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Marisol from Tavares Tile and Stone in Worcester lost a dozen kitchen jobs this spring to slow quote follow-up. Eric breaks down how a unified inbox and an automated 8-day text-and-email sequence turn cold quotes into booked deposits.
Marisol Tavares of Tavares Tile and Stone in Worcester joins Eric to diagnose why a dozen kitchen jobs slipped away this spring — and why the fix isn't pricing, it's follow-up. They map out the exact workflow that turns "into the void" quotes into signed deposits.
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Eric: ...okay so wait, back up. You said two to three weeks before anyone even LOOKS at the quote?
Marisol Tavares: Yeah. I mean, sometimes longer. I send it from the truck, right? I'm sitting in someone's driveway, I've just measured a kitchen backsplash, I punch the numbers into my phone, hit send, and then... it just goes into the void.
Eric: Into the void.
Marisol Tavares: Into the void. Because then I drive to the next job, and the next job, and by the time I'm home it's eight o'clock and I'm eating cold ziti over the sink.
Eric: The contractor dinner.
Marisol Tavares: The contractor dinner, exactly. So who's checking the inbox? Nobody. My guys are great with a wet saw, they are NOT great with email.
Eric: Right.
Marisol Tavares: And I'll be honest with you, Eric, this spring I think I lost a dozen kitchens. Minimum. Real kitchens. Like, full backsplash, sometimes the floor too.
Eric: A dozen.
Marisol Tavares: At least. And it's not because my price was wrong. It's because some other guy called the lady back on Tuesday and I called her back the following Monday.
Eric: And by Monday she's already picked tile with him.
Marisol Tavares: She's already picked tile. She's already at the showroom. I'm cooked.
Eric: Yeah. So before we get into what to do about it, just say what the business is so people have the picture.
Marisol Tavares: Sure. Tavares Tile and Stone, out of Worcester. I've got six guys plus me. We do flooring, backsplashes, the occasional shower surround if I like the customer. Been at it about eleven years on my own, before that I worked for my dad.
Eric: General contractor?
Marisol Tavares: General contractor, yeah. Old school. He still thinks a fax machine is a productivity tool.
Marisol Tavares: I love him.
Eric: Okay so here's what I want to say, and I say this with love because I've watched a LOT of trades businesses do exactly what you just described.
Marisol Tavares: Mhm.
Eric: You don't have a pricing problem. You don't have a quality problem. You have a follow-up problem. And follow-up is its own job.
Marisol Tavares: Yeah.
Eric: Right? Like, the part where you measure the kitchen, that's a job. The part where you cut the tile, that's a job. The part where you keep talking to that homeowner from "I sent a quote" until "I have your deposit"... that is ALSO a job. And right now nobody on your crew has that job.
Marisol Tavares: Nobody. It's just sort of... assumed it'll happen.
Eric: And assumed work doesn't happen.
Marisol Tavares: It doesn't happen. I know that. In my brain I know that.
Eric: So let me tell you what we did at the agency, because we had the same exact thing, just different flavor. We'd do a discovery call, send a proposal, and then it would sit. Because I was the salesperson AND the one doing the work AND the one answering the support emails.
Marisol Tavares: That's me.
Eric: That's everybody who starts something. So a couple years ago we moved everything onto one all-in-one ops platform. I won't bore you with the name, it's the platform we run the agency on. But the key thing is, every lead, every quote, every text, every email, every voicemail, it all lives in ONE inbox.
Marisol Tavares: One inbox.
Eric: One inbox. So when a homeowner texts you back at nine at night saying "hey what about a darker grout," that text shows up in the same place as the email she sent on Monday and the voicemail she left on Tuesday.
Marisol Tavares: Wait, even the voicemail?
Eric: Even the voicemail. Transcribed.
Marisol Tavares: Okay. That alone would change my life.
Eric: Right? Because right now where does that voicemail live?
Marisol Tavares: On my phone. Which is in my truck. Which is at the shop. Which I left at five.
Eric: Gone.
Marisol Tavares: Gone.
Eric: So step one is just consolidation. Get every channel a homeowner can reach you on into one place. Step two, and this is the one that actually fixes your dozen kitchens, is automated follow-up the moment a quote goes out.
Marisol Tavares: Okay, what does that look like?
Eric: So when you hit send on that quote in the driveway, the platform fires off a text two hours later. Just a short one. "Hey Linda, this is Marisol, just making sure the quote came through okay, let me know if you have any questions on the grout or the timeline."
Marisol Tavares: Which I would send if I remembered.
Eric: Which you would send if you remembered, exactly. But you don't, because you're measuring the next kitchen.
Marisol Tavares: Right.
Eric: Then the next day, if she hasn't replied, another short one. Day three, an email with a couple of photos of a similar job you did, you know, "thought you might like to see how this one came out." Day five, a quick check-in. Day eight, a soft "should I close this one out or are you still considering?"
Marisol Tavares: Wait, that last one, the "should I close this out," that one I bet works.
Eric: That one works. That one works really, really well. Because it gives her permission to either say yes or to say no, and you stop bleeding mental energy on a maybe.
Marisol Tavares: Yeah. Because right now my brain is carrying twenty maybes around all day.
Eric: Twenty open loops.
Marisol Tavares: Twenty open loops. And then I can't sleep.
Eric: Right. And here's the thing, Marisol, this is the part people miss. None of those messages have to be fancy. They have to be FAST and they have to be CONSISTENT. The homeowner who picks your competitor isn't picking him because his texts are better written. She's picking him because he texted her on Tuesday and you didn't text her until the following Monday.
Marisol Tavares: Speed.
