The short version
You quote a job. The customer says "great, let me check a couple of things." Then nothing — from them, and from you, because the desk got busy. Three days later they've hired the van somewhere else.
That hire wasn't lost on price or fleet. It was lost because nobody followed it up. Following up is the cheapest win in the business — no ad spend, no new vehicle, just going back to people who've already told you they're interested. And most of your competitors don't do it, which is exactly why it works.
The catch: it can't run on memory. On a busy desk, the follow-up is always the thing that gets parked. So it has to be a habit with a bit of structure behind it — not a personality trait.
Why the follow-up slips
Picture a Friday. Three vehicles going out, a damage query on a return, two people at the counter and the phone going. Someone rings for a quote, you give them a price, they say they'll think about it. You mean to chase it Monday. Monday is its own Friday.
Nobody dropped the ball on purpose. The enquiry just never had anywhere to live except someone's memory — and memory loses to a busy hire desk every single time.
Where your enquiries actually live right now
Before you can follow anything up, you have to be able to see it. And for most hire desks, the enquiries aren't in one place — they're scattered everywhere.
Think about where a single week's enquiries actually land:
- Phone calls — the biggest source, and the one that most often vanishes. A price given over the phone on a Tuesday afternoon, no note made, and by Wednesday there's no record it ever happened. If nobody wrote it down, you can't follow it up — you don't even know it existed.
- The website form — drops into one inbox, often a shared info@ address nobody really owns. Read by whoever opens it first, actioned if they've time, forgotten if they haven't.
- Personal inboxes and mobiles — the regular who texts the owner's mobile direct; the email that went to one person because the customer had their card. Fine, until that person's on holiday.
- Facebook and Instagram — a message sitting in a social account only one person checks, maybe not till the evening. High intent, no visibility to the rest of the desk.
- Walk-ins and the notepad — scribbled on a pad by the till, a whiteboard, or the back of a job sheet.
Here's the problem underneath all of it: there's no single list of who's asked you for what. Every enquiry is "owned" by whoever happened to catch it. Nobody can see the full picture, so nobody can work the follow-ups as a job — because there's no list to work from.
And it's fragile. When an enquiry lives in one person's inbox, one person's phone, or one person's memory, a day off is all it takes for it to go cold. Nobody else knows it's there to chase.
So a big part of the "we're bad at following up" problem isn't really discipline at all. It's that the enquiries are split across phones, inboxes, apps and notepads with no shared view. You can't chase what you can't see — and right now, most of it can't be seen.
What the evidence — and other operators — show
This gap is measurable, and bigger than most would guess. A 2025 UK mystery-shopper study of professional services firms found entire sectors doing nothing after first contact — in property services, not one firm followed up on phone or web enquiries — and only about one in fifteen gave a first response the researchers rated "exceptional" (insight6 / Moneypenny, 2025).
The flip side is what happens when a business simply starts doing it. One tradesman, after years of sending quotes and hoping, described his conversion jumping from 15% to 35% almost overnight once he followed up properly — same quotes, same prices, same work — six figures a year he'd been leaving on the table. Neither that nor the numbers later in this guide are controlled studies; they're individual accounts. But they all point the same way, and they match what operators find on their own desks.
You don't need to be slick. You need to be the one who actually goes back.
Read the temperature — not every enquiry needs the same chase
Here's the thing experience teaches that no template will: how hard you follow up should depend on how warm the enquiry is.
A hot lead — someone who needs a van this week, has asked about a specific vehicle, wants to know how to pay — usually needs one good nudge. They're ready; you're just removing the last bit of friction. Chase these fast and light.
A warm lead — interested, but the timing isn't nailed down, or they're weighing you against one other yard — often takes several touches before they respond. That's not them playing games; life gets in the way. This is where most operators give up too early, and it's exactly where the hires are hiding.
