Should You Follow Up on Quotes During the Holidays? (What to Send Between Thanksgiving and New Year's)

You sent a bunch of quotes in October and November. Now it's the holidays and everything has gone quiet. Do you keep following up, or leave people alone until January?

Short answer: yes, follow up. But change how you do it. A December text is not the same as a June text.

Why things really are slower

People are busy. They're traveling, hosting, shopping, and spending money on other things. A big project feels like a January problem.

That's real. Don't read the silence as a no. Most of those quotes aren't dead. They're parked.

The mistake is treating a parked quote like a dead one. If you stop all contact for six weeks, the customer forgets you. In January they start fresh and call whoever is top of mind.

What not to do

Don't blast a hard-sell text on December 24. Don't send a "last chance for this price" message during family dinner week. It lands badly and it makes you look desperate.

Also don't pretend it's a normal week. Writing "just checking in!" on the 26th, as if nothing happened, reads like an auto-message.

What to do instead

Use the holiday as a reason to reach out, then keep the message light. Three touches cover most of the season.

Late November: "Hi Tom, hope you have a good Thanksgiving. Your quote for the basement is still good. No rush on your end. Just wanted you to know I'm here when you're ready."

Mid December: "Hi Tom, quick note before things get crazy. I'm holding a couple of January start dates for jobs like yours. If you want one, let me know and I'll pencil you in. No pressure."

First week of January: "Happy New Year, Tom. Ready to look at that basement whenever you are. I have openings in late January and February."

That's it. Three messages across six weeks. You stay in front of them without crowding their holidays.

Use the calendar as your reason

Holidays give you honest, non-pushy reasons to write:

• Your schedule fills up in January and February.
• Material prices may change after the new year.
• You can lock a start date now and begin when the weather allows.

None of that is a trick. It's the truth about how a contractor's calendar works. See how long should a quote be valid if you need to extend a price past the end of the year.

Winter jobs and slow season

If you do outdoor work, December and January may be slow for you too. Use the quiet to clean up your list. Go back through every open quote, sort them by size, and give each one a real message. The ideas in contractor slow season: how to keep work coming in fit well here.

For customers who said they'd rather wait, customer wants to wait until spring has the exact words to use.

The trouble is remembering

You'll mean to send those three messages. Then it's mid December, you're slammed finishing jobs before the break, and the whole list gets skipped. The first week of January you'll wonder why nobody called.

QuoteChaser handles the timing. You set the sequence once. It sends the messages by text and email, skips holidays and quiet hours if you want, and pings you the second someone replies.

Join the QuoteChaser waitlist and walk into January with a full pipeline.