Why HVAC quotes go quiet: a 3-touch follow-up you can set up this week

You drove out, crawled through the attic, measured the return, priced three system options and sent a clean quote that evening. Then you heard nothing. A week later you're not sure whether to call, because you don't want to sound desperate. Two weeks later the homeowner has a new system from someone else, or they're still thinking it over and nobody asked them.

A quiet quote usually isn't a "no." Often nobody has decided yet, and the shop that follows up politely gets to answer the questions.

How often quotes go nowhere

Good numbers for residential HVAC quote conversion are hard to find, and we won't make one up. The closest published figures come from ServiceTitan's surveys, and both cover commercial contractors, not residential service shops:

• In a survey of more than 1,000 commercial specialty contractors (mostly plumbing, HVAC and electrical), the average bid conversion rate was 17.9%, and 70% of respondents converted less than 20% of their bids. (ServiceTitan, April 2025)
• In a separate survey of more than 1,000 commercial sales and marketing staff, 57% said they spend close to half their time on non-selling activities, and the release lists following up on estimates among the work that slows sales cycles down. (ServiceTitan, September 2025)

Caveats. Both are vendor-commissioned surveys (run by Thrive Analytics for ServiceTitan, which sells software to contractors), and ServiceTitan itself says it gives no assurance about the accuracy of the survey data. Commercial bids are not residential replacement quotes. Use these figures as a sign that most bids don't close and that follow-up is easy to drop. Don't use them as a benchmark for your shop. Your own number is in your FSM: quotes sent vs. quotes approved over the last 90 days.

Why quotes go quiet

None of the following is from a study. These are the common reasons owners give, and you'll recognize most of them:

• They're collecting quotes. You were one of two or three, and they haven't heard from the others yet.
• Someone else has to agree. A spouse, a landlord or an HOA.
• The options confused them. Good / better / best is great until someone can't tell why "better" costs $2,000 more.
• Money or financing questions they're embarrassed to ask.
• The urgency passed. The old unit limped back to life, or the weather turned.
• The quote got buried in their inbox under everything else.

Nearly every item on that list can be fixed with a short, friendly message that makes replying easy. None of them is fixed by a discount sent by a robot.

What a good follow-up looks like

1. Start early. The first touch comes while they still remember you.
2. Ask one easy question. "Any questions on the options, or want me to pencil in a date?" is easy to answer. "Just following up!" isn't.
3. Make replying effortless. A text they can answer in one line beats an email asking them to call the office.
4. Stop as soon as they reply. Any reply, even "not yet," goes to a person, and the automation stays out of it.
5. No prices, discounts or pressure in automated messages. If there's room on price, the owner or estimator should make that call in a conversation.
6. End cleanly. A last message that offers to close the quote ("Should we keep it open, or close it out? Either answer is fine") often gets a reply when nothing else did, and it lets everyone move on.
7. Hand the silent ones to a human. A big quote that got no reply after three texts deserves a phone call from the owner, not a fourth text.

The 3 touches

These are the defaults in our recipe. The timings are our judgment, not research, so adjust them for your market and your customers.

When	What	Example
Day 2	Check-in with the quote link	"Hi Sam, it's Rob at Acme Heating. Checking you got our quote for the furnace replacement. Happy to answer any questions - just reply here. [link] Reply STOP to opt out."
Day 5	A short, personal note, drafted by AI within strict rules	"Hi Sam, Rob here from Acme Heating. Any questions on the furnace quote, or want me to find a time that works for you?"
Day 10	A polite close-out	"Hi Sam, Acme Heating again - last check-in on the furnace quote. Should we keep it open for you, or close it out? Either answer is fine."
After that	The owner gets a list of quotes that stayed silent through all 3 texts, to call personally	"#1042 Sam Lee $9,850 (11d, no reply after 3 texts)"

Rules the sequence follows:

• At least 2 days between touches, and never two texts on the same day.
• A reply from the customer pauses everything for that phone number and forwards the text to the office.
• Quotes approved in your FSM drop out automatically.
• Customers marked as opted out are never texted.
• Quotes older than 21 days that were never followed up go to the owner, so nobody gets a cold text out of nowhere.

The day-5 message is written by an AI model, which keeps it from reading like a template, but it has guardrails. It must use the customer's first name and stay under 300 characters, and it may not mention prices, discounts, financing, links or deadlines. A draft that breaks any rule is swapped for a safe template. In our tests, a small model once wrote the message as if the customer were asking the company for help. We added a check for that, and we suggest you read the first few real drafts before you trust it.

Before you build anything: check your FSM

If you're on Jobber Connect or higher, Jobber has built-in quote follow-ups (Jobber pricing). Try those first. Building your own sequence makes sense when you're on a plan without them, or when you want the owner hand-off, the AI-written middle touch or the reply handling described above.

The recipe: 3-touch quote follow-up for Jobber

The quote follow-up recipe is a downloadable n8n workflow that does all of the above with Jobber and Twilio.

• Cost on published pricing: about $2 to $3 a month in texts for 40 quotes, plus n8n. It shares the Twilio number and A2P registration with the missed-call recipe. The recipe page shows the arithmetic.
• What we tested: day counting, the touch rules, no double texts, reply pausing, opt-outs, the owner hand-off and the AI guardrails all ran end to end in n8n against mock versions of Jobber and Twilio. We have not run it against a live Jobber account, and the query that finds quotes awaiting a response is based on a community copy of Jobber's schema, so check it in Jobber's GraphiQL explorer first.
• What we don't know: how much it will lift your close rate. We haven't measured that, and we won't guess.

How to tell if it's working

Write down your quote-to-job rate for the 90 days before you turn the sequence on. Use Jobber's quote reports or a simple export: quotes sent, quotes approved, and dollar value approved. Check the same numbers after 60 to 90 days. Also count the replies to the day-10 close-out. Even a "no thanks" is useful, because it tells you why you lost the job.

Sources

• ServiceTitan, Commercial Specialty Contractor Industry Report press release (April 10, 2025). Survey of 1,000+ commercial specialty contractors by Thrive Analytics for ServiceTitan. servicetitan.com
• ServiceTitan, Commercial Sales and Marketing Report press release (September 30, 2025). Survey of 1,000+ commercial sales and marketing staff, July 2025. servicetitan.com
• Jobber pricing page for plan features, and Twilio and OpenAI pricing for the cost arithmetic, as linked on the recipe page.