How to follow up on a proposal without being a pest

When you send a proposal, it starts a process on their side that you can’t see. Your contact liked the call. Now they have to forward your PDF to the person who approves the budget, find a slot on that person’s calendar, and answer the questions that come back. Meanwhile, their own work goes on.

Silence after a proposal means one of four things:

• It has not reached the person who decides. Your contact is waiting for a meeting with their boss.
• Someone raised a question your contact can’t answer. “Why two phases?” “What happens if we’re late with the access?” They don’t want to ask you yet, because asking feels like a commitment.
• Something more urgent happened. A launch, a new boss, a bad quarter. Your project slipped down the list.
• They chose someone else, or chose to do nothing, and saying so feels awkward.

Your follow-ups have a job in each case. In the first three, they make it easier for your contact to move the proposal forward: an answer to forward, a smaller step to approve, a date to plan around. In the fourth, they make it easy to tell you no, so you can stop guessing.

When the proposal goes to more than one person, it does better. In Proposify’s data on 902,305 proposals, close rates doubled when more than one stakeholder viewed the proposal (Proposify, The State of Proposals 2025, read October 8, 2026). Several of the follow-ups below are built to get your proposal in front of the second person.

Most published data on follow-ups comes from cold email, sent to people who never asked to hear from you. A client who asked you for a proposal is much warmer than that, so expect your replies to beat these numbers.

• One follow-up gets more replies. Backlinko and Pitchbox studied 12 million outreach emails and found that one follow-up got 65.8% more replies, and that three or more messages got the best response rate (Backlinko, email outreach study, read October 8, 2026).
• Two or three is the useful range. Woodpecker’s data on its users’ cold campaigns shows an average reply rate of 9% with no follow-up and about 13% with at least one, and calls two or three follow-ups the best number (Woodpecker, follow-up statistics, read October 8, 2026).
• The wording matters. Gong studied 304,174 prospecting follow-up emails. “Never heard back” got more replies but cut meetings booked by 14%, and “following up” cut the odds of a meeting by 5% (Gong Labs, read October 8, 2026). A follow-up that reminds them they owe you a reply gets a reply, but not the next step.
• Views tell you the deal is alive. In Proposify’s data, winning proposals were viewed 10 times on average, losing ones 7 times (Proposify, The State of Proposals 2025, read October 8, 2026). If your proposal tool shows views, a burst of them means someone is reading. Write that day, with an offer to answer questions.

We found no credible study of follow-ups on services proposals alone. The cadence in this guide is from our own practice.

Paste them, fill in every bracket, and cut whatever does not fit your client. Reply in the same thread as the proposal, so they can see it one scroll up.

“Not now.” This is a good answer. It comes with a date or an event, and that tells you when to write. Stop the cadence at once. A follow-up before the date they named tells them you did not read their email. Put the date in your calendar or your CRM, write the day after it, and in that email ask whether anything changed, before you resend a proposal that may be out of date.

If “not now” comes with no date, ask for one: “When should I come back to this?” Most people will name a month.

A discount request. Most often they want to buy, and the number is too high for whoever approves it. Treat it as a scope question.

• Trade, don’t cut. Less scope, a longer commitment, payment up front, a later start when you have a gap to fill. Each one gives you something for the money you give up.
• Show the math. If the price is 12 days at $1,400, a lower price means fewer days. Ask which days they can do without.
• Decide your floor before you reply. If their number is below what the work costs you, say so and offer the smaller version.
• Don’t discount in the same email you are asked. Take a day. A cut that arrives in minutes tells them the first number was padded.

Stop when you have an answer. A yes moves to the SOW. A no gets one question (“what tipped it?”) and a thank-you. A date gets a note in your calendar. All three are answers.

Stop after the day 20 email when there is no answer at all. Four follow-ups over three weeks is enough to show you care and to show them you won’t chase forever. Mark the deal as lost with “no reply” as the reason, and put a reminder in a quarter. Write again in three months only if something changed on their side or yours. A fifth reminder in week four costs you the goodwill that the first four earned.

Read your lost reasons once a quarter. If “no reply” leads the list, look earlier in the sale: the proposal went to one person, or the next step was vague.

• “Just checking in.” It adds nothing, so it gets skipped, and so does the next one. Every follow-up needs a question, a fact or an offer.
• “Did you get a chance to look at it?” It makes them feel behind. Ask a question they can answer in one line.
• Fake deadlines. “This price expires Friday” when it doesn’t. They can tell, and it costs you trust you need for the contract. Name a date only when it is real, like a start date you can only hold until then.
• Re-attaching the whole proposal. Reply in the same thread, and quote the one part that matters.
• Writing only to one person. If your contact cannot move it, offer a short version for the person who signs.
• Following up before the date they named. Wait for it.
• Discounting to break the silence. A lower price in an unanswered thread tells them you will go lower again.
• Stopping after one email. Silence after a proposal often means a busy week. Send the cadence through to day 20.

Every follow-up above is an email you have to remember to write, on the right day, with a fresh reason in it. Tommos (tommos.ai) is a CRM whose AI agents, the tommos, take a B2B inquiry to a signed contract. After you send the proposal, Tommo Closer follows up on the schedule you set, and when the last follow-up goes unanswered, it tells you where the deal stands. It drafts each follow-up from the email thread and your proposal, so the email answers what the client asked and quotes your numbers. The decision to cut scope or move the price stays yours.

1. 1

   The cadenceClose

   You set how soon and how many times Tommo Closer writes into a silence. Each email leaves inside the client's working hours, in their time zone.

2. 2

   Each follow-upClose

   Tommo Closer writes from the thread and the proposal on the deal: the question for day 2, the answer to what they asked, the smaller first step. The card: the email on your phone, with Send, Change and Skip.

3. 3

   “Not now”Close

   When the client names a date or an event (“after the board meets on the 20th”), Tommo Closer stops and waits for it. Pause outreach on the deal stops it at once.

4. 4

   A discount requestClose

   Tommo Closer never invents a price. When the client asks for a number your record does not hold, it asks you on a card, and writes the reply from your answer.

You review each follow-up from your phone until you let a tommo send that kind on its own. After twelve approvals in a row of one kind of email with nothing to fix, Tommo Closer asks to send that kind on its own. You switch it on, on a paid plan, and switch it off the same way.

Tommo Closer comes with the Close plan, $599 a month for the firm. No seats, the AI model included, 14 days of everything with no card.

PFLB, the load testing firm where Tommos began, has run its inbound sale on three tommos since August 20, 2026. In seven weeks the tommos wrote 65 emails to 21 people, each sent on a person’s yes, and booked 10 meetings: see each count on PFLB’s page.

What Tommo Closer does · Every plan