It is Thursday afternoon. Your tech is back in the truck with a cracked heat exchanger on camera and three prices he wrote on the tablet in the driveway. The homeowner said the thing every homeowner says: send me something in writing, I need to talk to my husband. Whether that quote is in her inbox by dinner or still sitting on your tech’s phone is the whole ballgame, and HVAC quote follow-up automation is what most owners go looking for once they count how many of those quotes never came back. What they find is a template. Every article on HVAC estimate follow-up hands over the same one: text on day zero, call task on day one, email with photos on day three, last chance on day seven.
That sequence is not the hard part. Pretending it is, is the entire gap. A follow-up sequence is a template you can copy off any of those pages in ten minutes. Everything the template quietly assumes somebody is doing around it is where the money actually leaks. And to be clear about where this post picks up: the lead was captured, the appointment was booked, the tech went out. How the call got answered and the visit got booked is a different job with its own moving parts. This one starts the second the truck backs out of the driveway.
Treat a quote as something that moves, not a document you emailed once. Between the moment your tech presents a price and the moment that money is either in your account or gone for good, there are eight stops: presented, sent, first touch, the option question, re-quote, the open-quote board, win-back, and the month-end read.
Almost every article written on this subject stops at stop three. It sells you the first touch. Day zero text, day one call, day three email with the photos. Then it stops, because a sequence fits in a PDF and a chain somebody has to run does not.
The five stops after the first touch are where quotes actually die. The customer asks about the middle option and nobody turns a new number around before the weekend. Nobody in the building can say out loud which quotes are open this morning. A big replacement goes quiet in week two and nobody circles back, ever. Month end arrives and you have a feeling about your close rate instead of a number. None of that gets fixed by a better cadence, because none of it is a cadence problem.
A quote that goes out Thursday from the driveway and a quote that goes out the following Tuesday from the office are not the same quote, even with identical numbers on them. The second one lands after she already called somebody else.
Your tech is not lazy. He has four more calls, a warranty part to pick up, and a price book he half trusts. Some days he sends it from the truck. Some days he means to and it sits on his phone overnight. Your office manager catches a few of the ones that slipped, on the days she is not buried. That is not a system, that is a good day. Same day out the door, every time, with the photos and the good-better-best options laid out in plain language, is the floor. Nobody should have to remember it.
The first touch is a text, not a call. Almost nobody picks up an unknown number two hours after a service visit, and a voicemail about a system replacement is a good way to make a homeowner feel worked. So the honest way to automate quote follow-up for HVAC work is to start where she already reads: a short HVAC quote follow-up text with the estimate attached, same day, written the way a person writes.
Then wait. Then a second touch, then a third, spaced further apart and getting shorter, not louder. What matters more than the cadence is what happens the instant she writes back. The moment a customer replies with a real question, the automation stops talking and a person is in the conversation. Nobody wants a robot negotiating a nine thousand dollar quote on their behalf. HVAC quote follow-up automation earns its keep by being the thing that never forgets, not by pretending to be your salesperson.
Good-better-best works, and it creates a very specific failure. You present three options. She picks none of them in the driveway, then two days later texts: what about the middle one, but without the thermostat?
That is not an objection. That is a buying signal with a clock on it. She is holding a second opinion somebody gave her Tuesday, and the shop that puts a revised number in front of her first usually takes the job, not because it is cheaper but because it is the one still in the conversation. If answering her requires your tech to pull the price book back up between calls, or requires you to remember it on the drive home, the new number goes out Friday. By Friday she has a signed proposal from the other guy.
So the re-quote is its own stop with its own clock. Pull the estimate, swap the line items, regenerate the total, send it the same day, note it on the record so the board stays honest. A repair against a full system replacement gets the same treatment, and so does adding a maintenance plan to sweeten a price you are not willing to drop. And when she finally says yes, the job gets scheduled and this part of the work is done.
Here is a word your software already uses and you probably do not. ServiceTitan calls a quote that was presented and never accepted or declined an unsold estimate. It is an estimate status on the record, not a mood. Housecall Pro tracks proposal status the same way, Jobber tracks quotes, and whichever one you run is the system of record we wire the follow-up into rather than something we try to replace. The machines that quote runs on are their own separate conversation.
The point is that the state already exists and is already queryable, which means unsold estimate follow-up is not guesswork. It is a list. The trouble is that nobody in a shop your size opens that list on purpose. It lives one tab over from dispatch, and your dispatcher is on fire.
An open-quote board is that list pulled out to where somebody actually looks at it, with an aging report beside it so age is visible instead of implied.
Four things, and only four: status, age in days, dollar value, and when a human last touched it. That is enough to sort a Monday. A $400 capacitor quote from yesterday and a $9,000 system replacement from three weeks ago need completely different handling, and you cannot see that difference inside a CRM pipeline nobody opens.
