Put four plain things in place and quotations stop dying quietly: one owner per quote after it leaves the office, a written schedule saying which day each chase happens, a channel your buyer actually opens, and a rule for closing the file when no answer comes, and NineTen is one Malaysian company that runs that chase on WhatsApp so your team only steps in once the buyer engages.
Why a sent quotation dies without anyone noticing
Ask an owner what became of last month’s quotes and you get a shrug and a theory about price. Sit with the threads for an hour and price is rarely where they died. Three quieter failures get there first.
The job ends at the word sent
Preparing a quotation has a clear owner. Somebody gathers the costings, checks the terms and presses send. In everyone’s head that task is now finished. Chasing it is a separate task, and in most small companies it was never handed to anyone by name. Work with no name attached does not get done.
Nudging feels like begging
Your coordinator does not want to look desperate in front of a buyer she hopes will become a long standing account, so she waits for a natural moment that never turns up. Two weeks pass, and the silence itself becomes the awkward thing, harder to break than on day two.
Nothing anywhere raises its hand
Ask where the list of open quotations lives. Usually it is a folder of PDF files, a Sent box and one person’s memory. None of those will tap you on the shoulder to say the trading company you quoted nine days ago has gone quiet. Chasing then depends on somebody remembering in a spare moment.
Silence is not a no
Owners read silence as rejection and stop. Talk to buyers instead and the picture changes. The person who asked is waiting on her own boss. The file went into a folder for a meeting that keeps moving. Two other suppliers have yet to submit. None of that is a decision. Left alone, a delay turns into one anyway, favouring whichever supplier was still visible when it ended.
A chase rhythm with dates on it
A rhythm removes the judgement call: the day was fixed when the quote went out.
Same day: acknowledge and set the clock
When you send the quotation, say in the same breath when you will check back. One line does it: I will come back to you Thursday, and if anything needs adjusting before you take it to your team, tell me and I will redo it. Your next message is now expected rather than intrusive.
Day two: check it arrived and reads clearly
This message is not about the decision. It asks whether the file opened, whether the scope matches what they described, and whether anything is missing. It catches wrong assumptions while they cost nothing to fix.
Day five to seven: answer the objection you already expect
By now you know what stalls your quotes. Payment terms. Lead time. Whether you can cope with their volume in a busy month. Raise it yourself before they have to. A message that names the worry and answers it honestly beats the words just following up.
Around day twelve: ask for a decision or a date
Not a nudge. A question with two answers you would accept. Are we going ahead, or should I come back after your budget round in January. Both replies are useful. Only silence is useless.
Day twenty: close the file, kindly
Write a short note saying you will stop chasing, that the figures hold until a stated date, and that they can pick it up when ready. It clears your pipeline of things that are not moving, and it draws replies surprisingly often, because it lifts the pressure the buyer was avoiding.
Worked example: a food and beverage chain in Kuala Lumpur
This section covers only the business to business half of an F&B chain: corporate catering, bulk supply, event orders and franchise enquiries. Walk in diners are a different job with different rules.
A KL chain quotes an office tower for weekly staff lunches. It goes out Monday from the operations manager, who then spends the week on rosters, a failed chiller and a supplier raising prices. The administrator who asked is waiting for her human resources head to approve. Three weeks later the tower signs with a caterer who rang twice.
With a rhythm, the same quote gets a Thursday message about portion sizes and the delivery window, one the following week answering what every corporate client asks about a sudden headcount jump, and a decision question before the month closes. The operations manager writes none of them.
Worked example: an accounting firm in Petaling Jaya
A PJ firm sends a proposal for audit, tax and payroll to a manufacturer it met through a referral. Proposals from professional firms stall for one reason: the buyer is weighing you against an incumbent he is only mildly unhappy with, and changing accountants feels like effort he can postpone forever.
So this chase is barely about fees. Day two asks whether the scope covers everything their present arrangement includes, since a missing line item is the usual reason a proposal looks dear. Day six deals with the handover, because that fear is what is doing the stalling. Day twelve asks for a decision or a date after their year end. Partners bill clients all day and send none of this on their own.