Eric: Speed. And consistency. Same cadence, every lead, every time.
Marisol Tavares: Okay so the platform does the texts automatically.
Eric: Automatically. You set the sequence once. We call it a workflow. You build it once, you turn it on, and from then on every quote you send out gets the same eight-day treatment without you doing anything.
Marisol Tavares: And if she replies?
Eric: If she replies, the sequence stops, and now it's a human conversation again. Which is the conversation you actually WANT to be having.
Marisol Tavares: Right, because that's the one where she's asking real questions.
Eric: That's the one where she's asking real questions. That's the one where you close.
Marisol Tavares: Okay. What about my guys? Because part of the problem is I don't want all of this on me forever.
Eric: Good. That's the right instinct. So in the platform you can assign an owner to every lead. So let's say you bring on, I don't know, your cousin's kid part-time, three hours in the morning.
Marisol Tavares: I literally have a cousin's kid.
Eric: Of course you do.
Marisol Tavares: His name is Dom. He's nineteen. He's bored.
Eric: Dom is perfect. Dom does three hours every morning. He opens the one inbox, he sees every conversation that needs a human reply, he answers the easy stuff, he flags the ones where you need to weigh in, and he moves leads through the pipeline.
Marisol Tavares: Pipeline meaning...
Eric: Meaning a visual board. New lead, quote sent, follow-up in progress, deposit received, job scheduled, job complete, review requested. You can see at a glance where every kitchen is.
Marisol Tavares: Oh that would be... yeah.
Eric: Right now where is that information?
Marisol Tavares: In my head. And on like four sticky notes on the dashboard of the truck.
Eric: The truck dashboard CRM.
Marisol Tavares: The truck dashboard CRM. Patent pending.
Eric: And one more piece, because I think this is the one that'll really get you. Reviews.
Marisol Tavares: Oh.
Eric: When a job marks complete in the pipeline, the platform automatically texts the homeowner a day later. "Hey, hope you're loving the new backsplash, would you mind leaving us a quick review?" With the link right there.
Marisol Tavares: We don't ask. We never ask.
Eric: Nobody asks. And then you wonder why the guy across town has a hundred and forty reviews and you have eleven.
Marisol Tavares: I have nine.
Eric: You have nine. And your work is better than his.
Marisol Tavares: My work is way better than his.
Eric: I believe you. But the homeowner on Google doesn't know that yet.
Marisol Tavares: Yeah.
Eric: Ask every time. Automatically. You'll go from nine to fifty in a season.
Marisol Tavares: Okay. Okay, this is a lot, but it's also... it's not a lot? It's kind of just one thing.
Eric: It's one thing. It's one inbox, one pipeline, one set of follow-ups that run on their own.
Marisol Tavares: And Notion for what, like, the internal stuff?
Eric: Yeah, we keep Notion for the internal workspace. SOPs, the script Dom would read from, the photos of finished jobs we pull into the day-three email, that kind of thing. The platform runs the customer-facing machine, Notion is where the team thinks.
Marisol Tavares: Got it.
Eric: But I don't want you to walk away thinking you need to do all of this on Monday.
Marisol Tavares: Good, because I have three kitchens on Monday.
Eric: Right. So here's the ONE thing I'd try this week. Forget the pipeline. Forget Dom for now. Forget the reviews.
Marisol Tavares: Okay.
Eric: Build ONE follow-up sequence. Eight days. Five messages. Text, text, email, text, text. And turn it on for every quote that goes out starting Monday.
Marisol Tavares: Just that.
Eric: Just that. Because that one move, by itself, is the one that recovers most of those dozen kitchens.
Marisol Tavares: Because the issue isn't that they don't want me.
Eric: The issue isn't that they don't want you. The issue is you go quiet and somebody else doesn't.
Marisol Tavares: Yeah.
Eric: That's it. That's the whole game in your business right now. Don't go quiet.
Marisol Tavares: Don't go quiet.
Eric: And the beautiful thing is, once that sequence is on, you don't have to remember anything. You can keep being the person in the driveway with the tape measure. Which is what you're good at.
Marisol Tavares: Which is what I like.
Eric: Which is what you like. The robot does the nagging.
Marisol Tavares: The robot does the nagging. I love that.
Eric: Let the robot nag.
Marisol Tavares: Let the robot nag. That's going on a shirt.
Eric: Put it on a shirt. So what are you gonna do this week?
Marisol Tavares: I'm gonna build the eight-day sequence. Five messages. I'm gonna turn it on for every quote starting Monday. And I'm gonna leave the rest alone until that one's actually running.
Eric: That's it. That's the move.
Marisol Tavares: That's the move.
Eric: Marisol, thank you for being so honest about the inbox thing, by the way. A lot of people won't say it out loud.
Marisol Tavares: I mean, what's the point of being on a podcast and lying? Everybody's inbox is a disaster.
Eric: Everybody's inbox is a disaster.
Marisol Tavares: Everybody's.
Eric: Alright. If you're listening to this and any part of what Marisol described sounded a little too familiar, you know, the quotes going into the void, the dozen jobs you suspect you lost this spring, do the one thing. Build the sequence. Turn it on. See what happens in thirty days.
Marisol Tavares: Thirty days. Report back.
Eric: Report back. And hey, if this was useful, hit subscribe so the next one finds you. We do one of these every week with a real operator like Marisol, talking about the actual thing that was breaking and the actual thing that fixed it.
Marisol Tavares: No fluff.
Eric: No fluff. Marisol, thanks for coming on.
Marisol Tavares: Thanks for having me, Eric.
Eric: Go sell some backsplashes.
Marisol Tavares: Going.
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