The situation
A four-person electrical contractor in the Hunter region was sending 30 to 40 quotes a month through ServiceM8. Roughly half went cold within a week, not because the work was lost, but because nobody had time to follow up. The owner was making chase calls on Saturday mornings to clear the backlog: about 14 hours a month spent on something that should not have needed his weekends.
The pattern was always the same. Quote sent on Tuesday, no reply by Friday, mental note to follow up next week, then a busier week swallowed the note. Quotes that converted usually did so within the first ten days. Anything older than two weeks had a sub 10 percent chance of being won.
The flow we built
A three-touch follow-up sequence inside ServiceM8, triggered the moment a quote is sent:
- 24 hours later, a friendly SMS confirming the quote arrived and offering to answer questions.
- Day three, a short email with the quote summary and a one-tap link to accept or request changes.
- Day seven, a final SMS asking whether the job is still on the table.
If the client replies, accepts the quote, or the job is marked complete in ServiceM8, the sequence stops. If there is no response by day ten, the quote is automatically marked cold and the owner gets a single digest at the end of the week showing what dropped off.
The platforms
ServiceM8 for the quote system and job records. Make.com for the automation logic and timing. Twilio for SMS delivery (replacing the more expensive in-app SMS credits). The whole thing runs on a Bot Care Professional tier with monitoring, so when ServiceM8 rolled an API change last month it was caught and patched before the next quote went out.
The results
In the first month the conversion rate on new quotes lifted from 28 percent to 51 percent, close to double. The owner stopped chasing on Saturdays entirely. The 14 hours of monthly admin dropped to about 30 minutes a week reviewing the cold quote digest and deciding whether any deserved a personal call.
The unlock was not the technology. The unlock was the consistency. Every quote now gets the same three touches, in the same order, at the same intervals. Nothing falls through the cracks because someone was on site, on a holiday, or having a slow week.
What this could look like for your trade business
If quotes are leaking out of your business because follow-up is manual, this kind of sequence pays for itself inside the first month. We can build a version tailored to your existing job-management system, whether that is ServiceM8, Tradify, simPRO, or AroFlo.