Six Things to Have Before You Send a Price

A price that goes out missing something does not stay out. It comes back as three more texts, a phone call, and a revised number that the customer now reads as a shop that does not know what it is doing.

We got tired of that, so we wrote down what has to be on the record before a quote can leave the building. It is six things. None of them are clever.

• The name and a phone number that works.
• The address the work happens at.
• The times the customer is actually free.
• What they say is wrong, in their own words.
• The vehicle as year, make and model. All three.
• Nothing else. The list is short on purpose so it gets used.

Why these six and not ten

Every shop that has tried this has tried it with a longer list first. We did too. Mileage, VIN, whether the car runs, whether there is a warning light, who the previous shop was.

All of that is useful and none of it stops a quote from being wrong. The six above are the ones where being wrong costs you the job. Get the address wrong on a mobile quote and the price is wrong. Get the model wrong and the part is wrong. Miss the availability and you have priced work you cannot place.

A long list also has a failure mode nobody talks about. It stops being a check and becomes a form, and a form gets filled in with whatever makes it go away. Six things get read. Fourteen get clicked through.

Drafting and sending are two different questions

This is where we had it backwards for a while, and it is the part most worth copying.

Our first version used the six things to gate the whole process. An advisor could not start building a quote until every field was filled in. That sounds disciplined and it is actually just friction, because the person best placed to notice a gap is the person building the quote, and we were stopping them from getting far enough to notice.

So the list gates sending, not drafting. Anybody can draft from almost anything. A draft that is missing something carries a plain sentence at the top saying what is still needed. The advisor sees the gap before the customer does, which is the entire point.

The practical effect is that a half formed lead still produces something to look at. You can see the shape of the job, you can see what it would cost if the missing piece turns out to be ordinary, and you can ask the one question that unlocks it.

The car is the one thing we will not guess at

Our first attempt read the year, read the make, and took the next word as the model. It seemed reasonable. A text saying "my 2015 Honda is making a noise" produced a quote for a 2015 Honda Is.

That is funny once. It is not funny on a price that reaches a customer.

It is all three parts now or there is no draft. The rule is deliberately blunt because the alternative is a confidence score, and a confidence score on a vehicle is a way of being wrong slowly.

There is one exception and it is not a guess. A returning customer with exactly one complete vehicle on file gets that vehicle, because it is their car and they are texting about it. Two vehicles on file and it stops and asks, because a household with a truck and a sedan will absolutely text you about one and mean the other. The draft states which way it worked the vehicle out, so the advisor never has to wonder whether the car came from the message or the history.

What happens when almost nobody says the car

We ran this over a week of real leads before trusting it with anything, and the result was worth the exercise.

Out of 416 open leads, almost none had a complete vehicle in the text itself. That is not a data quality problem. It is what leads look like. Most of them are a call that rang out plus a note from the tracking line, and a person who could not reach you does not leave a year, make and model on a voicemail.

Of those same leads, 108 had exactly one car already on file from previous work. That is the number that made the returning customer rule worth writing. Roughly a quarter of an otherwise unquotable pile becomes quotable the moment you let a customer record answer a question the message did not.

If you are weighing up whether this is worth building for your own shop, run that count first. It tells you in an afternoon whether you have a drafting problem or an intake problem.

It will not write the same customer a second quote

A subtler trap, and one we walked into. Our first two automatic drafts were both duplicates of quotes a person had already priced and sent by hand.

The reason is structural and probably applies to you too. A lead record knows whether it turned into a job. But an advisor who quotes a returning customer usually works from the customer card, not the lead, so the lead never gets marked. The lead sits there looking untouched while a real quote is already out.

The check that works is to ask the jobs table instead. Anything open on that customer at any status short of finished means hold. Do not draft, and do not name a job number, because two numbers for one piece of work is worse than no number at all.

The one quote that sends itself

A pre purchase inspection is $225 and that figure does not move based on what is wrong with the car, because finding out what is wrong with the car is the whole job.

That is the only quote we allow out without a person reading it first, and it is safe for exactly one reason. The price does not depend on anything we have not seen yet.

Everything else waits for a human. Not because the drafting is poor. Because a price is a promise, and somebody here should have stood behind it before a customer reads it as one.

What this actually changed

Two things, and only one of them is the obvious one.

Quotes stopped going out half formed, which took a round of back and forth off the front of every job. That is the one you would predict.

The one you would not is that the advisor stopped being the person who remembers the list. Before this, the quality of a quote depended on who happened to be at the desk and how busy they were. The list is in the software now, so a busy Tuesday produces the same quote as a quiet Thursday.

If you run a shop and you are still holding this in your head, start by writing the six things on the wall by the desk. It works on paper long before it works in a database, and the paper version tells you whether the list is right for how you actually sell.