Your month
Use last month rather than a good month. The number is only useful if it is boringly typical.
Three is a deliberately modest figure. Follow-up does not convert the people who said no; it catches the ones who never answered.
- Jobs won per month today
- 10
- Monthly revenue from quotes
- $14,000
- What the extra points are worth monthly
- $1,680
- Across a year
- $20,160
Forty quotes a month at $1400, closing 25% of them: 10 jobs and $14000 of work a month. Three points of extra conversion is $1680 more a month, or $20160 across a year.
Assumptions behind these numbers
- It models revenue, not profit. Multiply the result by your margin for the number that actually reaches you, which for most trades takes a fifth to a third of it.
- Three points is modest on purpose. Published claims of doubling conversion through follow-up are vendor claims about vendor customers, and they are not the base rate.
- It assumes the extra jobs have the same average value as your existing ones. In practice the ones recovered by follow-up skew slightly smaller, because the large jobs get chased already.
- It ignores capacity. Winning three more jobs a month is only worth anything if you can do them, and for some businesses the honest answer is that the constraint is not conversion.
The last assumption is the important one. If you are already turning work away, better follow-up is not your problem and this product is not for you — the number to work on is your pricing.
Why the answer is always bigger than expected
Conversion is a multiplier on everything you already do. Every hour spent quoting, every drive to look at a job, every evening pricing something up — the whole cost of that sits in front of the conversion rate, and improving the rate improves the return on all of it at once.
This is why a few points is worth more than it sounds. You are not adding three jobs; you are extracting three more jobs from the quoting work you had already paid for. The marginal cost of the recovered job is a text message.
The same three points across different trades
Illustrative businesses, each at a 25% base rate, modelling three extra points.
| Business | Quotes/mo | Avg job | Extra per month | Extra per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solo electrician, domestic | 22 | $680 | $449 | $5,385 |
| Two-van plumbing | 40 | $1,400 | $1,680 | $20,160 |
| Roofer | 15 | $6,200 | $2,790 | $33,480 |
| Landscaper, seasonal | 35 | $2,100 | $2,205 | $26,460 |
| Small builder, extensions | 6 | $28,000 | $5,040 | $60,480 |
Source: Rows computed with the calculator above. The quote volumes and job values are plausible illustrations, not survey data.
The builder's row is the one worth sitting with. Six quotes a month and the largest number in the table — because at that ticket size, half a job a month is a car. Low-volume high-ticket trades have the strongest case for follow-up and the least infrastructure for it.
Questions
What is a normal quote conversion rate?
Should I count quotes I never heard back on?
Is three points realistic?
What if my average job value varies enormously?
What did it say?
In the context field: your trade and the annual figure. I am collecting these.