How long does an open estimate stay worth chasing?
Longer than most shops assume, but the value falls on a curve rather than a cliff. Build the curve from your own history: for every estimate that eventually sold, measure the days between presentation and sale, then plot the cumulative share. Where that curve flattens is your practical follow-up horizon. Past it, you are not following up, you are re-quoting, because price and scope have both moved.
Measure the curve before you write the policy
Most follow-up rules are inherited, not derived. Someone decided three touches over ten days and it never got revisited. The data to replace that guess already exists in your field service system: presentation date and sold date on every won estimate.
Plot the cumulative share of eventual sales by day. You will get a steep early rise, then a long shallow slope. The steep part is demand that was already decided. The shallow part is deliberation. The horizon worth working is where the slope goes essentially flat, because past that point the effort per recovered job climbs sharply.
You almost certainly have two curves, not one
Repair work and replacement work deliberate on completely different clocks. A no-heat repair quote is decided in hours because the customer is cold. A system replacement, a panel upgrade, a re-pipe or a remodel involves a second decision-maker, financing, and often a second or third bid.
Blending them produces a curve that describes neither. Split by job type first, and split again by whether the estimate was presented in person or sent afterward, because a quote emailed to someone who was not home behaves differently from one handed over at the kitchen table.
Aging buckets should trigger different actions
- Zero to two days. Highest yield window. A direct call from the person who quoted it, not a templated message from the office.
- Three to fourteen days. Deliberation. Useful to address the specific objection captured on the visit, which is where notes and call intelligence matter more than cadence.
- Fifteen days to your horizon. Lower yield but cheap to work in batch. Financing reminders and seasonal offers live here.
- Past the horizon. Move it out of the pipeline. Keeping it inflates open value and corrupts every forecast built on it.
The limit of what aging can tell you
Age is a proxy for interest, not a measure of it. An estimate can be four days old and already dead because the customer signed with someone else that afternoon and never told you. Nothing in your data will show that until you make contact.
That is why the aging curve is a prioritization tool, not a prediction. It tells you where to spend limited follow-up time. Combining it with what was actually said on the original call, and with revenue-side pipeline reporting, gets you far closer than aging alone.
Topics: estimates · pipeline aging · follow-up · close rate
Have a version of this question about your own business?
The useful answer usually depends on which systems you run and how they're connected. That's a conversation, not a blog post.