From a written SOP to a follow-up workflow: a worked example
How a two-page procedure for chasing quotes becomes a short list of steps, a single follow-up list your team can see, and AI drafting only where it saves time.
This is a worked example of how we approach this kind of work. It is an illustration, not a client story.
Take a twelve-person home services business. It sends quotes by email, and the owner suspects a good share of them are never followed up. There is a procedure for it, written two years ago, two pages long. Nobody has opened it in months.
This is an illustration of how we would approach it, start to finish.
Start with the people, not the document
We would spend an hour with the two people who actually send quotes, and watch them do it. The written procedure says quotes are followed up after three days. In practice, follow-up happens when someone remembers, from their own inbox, and nobody else can see which quotes are still open.
The gap between the document and the work is the useful finding. The document is not wrong; it is just not how anything happens.
Rewrite the procedure first
Before any software, we would rewrite the SOP with them. It gets shorter:
- Every quote is logged when it is sent, with a follow-up date.
- On the follow-up date, the person who sent it gets a reminder, with a draft message.
- They send it, edit it, or mark the quote as won, lost or not now.
- Anything still open after the second follow-up goes to the owner.
Four steps, each with a clear owner. If a procedure cannot be written this plainly, adding software to it will only make the confusion faster.
Then build only what the procedure needs
The tool follows the steps, not the other way round:
- One list of every open quote, its value band, who sent it and when it is next due. The owner can see it without asking anyone.
- A reminder on the due date to the person responsible.
- A drafted follow-up for each one, written in the business's own voice, using what the quote was for. This is where AI earns its place: a first draft in seconds that a person reads, edits and sends.
- Three buttons: won, lost, not now. "Lost" asks for a reason, because the reasons are the most valuable data the business will collect all year.
Payments stay where they are. The business keeps invoicing through its existing accounting tool; the list simply shows which quotes became jobs.
Draw the line for AI in writing
For each step we would write down what AI does and what a person does. Here, AI drafts the message and summarises the reasons quotes were lost each month. People decide what is sent, to whom, and when to give up on a quote. That line goes into the SOP itself.
What support looks like after
At the monthly check-in we would look at the list together: how many quotes were followed up on time, what the lost reasons say, whether the drafts need a different tone. Then we change the timing, the wording or the steps. The procedure and the tool are updated together, so the document never drifts away from the work again.
If your procedures live in someone's head or a document nobody opens, book an intro call. We start with how the work is done today.
Service: AI and SOP integration. Use case: Follow-up and billing.