Quoting faster and winning more of them

Why speed beats price more often than you would think

When someone needs a job doing they are anxious about it. They have usually asked three firms. The first decent quote that lands turns the anxiety off. By the time the second and third arrive, the customer has half-decided, and the later quotes have to be noticeably cheaper to change their mind.

The window is short. Quote the same day and you are in the running. Quote a week later and you are mostly quoting for practice.

Where the time actually goes

Be honest about your own process. The visit takes 40 minutes. Then the quote sits in your head for three days because writing it up means an evening at the laptop, looking up prices, remembering what the customer said about the tiles, and typing it into a Word document you made in 2019.

The fix is to stop treating the quote as a separate job and start building it on site, on your phone, while the detail is fresh.

Build a price list you can price from

Most of what you do is a variation on a dozen jobs. Sit down once and write out your standard prices: a day of your labour, the common materials you use, the typical mark-up, and set prices for the jobs you do over and over. A boiler swap is a boiler swap; the house changes, the sum barely does.

Put the list in the notes app on your phone. When you are standing in the customer's kitchen, you can assemble 80 percent of the quote from that list before you get back in the van.

• Your day rate and half-day rate
• Prices for the five to ten jobs you quote most
• Standard materials with a rough current cost
• Your mark-up rule, so you are not deciding it fresh every time
• Add-ons you often forget: skip, parking, waste, access

Take the notes on site, not from memory

While you are there, photograph everything relevant: the existing boiler and its label, the fuse board, the roof from the garden, the room from the door. Dictate a voice note the moment you get back in the van: what they want, what they said about budget, anything unusual about access. Two minutes now saves an hour of trying to remember on Thursday.

Send the quote the same day, in a form that looks like a business

A price scrawled in a text is fast but it looks like a bloke in a van. A PDF, or better a quote page on your own website with your name and logo at the top, looks like a firm that will turn up. Both can be sent the same day; the difference is a template you set up once.

The quote itself should be short and clear. What you are doing, what it costs, what is included, what is not, how long it will take and when you could start. One page. Customers do not want a novel, they want to know the number and whether they can trust you to do it.

Several of the fixed-fee systems aimed at one-van trades include branded quote pages as standard; our sole trader agency round-up covers which. If you are not paying for a system, a free PDF template with your logo does the job.

A worked example

Say a decorator visits a three-bed semi to quote for a hall, stairs and landing. On site she photographs the walls, the staircase and the ceiling height, and notes the customer wants a specific paint. From her phone list she knows that job is normally three and a half days of her labour, plus paint and sundries. She dictates a voice note in the van: 'HSL, Ingleby, high ceiling on landing, wants Farrow & Ball, needs doing before Christmas.'

That evening, 15 minutes in her quote template: three and a half days at her rate, materials with mark-up, a line for the extra height, a start date in two weeks. PDF sent by 7pm with two photos of a similar job she did in the spring. The customer, who was expecting to hear from three decorators sometime next week, says yes on Tuesday.

Nothing clever happened. She just had a list, took notes, and sent it the same day.

Follow up without chasing

Most quotes that go quiet are not rejections. The customer got busy, or is waiting for the other two, or lost the email. One polite follow-up after three or four days recovers a good number of them: 'Hi Mark, just checking the quote came through all right and whether you had any questions. No rush either way.'

If you still hear nothing a week later, one more message, then stop. A quote tracker, even a notebook with columns for sent, followed up and outcome, means you never forget one and never chase twice. Some systems automate the follow-up text, which is useful once your volume is high enough that you lose track.

Learn from the ones you lose

When you lose one, ask why. Most customers will tell you if you ask nicely: 'No problem at all, would you mind telling me what swung it?' You will hear 'price' a lot, but you will also hear 'the other chap could start sooner' and 'he sent a proper quote', which are things you can fix.

Track your win rate by month. If you quote 20 and win 6, that is 30 percent. Knowing that figure also lets you work out what an enquiry is worth, which is the foundation of how much you should spend on marketing in the first place.

Where this sits in the bigger picture

Marketing gets the phone to ring. Answering it keeps the customer, which we cover in answering the phone when you're on the tools. Quoting quickly turns the call into a job. Of the three, quoting is the one almost entirely in your hands and almost entirely free to improve.

A trade that quotes within a day, in a format that looks like a business, and follows up once, will out-earn a trade with twice the marketing budget and a three-day quote lag. Fix this before you spend.

Frequently asked questions