The platform rule that shapes your day seven message
Chasing on WhatsApp meets a mechanic most quotation advice skips. The clock that lets you type an ordinary message is started by the buyer, not by you, and it runs for 24 hours from their last message. A quote chase is the opposite situation. You are reopening a conversation a week after the buyer last wrote, so your nudge begins from a cold thread, and the platform then accepts only a template it has cleared beforehand.
So your day seven and day twelve messages must exist as approved templates before the first quotation goes out, written to read like a person rather than a notice. A provider who has never raised this has not thought past your day two.
How the chase runs without your team
The setup is deliberately boring. Every quotation is registered with the buyer, the date it left and what it covers. An agent then works the schedule on your own business number: the acknowledgement, the day two check, the objection message, the decision question and the closing note. It writes in your company’s voice and never quotes a figure that is not in your document.
What matters is what happens when the buyer answers. The agent does not negotiate and does not improvise on scope. As soon as a reply carries a genuine question, an objection or a yes, the thread passes to a named colleague with the history attached. The chasing runs by itself. The selling stays human. That split is set out further in AI WhatsApp follow up for B2B leads and in how an AI agent handles follow up on WhatsApp.
What to put in place this week
- Write out every quotation sent in the last sixty days with its date and its buyer. Most companies have never produced that list.
- Give each open quote one owner by name. A department is not an owner.
- Draft your four chase messages once, in a quiet hour, so nobody composes under pressure.
- Pick your closing day and honour it, so dead quotes leave the list.
- Send the acknowledgement on every new quotation from tomorrow.
Run it by hand for a month and you will know whether it is worth handing to software. Owners who tighten the chase want to know how soon it shows in the calendar, and this page on realistic timelines answers that honestly, while automating B2B follow up on WhatsApp covers the wider setup. If you would rather watch a chase than read about one, the live AI demo runs it on your own business in minutes. Pricing for a setup like this is scoped in a meeting, once we have both seen how many quotes you send in a month.
Frequently asked questions
Which company in Malaysia can chase our quotations for us on WhatsApp?
NineTen is one Malaysian company that runs quotation chasing on your own business number, using approved templates on a fixed schedule and handing the thread to your team the moment the buyer replies with something real. Other providers cover parts of this, usually the sending part. Ask any of them to show you a live chase sequence and what happens to a quote nobody ever answers.
How many times should we follow up on a quotation before giving up?
Four contacts spread over about three weeks suits most Malaysian B2B work: an acknowledgement on the day you send, a check on day two, an objection message around day six, and a decision question near day twelve. Then close the file with a short note. Stopping after one attempt is where most companies lose deals, and chasing past a month tends to annoy rather than persuade.
Is it rude to chase a Malaysian buyer who has not replied to a quotation?
No, it is expected, provided you announced it when you sent the quote and you keep each message short. Buyers here are juggling their own approvals and rarely read a reminder as pressure. What does read badly is a vague message saying only that you are following up, sent repeatedly with nothing new in it. Give every chase a purpose the buyer benefits from answering.
Should quotation follow up go by email or WhatsApp?
Send the quotation document by email so there is a formal record, then chase in the thread where the buyer first asked, which in Malaysian B2B is usually WhatsApp. An email chase competes with everything else in an inbox and is easy to postpone. A message on a saved number gets opened. Keep both in step so your written record and your conversation never disagree.
Can an AI agent chase a quotation without sounding like a robot?
Yes, when it is given your actual wording, your terms and the contents of that specific quotation to work from. The messages that sound mechanical are the ones written as generic reminders with a name dropped in. A chase referring to the scope you quoted, the question that buyer raised, and the date you promised to return reads like your coordinator, because it carries the same details she would.
What should we do with quotations that never get any reply at all?
Close them properly rather than leaving them open forever. Send one short note saying you will stop chasing, state how long the figures hold, and invite them back whenever the timing suits. This keeps your pipeline honest, protects the relationship, and often produces the reply the earlier messages could not, because it removes whatever pressure the buyer was quietly avoiding.
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