Quote Follow-Up Automation for Tradies

The default sequence is three touchpoints over seven days: a same-day SMS confirming the quote arrived, a day-three email asking whether they have any questions, and a day-seven final check-in before the quote expires. You can shorten it, stretch it, or add a touchpoint — big building quotes often suit a longer rhythm, urgent electrical work a shorter one. Whatever you configure, the hard stops are the same: the sequence ends the moment the customer replies, accepts, declines or opts out, and you can close any quote manually at any time. It never keeps hammering someone who has already said no.

The messages come from your business name and number, using templates you approved during setup — so they read like a text you sent between jobs, not a marketing blast. There’s no do-not-reply address, and replies land in a real conversation: jump in yourself, or let the AI handle the response and book the job. Most customers simply experience a tradie who’s organised enough to follow up. If you’d rather be upfront, add a line saying your office system sends quote reminders — plenty of tradies do. What customers actually notice is that you cared enough to check in.

Yes. Connect ServiceM8 or Tradify — Fergus, simPRO and AroFlo work the same way — and the AI watches for quotes marked as sent. It pulls the customer’s name and mobile, the quote number and the GST-inclusive amount, then starts the sequence automatically. No exporting, no copy-paste. Every SMS and email is written back to the job record, so anyone opening the job in your software sees the full history, and an acceptance updates the quote status ready for scheduling. If you quote outside a job platform — from email or as a PDF — you can BCC or forward quotes to a dedicated address and get the same result.

Yes. In approval mode, every follow-up is queued to your phone before it goes anywhere — tap approve, edit the wording, or skip that touchpoint entirely. It takes seconds and keeps you in full control while you build trust in the system. We’d suggest running approval mode for the first couple of weeks, tweaking a template or two, then flipping standard jobs to fully automatic and keeping approvals for big-ticket quotes only. The templates are always yours: written with you at setup, editable any time, with merge fields for the customer’s name, the job and the quote amount so nothing reads generic.

Everything stops, instantly. An acceptance — an SMS reply, an email, or the quote being accepted inside ServiceM8 or Tradify — kills the remaining touchpoints, so the customer never gets a chase-up for a job they’ve already said yes to. You get an SMS straight away, the quote is marked accepted in your job software, and the job is ready to book: the AI can offer the customer available times and slot the work into your calendar on the spot. From there your normal workflow takes over — scheduling, deposit invoicing through your Xero or MYOB connection, and whatever contract paperwork your state requires before you start.

Both end the sequence just as fast as a yes. A decline gets a short, courteous sign-off — thanks for the chance to quote, we’re here if anything changes — which protects the relationship, because plenty of no-for-now customers come back months later. A change request is flagged to you immediately with the customer’s message attached, so you can revise the quote and re-send it; the sequence then restarts against the new version. Either way the reason is captured against the quote, so over a few months you build a real picture of why quotes are being lost — price, timing, or slow response — instead of guessing.