You sent the estimate. The tech did good work. The customer said they’d think about it. And then nothing. No call back, no signed estimate, no booked job. That money just sits there in your unsold estimates, slowly going cold. Most home service companies have tens of thousands of dollars sitting in unsold estimates at any given time, and nobody is doing anything about it.
ServiceTitan has tools built specifically for following up on these opportunities. The problem is that most companies either don’t know they exist, or they set them up wrong and stop using them after a week. This post walks you through how to actually use them.
Why Estimates Go Cold in the First Place
Before we get into the tools, it helps to understand why estimates don’t close. It’s rarely because the customer said no. Most of the time, they said “let me think about it” and then life got in the way. They forgot. They got busy. They called another company that followed up faster. Or they’re waiting for a specific trigger, like the start of summer or a paycheck clearing.
The other common reason is that the estimate got lost internally. The tech closed out the job, the office assumed someone else was handling it, and nobody circled back. ServiceTitan actually tracks all of this through opportunities and estimate statuses, but only if your team knows where to look and what to do with the information.
The Follow-Up Screen: Your Command Center for Unsold Estimates
The follow-up screen is in your main navigation bar. It’s the icon with the flag. Under the Follow Up tab, you’ll find several sub-tabs, but the two that matter most for sales recovery are Unsold Estimates and Sold Estimates.
Unsold Estimates Tab
This is where every estimate that hasn’t been sold lands. Now, here’s something that trips people up. ServiceTitan groups estimates into folders called opportunities. If your techs build good-better-best options, all three of those estimates live inside one opportunity. When the customer picks the “better” option, the opportunity is marked as won, even though the “good” and “best” estimates are technically still unsold.
If you build estimates in a progressive style (good, better, best where the customer picks one), check the box that says “Exclude opportunities with any sold estimates.” That keeps your list clean. You don’t want your team calling a customer back to pitch the “good” option when they already bought the “better” one. If you build estimates in an additive style, where the customer might buy three out of five recommended items, leave that box unchecked so you can follow up on the items they skipped.
How to Actually Work the List
Click into any opportunity and you’ll see all the estimates inside it, the customer’s info, and an audit trail of any previous follow-up attempts. At the bottom, you have buttons to call the customer, log a follow-up, or upload an attachment.
When you log a follow-up, you can leave notes, use a log template like “callback another day,” and check whether you actually reached the customer. This matters because it changes the opportunity status. If you didn’t reach them, it moves to “unreachable.” If you did, it moves to “contacted.” Those statuses let you filter and prioritize later.
You can also set a follow-up date. If the customer says “call me next week,” set the date for next week. That way, when you filter the follow-up screen by date, it’ll show up exactly when you need to act on it. I’d recommend making this part of someone’s daily routine. Spend 20 minutes every morning working the follow-up list. The companies that actually do this consistently are the ones that recover the most revenue.
Sold Estimates Tab (The Overlooked One)
This tab catches something different. It shows estimates that have been sold but haven’t been booked into a job yet. So the customer said yes, but nobody actually scheduled the work. This is pure revenue that’s already been agreed to and is just waiting to be collected. If you’re not checking this tab regularly, you’re leaving money on the table for no reason.
Mobile Follow-Ups for Techs and Salespeople
Your technicians and salespeople also have a follow-up screen on their mobile app. It’s a tab on their main dashboard. The key difference from the office side is that techs can only see their own opportunities, not the whole company’s. That’s by design. You want each tech or salesperson owning their own follow-ups.
When a tech closes out a job where they created estimates but didn’t sell any, ServiceTitan automatically creates a follow-up date, typically two days out. So there’s already a built-in reminder. The tech just needs to actually check their follow-up tab and act on it. From there, they can call the customer, email them, resend estimates, set new follow-up dates, and even set reminders that’ll notify them via text or email.
One tip worth calling out: if your salespeople want to collect info in the field but build their estimates later, they can create a blank “ghost” estimate on the job, close it out, and then come back to the follow-up screen to duplicate that shell and fill in the real numbers. It’s a workaround, but it lets them build estimates from mobile without needing an office login.
Permissions to Check
There are a few technician permissions that affect what your team can do on the mobile follow-up screen. “Access follow-ups” controls whether the tab shows up at all. “Edit estimates in follow-up” lets them dismiss, duplicate, and modify estimates from the follow-up screen. And “Send emails from technician email address” lets them send estimates from their own work email so the customer can reply directly to them. I’d recommend turning that on for salespeople. For technicians, probably not. Most of them don’t even know the password to their company email.