Then the harder half. Somebody has to be watching it. Not a dashboard that exists. A named person whose Monday morning includes reading that board top to bottom and doing something about the rows that are aging.
Some quotes go quiet and stay quiet. She stopped replying, the unit limped through the season, and it is week six. Most shops do one of two things with a quote like that: nothing at all, or nine more texts.
There is a third option and it is the only one worth running. One deliberate re-approach, written like a person who accepts she may well have gone another direction. Something close to: we quoted you in July, that price holds through the end of the month, and if you already took care of it just say so and I will leave you alone. That last clause is not weakness. It is the reason she answers at all.
Then it is over. One attempt, then the estimate status gets closed out so the board only shows quotes still worth chasing. A board full of dead quotes is the same as having no board, because nobody trusts a list they know is stale.
Ask most owners how many quotes are open right now and you get a range and a shrug. Not because they are careless. Because the number lives in three places and none of them agree.
The real output of estimate follow-up automation for home services is not activity, it is a read: how many quotes went out, how many are still open, how many closed, how many died, and what all of it was worth. Delivered to you, not waiting inside a report you have to go find on a Sunday. The first dollarized version of it lands within fourteen days of going live, and the value is that it is a number you can act on. If the small repair quotes close and the big replacements stall out, that changes what your techs say in the driveway next week and what your maintenance plan pitch sounds like.
It also answers the question you were really asking when you started searching who follows up on HVAC estimates. Somebody does, and at month end you can see exactly what they did about it.
You could buy HVAC sales follow-up software this afternoon. Most of you already pay for something that does half of this and has since the day you signed up. That is genuinely the easy part, and it is exactly why every page on this topic is about the template.
What you are short of is an operator. Somebody who owns the board, sends the re-quote before Friday, hands the conversation to a human the moment the reply deserves one, and tells you at month end what all of it produced. That is what the subscription buys. Growth at $699 a month is the entry point, because it already carries marketing automation over email and text plus CRM automation and pipelines, and it is where HVAC quote follow-up automation lives. Business Operations starts at $999 a month for shops where the front desk, the point of sale, or the IT is also a bottleneck. Technology Department starts at $2,500 a month when the price book or the system of record needs real integration work, which is the custom build side of the same shop and not a subscription feature. Setup is $0, billing is month to month, the migration is done for you, and your website, your domain and your data stay yours. Thirty days money back if it is not what we said it was.
Plumbing quote follow-up is the same job with different line items and it runs the same way, as it does across the industries we run day-to-day operations for.
How do HVAC companies automate quote follow-up after the technician leaves the job site?
HVAC companies automate quote follow-up by running the full chain after the visit, not just a reminder text. The quote goes out, gets a first touch, answers the option question if the customer asks about a cheaper tier, gets re-quoted same day, sits on an open-quote board until it closes or dies, and gets one honest win-back pass if it goes quiet. It works because a person watches that board.
What is an unsold estimate, and how long should an HVAC company keep following up on one?
An unsold estimate is a quote that was presented and never accepted or declined, a state field service platforms track by name. There is no fixed expiration; a live estimate stays open until the customer says yes, says no, or goes quiet long enough to earn one honest win-back attempt. After that attempt, the estimate is closed out so the board only shows quotes still worth chasing.
Does HVAC quote follow-up automation work with ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber?
Yes, HVAC quote follow-up automation runs on top of the system of record a shop already uses, including ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro, or Jobber. It does not replace the platform or move the price book anywhere; it wires into the estimate and customer record already there and keeps the follow-up moving around it, without changing how the shop already dispatches.
Who watches which quotes are still open if the office manager is already answering the phone?
A named account manager watches the open-quote board so nothing sits unanswered because the office manager is on another call. The board flags what is still open, what needs a re-quote, and what has gone quiet long enough for a win-back attempt. The moment a customer replies with a real question, a person takes the conversation and the automation stops talking.
What does it cost to have quote follow-up run for an HVAC or plumbing company?
Quote follow-up for an HVAC or plumbing company runs inside Growth at $699 a month, the entry tier that already includes marketing automation and CRM pipelines. Business Operations from $999 a month adds it when the front desk, POS, or IT is also the bottleneck, and Technology Department from $2,500 covers custom price-book or system-of-record integration. Setup is $0, billing is month-to-month, and there is no lock-in.
If you want to know where your quotes actually stand right now, book a Free Technology Audit at cal.com/mirgen-motomtech/quick-intro. We walk the eight stops against your own shop and tell you which ones are genuinely handled and which ones are running on somebody remembering, and if typing is easier than talking you can send us how your quotes get followed up today instead.
