What a quote request should ask, and what it should not

A quote form has one job: get you enough to price the work, or enough to know it is worth a visit. Most forms fail in one of two opposite directions. They ask for a name and a message, which tells you nothing, or they ask fourteen questions and nobody finishes them.

The right length is shorter than most owners expect, and the right questions are more specific.

Every field costs you people

This is the trade-off underneath the whole thing. Each additional field loses a percentage of the people who started, and the loss is steepest on a phone, which is where most of them are.

So a field has to earn its place. The question is not whether the answer would be nice to have. It is whether not having it would change what you do next.

If you would visit either way, do not ask. If the answer decides whether you quote by email or drive across town, ask.

The four that almost always earn their place

How to reach them. One field, and make it a phone number rather than an email if you intend to call. Asking for both usually means you get one filled in badly.

Where the job is. A ZIP code or a town. This is the single most useful filter you have, because half of unusable enquiries are outside your area, and you find out after two phone calls.

What the job is. One open box, with a prompt that tells them what to include. Not "your message" but "what needs doing, and anything that might affect it: age of the property, access, whether it is currently working."

That prompt is the highest-value text on the form. Without it you get "need a quote for a bathroom" and a week of back and forth. With it you get something you can price.

When they need it. Not an exact date. Something like: emergency, next few weeks, or just planning. This one question sorts your enquiries into the ones to call immediately and the ones to book in, and it costs the customer two seconds.

The ones to cut

Title. Never needed.

Full address before you have spoken. A ZIP code is enough to know if it is yours. Asking for the whole thing up front reads as intrusive from a business they have not met.

Budget. Tempting and usually counterproductive. Most people genuinely do not know, so they either guess low and anchor themselves, or abandon the form rather than commit to a number in public. Ask on the phone if you must.

How did you hear about us. Useful to you, worth nothing to them, and it sits between the customer and the send button. Put it in the thank-you page if you want it.

Let them send a photo

For most trades this is the highest-return field on the form. One photo of the boiler, the roof, the room, the damage often replaces an entire visit and lets you quote accurately the same day.

Make it optional, and say why it helps. "A photo usually means we can quote without coming out." People will happily do something that saves them an appointment.

What happens after send

The form is half the job. The other half is what the person sees next, and "thank you, we will be in touch" wastes it.

Say when. "We reply to quote requests the same working day, usually within a couple of hours." That single sentence stops them contacting two competitors while they wait, which is exactly what they do otherwise.

Then meet it. A stated window you miss is worse than no window at all, and how fast you answer decides who gets the job more often than the quote does.

Test your own form

Fill it in as a customer, on your phone, and time it. Anything over about forty seconds is losing people. Then check the enquiry actually arrived, and see whether what you received would let you price the job.

If it would not, the problem is not that customers are vague. It is that the form never asked.

The Instinctor team