The 72 hours after you send a quote are the ones that matter

Ask a tradesperson what makes a good quote and you'll hear about line items, materials, branding, and price. Those matter. But they're not what decides whether the job comes in. What decides the job is timing, specifically, the 72 hours between you sending the quote and the customer making a decision.

Those three days are invisible to most tradespeople. You send the PDF, close the app, move on to the next job, and the quote disappears into a black box until the customer either replies or doesn't. If you could see what was happening inside the black box, you'd book a lot more of them.

What a customer is actually doing in those 72 hours

Most domestic customers are doing roughly the same thing: they got your quote on Tuesday, they'll probably compare it to at least one other quote over the next two evenings, discuss it with a partner, Google a couple of line items, and make a decision by the end of the week. Commercial customers take longer, but the pattern is similar, the decision window is finite, and it closes.

During that window, every customer does three things that, if you could see them, would change your follow-up entirely:

• They open the quote, usually within a few hours of getting the email. First open is the highest-signal moment: they're interested enough to look.
• They reopen it, often the next evening when they're discussing it with someone else. Second open means it's in the running.
• They'll either accept, decline, or go dark.Going dark is the most common by some margin, and the one that loses you the most jobs.

Why “going dark” is usually forgetfulness, not rejection

Tradespeople read silence as “they went with someone else”. It's usually not. It's more often one of:

• The quote never arrived. Gmail promotions filter, typo'd email address, attachment blocked, spam folder. You'll find no evidence of opens because there were none.
• It arrived but hasn't been opened.Customer's been busy, means to read it tonight, keeps meaning to, forgets. Needs a nudge.
• It's been opened twice but they're stuck.They're torn between your quote and a competitor's. A short, well-timed follow-up often tips it.

All three look identical from the outside, total silence. The solution isn't to chase harder, it's to chase smarter.

What quote view tracking changes

When every sent quote has a private client-portal link (rather than a plain PDF attachment), the backend can log exactly when the customer opened it, when they accepted, and when they declined. Notify-on-view turns those events into push notifications to your phone so you can act on them in real time.

This changes the whole game:

• If the quote never gets opened in 48 hours,you know it didn't land. Call them. The email probably failed.
• If the quote was opened once then silence,a polite “any questions?” message the morning after is the single highest-ROI text you can send.
• If the quote was opened twice in one evening,the customer is close to deciding. A well-timed follow-up the following afternoon has outsized impact.
• If the customer's still on the portal page,you can phone them while they're literally looking at your quote. That call has a materially higher conversion rate than any chase email ever will.

Combining view tracking with auto-chase

View tracking answers “what's going on?”. Auto-chase answers “what should I do about it?”. Together they replace the combination of paper notebook and guilty Sunday-evening follow-up sessions that most trades run on.

The best rhythm, if you want a starting template:

1. Send the quote with auto-chase and view notifications both enabled.
2. Wait for the first view notification. If it lands within a few hours, excellent, the customer is engaged. Do nothing yet.
3. If no view notification arrives after 48 hours, phone or text to confirm they got it. Don't chase by email; if the email didn't land the first time, another email won't help.
4. If a view notification arrives but no acceptance in 72 hours, let auto-chase handle the polite reminder. Only intervene manually if you've got new information to add.
5. If an acceptance or decline comes through, stop thinking about it. The system already did.

The short version

Most jobs are decided in the 72 hours after you send the quote. If you can't see what's happening inside that window, you're flying blind. If you can see it, and you pair it with an automated chase cadence so you don't miss the timing, you'll book materially more of your quotes with the same pricing you already use.

QuickPrice Pro ships both view notifications and auto-chase out of the box for £12.99/mo + VAT. If you want the full AI-quoting picture first, start at the AI quoting software overview.