Then there's the not-yet — a real enquiry whose job hasn't landed, or whose need is a month off. These aren't dead. They go quiet and come back, sometimes weeks later, when the work turns up.
Match your effort to the heat. Chase a hot lead like it's warm and you'll close it. Chase every cold quote like it's hot and you'll waste your week and annoy people. The skill is telling them apart.
A cadence that works — and where to stop
For a live quote you actually want to win, a simple rhythm covers most of it:
- Same day — send the quote, clearly, with a plain next step ("happy to hold this vehicle — just say the word").
- Next day — a short nudge if you've heard nothing. This is the one most people skip, and it's the highest-value touch you'll make.
- A few days on — one more check-in, ideally offering something useful (availability, a question about their dates) rather than just "any thoughts?".
- Then space it right out — drop to the long-tail rhythm below.
And know where to stop. Hammering a live quote daily doesn't win it — it gets you marked as a pain and, if you're texting, gets you an opt-out. A few well-judged touches beats a barrage. After that, silence is usually a "not now," not a "never" — so you keep them warm, you don't keep chasing.
Don't bin a quiet quote — the long tail is real
The quote that goes quiet is not a lost quote. You've seen it: someone you priced a month or two ago suddenly rings, ready to go, because the job finally landed.
The numbers point the same way — a long-cited figure is that most people asking for a price won't buy for at least three months, and a fifth take more than a year (Marketing Donut; treat as directional rather than gospel). Either way, the lesson holds: a dead-looking quote is often just early.
So after the active chase, don't delete it — park it on a light, occasional check-in. A friendly "still here if that job's back on" every few weeks costs you nothing and catches the ones whose timing simply wasn't right first time. That habit alone quietly rebuilds a pipeline most yards throw away.
Email and text together — the combination that gets replies
The most reliable way to get a response is the one you've probably already found by trial: send the detail by email, then follow it with a short text.
They do different jobs. Email carries the quote, the terms, the numbers — things a customer wants to read properly and keep. But email is easy to leave sitting unread. A text is almost impossible to ignore: texts are opened within minutes and answered far more often than email (SMS sees roughly a 98% open rate and around 45% replies against email's ~20% and ~6% — though the headline open rate is estimated, so lean on the speed, not the exact figure). One service business that tested it on quotes saw bookings rise from 19% to 31% simply by adding a follow-up text (a single example, but a telling one).
The move is simple: "Just emailed your quote over for the Transit — anything you want me to talk through?" The email does the explaining; the text gets the reply.
One caution, because a lot of your customers are sole traders: texting and emailing individuals for marketing is covered by UK rules (PECR) — you need a lawful basis and a clear opt-out. Following up a quote someone asked you for is on solid ground; blasting an old list is not. Keep it to people who've actually enquired. (Not legal advice — just worth keeping on the right side of.)
What doing this by hand actually costs
Following up properly is worth it — but be honest that, done by hand, it's real work for a real person. And the phone is the heavy part: taking an inbound enquiry call, or ringing someone back, easily runs 10–20 minutes a time once you've talked the job through and taken the details. It helps to put a number on the whole lot.
Here's roughly what handling and following up enquiries properly takes out of one person's week — shown for a quieter desk and a busier one (assume around half your enquiries come in by phone):
| The job, done by hand | ~20 enquiries/wk | ~40 enquiries/wk |
|---|---|---|
| Taking inbound enquiry calls (10–20 min each) | ~2.5 hrs | ~5 hrs |
| Logging every enquiry — calls, forms, emails, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — into one list | ~1 hr | ~2 hrs |
| Following up: callbacks (10–20 min each) plus email and text nudges | ~2.5 hrs | ~5 hrs |
| Working out where each deal's at — re-reading threads, checking who's already chased it | ~0.75 hr | ~1.25 hrs |
| Reviewing the quiet, older quotes and sending a light check-in | ~0.75 hr | ~1.25 hrs |
| Total | ~7.5 hrs/wk | ~14.5 hrs/wk |
Now put a cost on the time. The UK National Living Wage is £12.71 an hour from April 2026, a hire-desk person is usually a bit above that, and once you add employer National Insurance, pension and holiday the true cost is realistically around £16 an hour. So:
- At ~20 enquiries a week: ~7.5 hrs × ~£16 ≈ £120 a week — roughly £520 a month, or about £6,200 a year.
