One job AI can take off your plate, with the exact steps. Ten minutes to read, ten minutes to do. No hype, no jargon, nothing to buy.
THIS WEEK'S JOB: CHASE THE QUOTES THAT WENT QUIET
SEE THIS
Open your sent folder and search back ninety days for the word "quote".
I did this in my own business last month and found three that had never had a reply. Not one of them had said no. They had just gone quiet, and so had I.
That is the thing about a dead quote. It does not feel like lost work, because nothing happened. You did the site visit, worked out the price, sent it over, and then Thursday arrived with its own problems. Nobody rejected you. It simply stopped.
Most of those customers did not choose someone else. They meant to reply, got busy, and it slid down the screen. A polite nudge three days later would have caught a fair few of them, and we all know it, and almost none of us do it, because chasing feels a bit like begging.
It does not have to be you that does the chasing.
TRY THIS
Open whichever AI you already use. Paste this in, filling in the brackets:
"I sent this quote and heard nothing back. Write me three short follow-up emails, to go three days, ten days and twenty-one days after the quote.
Business: [what you do]
Customer: [their name and what they asked for]
Quote: [the amount and what it covered]
Sent on: [date]
Rules: British English, plain and friendly. No pressure, no discounting, no chasing tone. Each email under eighty words. The first assumes they are simply busy. The second adds one genuinely useful thing and asks for nothing. The third gives them an easy way to say no."
That last rule is the one that matters. Giving somebody permission to decline is what gets you an answer, and an answer is what you actually want. A clear no is worth more than another fortnight of wondering.
Read all three before you send anything. Change the bits that do not sound like you.
DO THAT
Pick your five biggest quiet quotes and send the first email today. Just the first one. Diarise the second for next week.
Then do the boring bit that makes this permanent: save the prompt somewhere you will find it, and add one line to your quote template that says you will follow up in a few days. Now the chase is expected rather than awkward, and it happens whether or not you are having a good week.
SEEN THIS WEEK
Someone sent me a 90 minute training video this week. Useful, probably. Ninety minutes, definitely not.
So I did not watch it. I got AI to work through it instead and give me back what was actually said: the argument, the numbers, and what was being sold at the end. About a page. I read it in four minutes, decided the thing was not for me, and got my afternoon back.
The general version is worth having. The long webinar, the recorded meeting you missed, the forty minute podcast someone swears by. You are allowed to extract it rather than sit through it.
Two honest caveats. It is easiest when there is a transcript or subtitles to work from, and it took a bit of fiddling when there was not. And if it is your own client on that recording, watch it properly. This is for the pile you were going to skim anyway.
WORTH KNOWING
Never let AI send anything you have not read. Not because it writes badly, but because it does not know that this particular customer lost their father in June, or that you already knocked fifty quid off. You do. Ten seconds of reading is the whole difference between helpful and mortifying.
That is issue two. If it was useful, forward it to one person you know who has quotes going quiet.
That's it for this week.
Simon
P.S. Hit reply and tell me how many quiet quotes were in your sent folder. I read every reply, and I will tell you my number if you tell me yours.