Second Chance Leads: AI-Powered Call Recovery
This one goes a step beyond estimate follow-ups. Second Chance Leads is a Titan Intelligence feature that listens to your phone calls and flags ones that should have been booked but weren’t. Even if the CSR marked the call as “not a lead,” the AI will override that classification if it thinks there’s still an opportunity. It’s catching the calls that fall through the cracks at the booking stage, before an estimate even gets created.
The Second Chance Leads page has three tabs: Open, Cold, and Done. Open is your fresh leads that someone should jump on immediately. Cold is leads that have aged past a threshold you set (the default is seven days, and you can adjust it anywhere between one and fourteen days). Done is where leads go after you’ve reached a resolution, whether you booked it, dismissed it, or decided not to follow up.
For each lead, you can review the AI-generated call summary, listen to the recording, read the transcript, and see the original CSR notes. Then you can call the customer back, leave notes, and update the status. If you do book the job, the status updates automatically.
One important thing: when you dismiss a Second Chance Lead and it asks whether it was a real lead, use the dictionary definition. If the person on the phone expressed any interest in having work done, it’s a lead. Even if they were price shopping. Even if you thought they were tire kickers. That answer feeds back into training the AI, and marking real leads as “not a lead” warps the system over time.
Setting It Up
In settings, search for Second Chance Leads. You’ll find the toggle to enable it, the after-call work time (how long after a call ends before the AI analyzes it), and the cold lead threshold. For the after-call work time, I’d recommend keeping it around five minutes. If you set it too short, the AI might flag calls that the CSR was still in the process of booking. Too long and you lose the speed advantage. You also want to make sure the right people have the permission to access Second Chance Leads. Give it to at least one call center manager, but ideally assign it to whoever on your team has inside sales skills. You want someone who’s good at winning people back on the phone.
One heads-up: Second Chance Leads is not a default feature. It costs extra. You either buy it a la carte if you’re on basic phones, or it comes included with Phones Pro (which may have been renamed to Contact Center Pro by the time you’re reading this).
The Free Alternative: Leads from Unbooked Calls
If you don’t have Second Chance Leads, there’s still a free, built-in option. Under Settings > Account > Feature Configurations, you can enable “Create leads from unbooked calls.” With this turned on, when a CSR closes out a call without booking, they’ll get a prompt to log a follow-up. They can leave notes explaining what happened, set a follow-up date, and attach it to a marketing campaign.
Those leads land on the Follow-Up page under the Leads tab. From there, someone can call the customer back, log additional notes, and either convert the lead into a booked job or dismiss it. The difference between this and Second Chance Leads is that this one is manual. Your CSR has to actively log it. The AI version catches things your team misses. But if you’re working with a tighter budget, this is still way better than doing nothing.
Making Follow-Ups Actually Stick
The tools are only useful if your team actually uses them. Here’s what I’d recommend. Assign one person to own the follow-up process, at least on the office side. Make it part of their daily routine, not something they do when they “have time.” Twenty minutes in the morning working through the unsold estimates list, plus a quick scan of the sold-but-not-booked tab, will recover more revenue than most companies realize.
For techs and salespeople, make sure they understand that the mobile follow-up tab exists and that ServiceTitan is already creating follow-up dates for them automatically. All they have to do is check it and make the call. If your salespeople are competitive, you can even use the opportunity statuses (not attempted, unreachable, contacted) as accountability metrics. It’s easy to see who’s working their follow-ups and who’s ignoring them.
And if you’re using Second Chance Leads, keep an eye on the metrics in the top corner of that screen. It shows how many leads you’ve recovered and your percentage increase over baseline. That’s the number to put on the wall in your call center.
Every unsold estimate is a customer who was already interested enough to get a quote. They’re warmer than any new lead you’ll buy from a marketing campaign. Following up consistently is the cheapest way to grow revenue, and ServiceTitan gives you the tools to do it without tracking anything on spreadsheets or sticky notes.
If this was useful, the Blue Collar Nerd guide goes much deeper. Searchable video lessons covering estimate workflows, follow-up screens, Second Chance Leads, and every other part of ServiceTitan, built for every role on your team. Check it out here.