A quote goes out, and nothing comes back. The natural interpretation, and the one most small businesses reach for, is that the price was too high or somebody else got the job. Sometimes that is exactly what happened. But a great deal of the time nothing was decided at all: the person who asked for the quote read it, thought it looked reasonable, intended to come back to it properly, and then had a week of their own. The quote moved down the inbox, the intention faded, and eventually the whole thing was either dropped or given to whoever was in front of them when the need became urgent. No decision was ever made against the business. The moment simply passed.
This distinction matters because the two situations call for opposite responses. If the price was wrong, following up changes nothing and the lesson is about pricing. If the customer never got round to it, a single short message brings the job back to the top of their pile and frequently wins it - and it costs a few minutes. Since the business cannot tell which situation it is in from silence alone, and since silence looks identical in both cases, the only way to find out is to ask. The remarkable thing is how consistently small businesses choose not to, and how much work is lost to that choice each year without ever being counted, because a job that was never won leaves no record anywhere.
The obstacle is almost never time. It is that following up feels like chasing, and chasing feels like admitting you need the work. That discomfort deserves to be met directly, because it rests on a misreading of how it lands. From the customer's side, a brief note asking whether they have any questions about the quote reads as ordinary professional attentiveness, and quite often as a relief - they had been meaning to reply and now do not have to feel awkward about the delay. Very few people are annoyed by a polite follow-up on something they themselves requested. The business is imagining an irritation that the customer, in the overwhelming majority of cases, does not feel.
The practical version is undramatic. Decide on a rule rather than judging case by case, because case-by-case judgement is what allows the discomfort to win: a short message a few days after the quote, and another a week or two later if there is still nothing, and then let it go. Keep it brief and free of pressure - checking they received it, offering to answer questions, and saying plainly that the quote still stands. Write down when each quote went out, because the reason follow-ups do not happen is usually that nobody remembers which ones are outstanding. It is the cheapest work available to most small businesses: no advertising, no new customers to find, just finishing conversations that were already started.