How Are You Managing and Nurturing Leads?

I think the interesting part is that “follow-up” and “prioritization” are actually two different problems.

A shop could have 50 old estimates, automate reminders for all of them, and still not know which 5 deserve a human follow-up today.

I’d probably track each open estimate by:

• estimated dollar value
• age of the estimate
• last customer response
• last follow-up
• reason it appears stuck
• next action/date

Then you can separate “don’t let this lead fall through the cracks” from “this one is worth my attention today.”

That also makes the lost-revenue side much easier to see than a single close-rate percentage.

Curious if anyone here is actually tracking the dollar value sitting in their open/aging estimates, rather than just the number of leads?

We do follow up, but I’m not a huge fan of endlessly chasing people who clearly aren’t ready to buy.

For unbooked estimates, I like the heaviest follow-up to happen while the lead is still warm:

• Same day/next day after the estimate
• A few days later
• Around the one-week mark
• One final follow-up after that

After that, I’d rather move them into a longer-term nurture bucket than keep sending “just checking in” messages forever.

The biggest thing for me is that the follow-up should actually add something. Answer a common objection, remind them what was included, share availability, mention a relevant service, etc. Repeatedly asking “are you still interested?” gets old really fast.

We also don’t treat every lost lead as truly lost. People come back months later because they weren’t ready financially, were comparing companies, had a life change, or just forgot.

So I’d personally separate “active sales follow-up” from “long-term nurture.” I’d probably stop actively chasing after 2–3 weeks, but keep good leads in your database for occasional email/text marketing unless they opt out.

I’d also track WHY they didn’t book. Price, timing, ghosted, chose competitor, not our ideal client, etc. That data becomes way more useful than just knowing your close rate.

You should think about having them in 2 different buckets. The first has to do with the actual quote you gave them and following up on that. I would bug them about it for a month before archiving. Send them a message each day for 3 days after then 5th day, then 8th, 14th, 21st, then one last one 28 days later. Something like that. All the messages should sound like you are texting them, not an automation.

After that, I'd drop them in to a separate bucket. It'd be a nurture sequence for any customer. This could be purely informative. I like these because people will start to see you as an authority figure and reach out for jobs in the future. I get told ALLLLL the time, "i've been following your emails for a while and now I wanted to reach out". This is what you're looking to achieve but you won't get there always asking them to buy from you. Provide value.

If you want, you could do a third bucket that re-engages on the quote 3-6 months later. Something like "hey whatever happened with this project we quotes". You'd be surprised at the number of people that just never took action then end up booking. 

For your workflow, do you ever need to prioritize WHICH older leads deserve attention first?

Or because you follow up with everyone until they say stop, is prioritization basically unnecessary?

I'm testing whether prioritizing old quotes is actually useful or whether consistent nurture already solves the problem.

We follow up with leads until they tell us to stop. 
Our nurturing is 4 times after they reached out.  They either ghost us or we eventually speak, text, email with them and either book or not. 

We also add them to our mailing list and we send out promotions, communication at least once a month.