other three into the open.
What a quote that gets answered contains
The follow-up starts with the quote. A homeowner holding three PDFs will go with the one they understand. Make yours the easy one to say yes to:
One short line explaining why your price is your price is worth more than a page of sales copy. “This includes a full system clean and a magnetic filter, which some quotes leave out” does the comparing for them.
One legal point while you’re writing it. When a consumer agrees a contract with you in their home, or at a distance by phone, email or messages, they usually have 14 days to cancel under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, and you have to give them the cancellation information. If they want you to start inside those 14 days, get that request from them in writing. Trading Standards can tell you exactly what applies to your setup.
Three messages, fixed days
Nagging is when the follow-up only says “any news?”. A good follow-up gives them something each time, and it stops. Pick fixed days so you aren’t deciding whether it’s too soon:
Day 2. “Hi Sarah, just checking the quote for the boiler came through OK. Any questions about it, just ask. Happy to explain any of it.”
Day 7. “Hi Sarah, if you’ve had other quotes and they’re hard to compare, send them over and I’ll tell you honestly where they differ from mine. No pressure either way.” People take you up on this more than you’d think, and it tells you where you stand.
Day 14. “Hi Sarah, I’m planning the next few weeks. Shall I keep your boiler price open, or close it off for now? Either’s completely fine, I just don’t want to keep bothering you.”
“Keep it open or close it off?” gives them an easy way to say no. People find that much easier to answer than silence.
Send them on WhatsApp or text, at a time a person would. Mid-morning on a weekday or early evening, never at 11pm when you’ve finally sat down to do the admin.
When to let it go
After the third message, stop. Chasing past that costs you time and goodwill and rarely wins the job. Instead, sort the reply into one of four piles:
One more rule: never use safety as a lever to chase a quote. If you found something dangerous on the survey, you dealt with it there and then. The follow-up is about the replacement they’re choosing, not about frightening anyone into it. Customers remember who was straight with them, and some of them come back two winters later.
Over a season, the “why did you go elsewhere?” answers are the most useful thing in this article. If it’s always price, look at what you’re including. If it’s always timing, look at how fast your quotes go out. It’s worth knowing where your evening admin time actually goes before you decide.
If writing quotes is the bit that slows you down, Datify can draft them for you from a WhatsApp message like “Quote for a boiler swap at 22 Mill Lane”, using your saved prices and quote terms, and send the PDF to your WhatsApp to check. Nothing goes to the customer until you approve it, unless you’ve set a rule for that kind of quote, and quotes still waiting on a customer show up in your daily summary. There’s a 14-day free trial, then it’s £37 a month.
Silence after a boiler or bathroom quote usually means they’re comparing, waiting on money or putting it off, not that they’ve said no. Send a quote they can compare easily, then three messages: day 2 to check it arrived, day 7 to offer help comparing, day 14 to ask whether to keep the price open or close it off. Then stop, and write down why the ones you lost went elsewhere.
Writes about what actually happens when you put an AI in charge of real business operations — including the parts that go wrong.