There is a version of this article that says “be more professional” for a thousand words. This is not that. These are the specific things that change whether a quote gets accepted, roughly in order of how much difference they make.
Speed is the biggest single lever, and it is not close
If you change one thing, change how fast the quote goes out.
Think about what is happening at the customer’s end. They have decided to spend money, which for most people is uncomfortable. They have had two or three trades round. They want the decision made and off their list.
The quote that lands the same evening arrives while they still remember who you are, what you said about the boiler and how you were about your boots on the carpet. The quote that lands eleven days later arrives after they have already leaned towards someone else, and it has to overturn a decision rather than inform one.
There is a second signal in it, and customers read it consciously. Slow to quote suggests slow to turn up, slow to answer the phone and slow to come back when something needs fixing. Fast to quote suggests the opposite. It is the only evidence of your reliability they have before they hire you.
How to be fast without being careless
The reason quotes go out slowly is almost never that the tradesperson does not want the job. It is that quoting happens in the evening, after the work, when you are done in.
Things that genuinely help:
- Price it on site. Not always possible, but for jobs you have done fifty times you already know the number before you get back to the van. Write it up there and then.
- Have your rates settled in advance. If you are recalculating your day rate on every job you will delay every job. Do the arithmetic once, properly: that is how to price a job.
- Have a template. Rewriting your terms every time is why the evening disappears. Build it once, as in the estimate template guide.
- Set a rule. Every job seen gets a quote out within 48 hours, or you ring them and tell them why. The phone call is not a failure. It is still faster than most of your competition.
- Send the price even when it is bad news. A quote of £6,000 sent tomorrow is worth more to your reputation than a quote you never send because you assume they will say no. Let them decide.
Look like a business, because the alternative is a stranger with a van
A domestic customer is letting an unknown person into their home with tools and, usually, a key. Everything in your quote is either evidence that this is safe or it is nothing.
What reads as safe:
- your business name and a real address, not just a mobile number
- registration numbers that mean something: Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, TrustMark, your trade body
- the fact that you carry public liability insurance, stated plainly
- a clear guarantee on your workmanship, with a length attached
- consistent formatting, no typos, the customer’s name spelled correctly
- a PDF, not a photograph of a handwritten page
None of that costs anything. All of it is invisible until it is missing.
Photographs help more than people expect. Two or three shots from the survey, dropped into the quote, showing the actual pipework or the actual roof, prove you looked. A quote with a picture of their own house in it is very hard to compare with a text message containing a number.
Itemise, and let them see the shape of the job
A single number is easy to write and easy to reject. It gives the customer exactly one thing to judge.
An itemised quote does three jobs at once:
- It shows what they are buying. “Remove and dispose of existing suite” is work they had not thought about and would otherwise assume was free.
- It exposes the cheap rival. When your quote lists making good and waste removal and the other one does not, the other one is not cheaper, it is smaller. The customer cannot see that unless you show them.
- It gives you a way to move without discounting. If the budget will not reach, you take a line out, together, with them watching. That is a conversation about scope, not about whether your prices are real.
There is a limit. Nobody wants to read forty lines to change a tap. Match the detail to the size of the job.
Give them a choice about what to buy, not whether to buy
Where it fits, put two or three concrete options in front of them.
Not “Bronze, Silver, Gold”. Something real:
- Option A: replace the suite, retile the shower area only, reuse the existing flooring
- Option B: as A, plus full-height tiling to all wet walls and new floor covering
- Option C: as B, plus reposition the WC and a new heated towel rail
Something changes psychologically when there are options. The question stops being “shall I use this person or the other one” and becomes “which of these do I want”. You are already in the job.
Two or three, though. Five options is not a choice, it is homework.
What to say when you are not the cheapest
You will often not be. Say something, because silence lets price be the only story.
The useful move is to be specific about what is included that the customer would otherwise find out about later:
This price includes removing and disposing of the old unit, capping off the redundant supply, making good the plaster ready for decoration, and a two-year guarantee on the workmanship. Worth checking whether other quotes cover the making good, as it is often left out.
That is not slagging off a competitor. It is telling the customer what to compare, which is the single most useful thing you can do for someone buying something they do not understand.
The follow-up almost nobody does
Most quotes in the trades are sent and then never mentioned again. The customer goes quiet, the tradesperson assumes no, and neither of them ever finds out that the quote went to spam.
Follow up once, at about five to seven working days, with something that is genuinely for them:
Morning Sarah, just checking the estimate for the bathroom reached you alright. The price holds until the 14th and I have a slot the week after if that suits. Happy to talk any of it through.
That is a reason to make contact, not a plea. If they do not reply to that, stop, and put a note in your diary for two or three months. Kitchens and bathrooms slip. A polite “still thinking about that bathroom?” in October, on a job quoted in July, wins a surprising amount of work simply because everyone else has forgotten.
Why the cheapest quote usually does not win
Ask people how they chose a tradesperson and price is rarely the whole answer. What comes up is that someone turned up when they said they would, answered the phone, explained what was wrong in words they understood, and put it in writing.
The reason cheapest sometimes wins is more uncomfortable: when a customer has no other information, price is the only thing left to decide on. Three quotes that are all just a number, all sent by text, all from someone they met for ten minutes, will be decided on the number every time.
So the way to stop competing on price is not to argue about price. It is to give them something else to weigh.
The jobs to be slow on
For balance: speed is a lever for jobs you want. Some jobs you should be deliberately slow to quote, or should decline outright, and there is a list of the warning signs in how to price a job. Being fast is a way of winning more of the work you want, not a reason to take on all of it.
The checklist
- Quote within 48 hours, every time
- Send a PDF, not a text
- Spell their name right
- Include photographs from the survey
- Itemise, at a level that suits the job size
- Show your registrations, insurance and guarantee
- Offer two or three real options where it fits
- Say what is included that others leave out
- State how long the price is valid
- Follow up once at a week, then diarise
Ten things, and eight of them are about the document rather than the price. That is the point: the quote is the only sample of your work the customer sees before they commit. If yours takes an evening to produce, that is the constraint worth removing, which is the job TradeScribe was built to do.