- At ~40 enquiries a week: ~14.5 hrs × ~£16 ≈ £230 a week — roughly £1,000 a month, or about £12,000 a year. That's the best part of half a person, on enquiry handling and follow-up alone.
Two honest points. First, it's illustrative — plug in your own volume, your own phone-to-online split, and your own wage cost, because yours will differ. Second, and more important: that's the cost of doing it well. The far more common reality is it gets done partially, in gaps, when there's time — which means the real cost isn't the wage bill at all. It's the hires that quietly walk because the follow-up never happened. One extra van out on hire a month usually covers that whole labour cost several times over. The leak is always bigger than the wage.
Fixing it: the manual way, and the automated way
You don't need to buy anything to fix most of this. You need one place and one habit.
The manual method (costs nothing but discipline):
- Pick one place for everything. One shared list every enquiry goes into — a shared spreadsheet, a shared inbox, or a single WhatsApp Business number — so no enquiry is trapped in one person's phone or memory.
- Do one daily sweep. One person, once or twice a day, checks every channel and copies every new enquiry into the one list. Dull, but it plugs the biggest leak in the business.
- Run one follow-up rule everyone knows. Same-day quote, next-day nudge, day-four check-in, then space out. Put the dates in a shared diary so they actually happen.
- Review the quiet quotes monthly. Run down the old ones and send a light "still here if it's back on."
- Email then text, every time.
Do that and you'll already be ahead of most of your competition — because most of them do none of it.
Where a system takes over:
The manual method works, but it leans entirely on someone holding the discipline every day, forever — and that's the bit that breaks on a busy Friday. This is the gap RouleurCo is built to close:
- Every channel — web form, phone, email, Facebook, Instagram — feeds one place automatically, so there's no daily sweep and nothing lands in a personal inbox no one else sees.
- The follow-up sequence runs itself — email, then a text nudge — at the right intervals, so the chase happens whether or not anyone remembered.
- Quiet quotes resurface on their own weeks later, instead of dying in a spreadsheet.
- The whole desk sees one pipeline. Nothing is "owned" by whoever caught it, and a day off no longer means lost enquiries.
Common questions
How many times should I follow up?
It depends on the heat. A hot, ready-to-go enquiry often needs one nudge. A warm one can take several over a couple of weeks. Beyond that, stop chasing and switch to an occasional keep-in-touch — persistence wins hires, pestering loses them.
Email or text — which is better?
Both, in that order. Email carries the quote and the detail; a short text afterwards is what actually gets it read and answered. Texts are opened in minutes; emails often sit.
When should I give up on a quote?
Rarely completely. After a few unanswered touches, treat it as "not now," not "never," and move it to a light check-in every few weeks. Quotes reactivate weeks or months later far more often than people expect.
Isn't chasing customers annoying?
Chasing badly is — daily "any update?" texts get you blocked. Following up well isn't: a timely, useful, well-spaced nudge reads as good service, not pressure. Most customers don't reply because they forgot, not because they're avoiding you.
Do I need a CRM to do this?
No. You can do all of it by hand with one shared list, a daily sweep, and a diary — and it works. Just be honest about the cost: it's the best part of a day of someone's week, closer to two once you're busy, and it only holds while the discipline holds. A system is for when you'd rather the follow-up didn't depend on someone remembering.
What about all my old quotes?
They're a pipeline, not a graveyard — as long as the people asked you for a price in the first place. A periodic, friendly check-in to past enquirers turns up work you'd written off. Just mind the opt-out rules on marketing to individuals.