How to Find Every Cold Quote in Your CRM (and What to Do With Them)

The average home service contractor sends a quote, waits, and sends nothing else. Hatch's 2025 Home Improvement Industry Report shows the multi-touch response rate hits 89.86% when contractors actually follow up. The single-touch response rate is 32.39%.

That gap is the difference between a $1M shop and a $5M shop. Same leads. Same quotes. Different follow-up discipline.

This is how you find every cold quote in your CRM, segment by recoverable value, and run the outreach that brings the stalled ones back.

What Counts as a Cold Quote

A quote is cold if all three are true. It was sent more than 14 days ago. The customer has not signed or paid a deposit. Nobody from your team has touched the record in the last 7 days.

Inside 14 days, most homeowners are still comparing options. After 14 days with no contact, the deal stalls. After 30 days, the customer assumes you forgot or no longer want the job.

Hatch's 2025 data makes the timing concrete. Quote follow-up within 24-48 hours has the highest conversion, second-touch at 5-7 days adds a meaningful lift, and a third touch at 14 days is what closes the long-tail deals. Most shops do the first two and skip the third, leaving 20-30% of recoverable quotes on the table.

ServiceTitan's 2024 home services report frames it as one of the cleanest opportunities in the trades: every $1 spent on disciplined quote follow-up returns $4-$8, depending on average ticket. The math beats almost any other marketing spend.

Text Clint: "list all unsigned quotes older than 14 days sorted by total descending"

Why Quotes Go Cold

Three reasons, ranked by frequency.

Reason 1: The CSR or salesperson never circled back. Most field service teams send the quote and consider the work done. The sales motion ends at "estimate sent" instead of "deposit paid." Hatch's data shows this single gap costs contractors 25-40% of recoverable quote revenue.

Reason 2: The customer is shopping. They got two or three quotes. Yours is one of them. Without a follow-up, the customer goes with whoever called them back first, which is rarely the most competitive bid.

Reason 3: Real objections that nobody surfaced. Price, timing, scope, financing. The customer needs a conversation to resolve. The quote sits in their inbox while they think about it forever.

A plumbing owner on r/sweatystartup put it bluntly in 2024: "Half the quotes we marked as 'thinking about it' were customers who never heard from us again. We had no follow-up system. Built one. Booked 28% more of those quotes the next quarter." That is exactly the gap the 5-touch follow-up cadence for cold leads is built to fix.

That tracks with Drift's lead response data. Speed and persistence both matter. Fast first response wins the lead. Persistent follow-up wins the close.

Text Clint: "show me cold quotes between $5,000 and $25,000 sent in the last 60 days"

The Five Cold-Quote Segments

A working follow-up sequence starts with segments. A blast to every cold quote with the same message converts at 1-2%. Segmented sends convert at 8-15%.

Segment 1: Sent 14-30 days, no contact since send. The biggest bucket and the easiest recovery. These customers have not heard from you. A polite check-in often books the deal.

Segment 2: Sent 30-60 days, one follow-up that got no response. Needs a different angle. Reference the time gap. Offer something specific (financing, scheduling flexibility, a small discount on add-ons).

Segment 3: Sent 60-90 days, multiple follow-ups, ghosted. Lower yield, but the high-ticket ones are still worth a final touch. Half of these are real dead. The other half had something change in their life and need a clean reason to come back.

Segment 4: Sent over 90 days, never explicitly closed. These are the dead leads worth $10K each. Different message altogether. Reference the original work, the season, why now might be different.

Segment 5: High-value quotes over $15K at any age. Always worth a phone call, not a text. Big tickets justify a salesperson's time. Often the difference between a 5% close rate on a blast and a 30% close rate on a structured callback.

Each segment gets a different message, and the close rates can vary 3-5x between the best and worst segment.

Find Them With These Queries

The query shape is the same in Jobber, Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Workiz, and GoHighLevel. Field names vary. The logic does not. CRM-specific call-list playbooks live in who to call next in Housecall Pro (5 callback sources, 7:30 AM routine) and who to call next in GoHighLevel (5 Smart Lists for callback prioritization).

Query 1: All unsigned quotes older than 14 days. Pull every estimate where signed_at is null, sent_at is more than 14 days ago, and status is not won, lost, or expired. Sort by total descending.

Text Clint: "find quotes over $5,000 that haven't been signed in 14 days"

Query 2: Quotes with no follow-up activity. Pull every estimate where signed_at is null and the activity log has zero outbound contacts since the send date. These are the pure neglect cases and the highest yield.

Text Clint: "list cold quotes where we never followed up after sending"

Query 3: Quotes by ticket band. Split the cold quote list into bands. Under $2,500. $2,500 to $7,500. $7,500 to $15,000. $15,000 to $50,000. Over $50,000. Each band gets a different motion. Small tickets get SMS only. Large tickets get a phone call from a closer.

Text Clint: "group cold quotes by total in $5,000 buckets"

Query 4: Quotes by source. Cross-reference each cold quote with its lead source. Google Ads quotes convert differently than referral quotes than LSA quotes. Source-aware follow-up outperforms generic follow-up by a wide margin.

Query 5: Quotes by salesperson. Pull cold quotes grouped by the original closer. Some closers leave 30% of their quotes uncovered. Some leave 5%. The contrast tells you where to focus management attention.

