The job you lose between the phone call and the quote
Electricians, builders and installers rarely lose work on price. They lose it in the days between the enquiry and the number. Where those days go, and how to get them back.
An electrician finishes a job at six, drives home, eats, and at half past nine sits down to write the three quotes promised that week. One of them needs a measurement he forgot to take. One is for a customer whose name he wrote on the back of a receipt. The third goes out on Thursday, five days after the call.
By Thursday the customer has had two other quotes.
If you work in a trade, none of this will surprise you. What is easy to miss is how rarely the lost job has anything to do with price or quality. It is mostly lost to time.
Where the days go
The gap between "can you come and have a look?" and "here is the number" fills up with the same few things:
- The enquiry arrives without what you need. A phone call gives you a name and "the lights keep tripping". You still need the address, the type of building, photos, and whether anyone is home in the mornings.
- The details live in several places. A missed call, a Viber message with photos, a note in the van. Putting them together is the first job, and it happens late at night.
- Quotes are written from scratch. Every quote starts as an empty document, even though most of them are variations on ten you have written before.
- Nobody follows up. A quote that goes unanswered for a week is usually treated as a no. Often it is a customer who got busy.
Speed is the thing a customer notices
We saw how much timing matters in a different trade. At Sports&Ski, a ski shop, customers test skis before they buy. Before we built the ski test system, following up on a test with an offer took around five days. Now it takes hours: the offer email goes out straight from the test record. Conversion after a test went from 12% to 37%.
Skis are not electrical installations. But the lesson carries: the customer's interest is highest the moment they ask, and it cools every day after.
What helps, without new software
- Ask for what you need in the first contact. A short form on your website — address, type of property, what is wrong, two or three photos — means you arrive at the quote with everything in one place. The Electrotechs website has exactly this: a quote request that asks the questions an electrician would ask on the phone.
- Keep five quote templates. Most of your work falls into a few types. Start from the closest one, not a blank page.
- Send something within a day. If the full quote needs a site visit, send a message that says so and books the visit. A customer who has a date is a customer who stops calling around.
- Follow up once, on a fixed day. Put it in the calendar when you send the quote. One polite message a week later wins back more jobs than you would expect.
ElectrotechsAn electrician's website built to be found — by search and by AI assistants
When it is worth building something
If you send a handful of quotes a month, the four steps above are enough. If you send dozens, with several people on the road and someone in the office putting it together, a small system that turns an enquiry into a quote and tracks which ones are still open starts paying for itself quickly.
Either way, the first step is the same: count how many days your last ten quotes took. If you would rather not know, that is a good reason to call us.