No. 01 · Home services
Build / 9 business days
Quote follow-ups that actually go out — for a 6-tech HVAC shop
Forty quotes a week were going out and disappearing. The owner had looked at two CRM add-ons that would only remind him to chase them. We built the chaser.
Client: Regional HVAC contractor (anonymized at owner's request)
The owner runs a six-technician HVAC shop in a mid-sized metro. He'd been told for years that his close rate was "fine for the trade." He suspected it wasn't. The math, when we ran it on his last quarter of quotes, said he was right.
The brief
"My techs do the visit, I send the quote, and then it just sits. I know I should follow up. I never do. Two of these CRM AI tools want $400 a month to remind me to follow up. I don't need a reminder. I need the email written."
What we found
About 40 quotes per week sat past 48 hours with zero contact — quotes ranging $400 to $11k.
The two CRM "AI add-ons" he'd demoed both surfaced reminders, neither drafted the actual follow-up.
Office manager was already at capacity; adding chase-the-quote to her list would mean dropping scheduling.
Jobber already held every quote with line-item detail and the customer's first name — enough context for a real follow-up, not a templated one.
Owner was willing to be the human-in-the-loop: read each draft, click send. He just wouldn't write them from scratch.
Quote follow-ups, weekly
Average over the trailing 60 days, before and after go-live.
“I went from sending five follow-ups a week to forty. The crazy part is I'm doing less work, not more.”
What we built
- 01
Map the actual workflow first
One 60-minute call with the owner and his office manager. Watched a quote get created in Jobber, watched it get emailed from Gmail, watched it get forgotten. No new tool was going to fix this — it had to slot into Jobber → Gmail without retraining anyone.
- 02
Pull stale quotes once a day
Apps Script job runs every morning at 7am. Pulls every quote in Jobber that's been sitting more than 48 hours with no reply, grabs the line items and customer name.
- 03
Draft, don't send
Claude drafts a short follow-up per quote — references the specific job ("the heat pump replacement we quoted on Tuesday"), keeps the tone the owner uses in his own emails. Drafts land in a Gmail folder labeled "Follow-ups (review)."
- 04
30-second human review
Owner opens the folder over coffee, reads each draft, clicks send. We trained him on one rule: if a draft says something he wouldn't say, just delete it. After two weeks he was deleting fewer than one in twenty.
- 05
Measure honestly
Tracked closed-quote rate against the prior 60 days. Did not count quotes the owner manually re-priced — only true follow-up wins.
Numbers
- follow-ups now sent vs. ~5 before
- ~40/wk
- scoping call to live
- 9 days
- added software cost
- $0/mo
- closed-quote rate (was 18%)
- 27%
Outcome
First two weeks: 84 follow-ups sent that would not have gone out otherwise. Closed-quote rate moved from 18% to 27% by day 60. Owner asked us to scope a second build for new-customer onboarding — those quotes alone covered the build cost in three weeks.
What this cost
Build tier · $349 fixedBuild tier, $349 fixed. Runs on his existing Jobber and Gmail accounts; total ongoing cost is roughly $4/month in Claude API usage.
Stack
- Claude (drafting)
- Jobber (CRM, already in place)
- Gmail + Apps Script glue
- 30-min training session for owner
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