Text Clint: "rank salespeople by cold quote count with average quote age"

These cross-cuts are the kind of slice most CRM dashboards cannot answer without exporting CSVs and pivoting in a spreadsheet.

The Outreach That Recovers Cold Quotes

Bad copy: "Just following up." Gets ignored.

Working copy is specific, references the original quote, gives a reason for reaching out now, and ends with a clear option. Templates that work in real shops:

14-30 day cold quote. "Hi [Name], it's [Salesperson] at [Shop]. We sent you the quote for the [scope] at [address] on [date]. I wanted to make sure you got it and check if you have any questions before we close out the file. Reply YES if you'd like a quick call this week, or NO if you've gone another direction."

30-60 day cold quote. "Hi [Name], following up on the [scope] quote we sent on [date]. We're booking [season]'s schedule now. If the project is still on your list, replying YES gets you a 15-minute call to lock in current pricing. NO and we'll close the file."

90+ day cold quote. "Hi [Name], I'm closing out our open files from [season]. We had a quote out for the [scope] at [address]. If the project is still on your list, reply YES and I'll have someone walk through current pricing. Otherwise NO and we'll mark it closed."

The four pieces are the same every time. Specific reference. Reason for the timing. One easy ask. An explicit out.

TCPA compliance for SMS matters here. Quote senders are existing-relationship contacts in most cases, but quiet-hours, opt-out language, and STOP processing still apply.

The Phone Call for Big Tickets

For quotes over $15K, an SMS is supplementary. The recovery motion is a phone call from the original closer or the sales manager.

The structure that works:

1. Reference the quote specifics by memory or quick CRM lookup.
2. Ask a single open question: "I'm following up on the quote we sent for [scope]. Where are you on it?"
3. Listen. Almost always the customer surfaces a real objection in the first 90 seconds.
4. Solve the objection or schedule the next step.

Owned and Operated podcast episodes with John Wilson and Jack Carr hammer this point. Wilson Companies built the HVAC and plumbing operation past $30M+ on disciplined sales follow-up, and Carr's Carr Plumbing runs the same playbook. Both consistently say the difference between a $1M and a $10M shop is whether the closer picks up the phone on day 7 after a quote goes out.

A1 Garage Door's Tommy Mello frames it the same way in The Home Service Millionaire. The quote close rate on a follow-up call is 2-3x the close rate on a quote that gets sent and forgotten.

The Numbers a CFO Will Sanity-Check

Use a $1M-$10M shop as the baseline.

A typical contractor in this band sends 800-2,000 quotes a year. The current close rate sits around 25-35%. That leaves 60-75% of quotes unsigned, which is 480-1,500 quotes per year. That bleed is one of the 9 places a CRM is losing money via lead leakage.

Run a disciplined follow-up sequence on the cold half of that pile. Recover 8-15% of them. That is 40-225 incremental signed jobs per year.

At a $4K-$15K average ticket, the incremental revenue is $160K to $3.4M. The labor cost is one CSR or salesperson running a defined sequence, or one AI agent doing the sequence end-to-end.

The roofer in the customer LTV math post ran the same exercise and found his real LTV per recovered customer was $12K, not the $8K per job he'd been pricing. The recovery numbers compound when you count repeat work and referrals.

This is also where a thin slice of dashboarding actually helps. Most owners cannot see cold-quote pipeline volume on the dashboards they ship with their CRM, so the asset stays invisible until somebody runs the queries.

Why AI Changes the Economics

A disciplined CSR can run cold-quote follow-up. The reason most shops do not is that it never beats the inbound call queue for priority.

AI does not get distracted by inbound calls. An agent connected to your CRM pulls the cold-quote queries every morning, drafts the segment-specific message, sends through a TCPA-compliant pipeline, handles replies, books the call or job, and only escalates the conversations that need a human closer.

AI quoting and estimating tools for contractors cover the front half of the quote lifecycle. The cold-quote recovery is the back half. Together they cover the full motion: send the quote fast, follow up on a defined cadence, escalate the high-value stalled ones, and close the loop with a clean status in the CRM.

AI lead qualification agents handle the inbound feeder. Cold-quote recovery handles the outbound motion against the existing pipeline. Both run in parallel against your CRM.

A Two-Week Cold-Quote Sprint

Day 1. Run the five queries above. Stash the CSVs in one spreadsheet.

Day 2. Validate phone numbers and emails. Skip the bounced ones.

Day 3. Write five SMS templates, one per segment. Add a phone-call script for the over-$15K bucket.

Days 4-9. Send in batches of 30-50 per hour. Reply same-day to every response. Book what is bookable. Pass the over-$15K live conversations to a closer for a phone follow-up.

Days 10-14. Run a second touch on non-responders with a different angle. The Hatch 2025 data shows the second touch is what drives the 89.86% multi-touch response rate.

A solo CSR can run this on top of normal duties. Most $1M-$10M shops will book 25-50 incremental jobs from a single sprint and pay for a year of better tooling in two weeks.

Sources

• Hatch 2025 Home Improvement Industry Report
• ServiceTitan 2024 Home Services Trends Report
• Drift Lead Response Time Benchmarks
• Owned and Operated Podcast with Wilson and Carr
• A1 Garage Door / Tommy Mello
• LocaliQ 2025 Home Services Search Advertising Benchmarks