Quote Systems for Lift Engineers
You are quoting against an incumbent, not against a price
Nobody changes lift company because the quote was cheaper
- £14,900Passenger lift modernisation
- £14,350Domestic through-floor platform lift
- £9,200Platform lift installation
- £850Annual service contract
- £350LOLER thorough examination
Almost every commercial quote you send is going to a building that already has a lift company. There is an incumbent, there is a history, and the person reading your quote is not asking whether your price is good. They are asking whether changing supplier is going to become their problem.
That is a completely different document from a competitive price.
The fear is specific and it is worth naming. Somebody who switches lift maintenance is worried the new contractor will find a list of faults the old one never mentioned, that a proprietary controller will turn out to be locked, that the handover will leave a gap in the examination record, and that if it all goes wrong it will be visibly their decision.
A quote that only addresses cost leaves every one of those unanswered, and the safest thing a facilities manager can do with an unanswered question is nothing.
What the document actually has to do
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Address the handover explicitly.
Who holds the records, how the examination history transfers, what happens to the current certificate, and what the first month looks like. This is the single most reassuring page you can put in a quote and it is almost never there.
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Separate the survey from the promise.
Quoting a maintenance contract without seeing the equipment means either padding the price or discovering problems later. A pre-contract survey, priced or free but explicitly stated, converts “what will they find” into a known quantity before anybody commits.
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Price remedial work separately and honestly.
If the lift needs work the incumbent has been deferring, say so as a separate schedule with its own timescales. Rolling it into the contract price makes you look expensive; presenting it as a discovery makes you look like the one who noticed.
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Be explicit about response times and what they cost.
Four hours and next working day are different products. A quote that offers one figure with no service level attached is not comparable to anything.
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Say what is excluded.
Vandalism, misuse, obsolete parts, water ingress in a pit. Every lift contract has exclusions and the ones that hide them get the argument later.
The ratio
One modernisation is £14,900 and a service contract is £850 a year. Our Booked package is £99 a month — £1,188 a year.
The number that matters is win rate on contracts you are already quoting for. A lift company quoting twenty maintenance contracts a year at £850 and winning six is leaving £11,900 of annual recurring revenue on the table against a competitor who wins ten — and the difference is almost never the price. It is whether the document answered the switching question.
What we’d actually build
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A handover section
That goes into every maintenance quote, covering records, certificates and the first month.
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A pre-contract survey offer
So the unknown is priced rather than feared.
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A remedial schedule template
That separates discovered work from contracted work.
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Service level options
Presented as a comparison, so the buyer chooses a level rather than doubting a number.
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A follow-up sequence
Because a facilities manager who did not reply is usually not saying no — they are waiting for a reason to act.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Every maintenance quote answers the handover question without being asked
- Remedial work is quoted separately and wins on its own merits
- Response levels are offered as choices rather than assumed
- Win rate against incumbents is a number you track
- Quotes get a second contact without anybody remembering to send one
The mistakes we see most
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Quoting a price against a price.
The buyer is comparing risk, and the cheapest quote from an unknown contractor is the riskiest option on the desk.
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Hiding the condition problem.
If the lift needs work, finding out after the contract starts damages the relationship you just won.
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One response time for everyone.
A block of flats and an office have different tolerances and will pay differently.
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No follow-up.
Procurement decisions stall constantly. The quote that gets a polite second contact is frequently the one that gets signed.
The first ninety days
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Weeks 1–4
The quote rebuilt around handover and exclusions, with service levels offered as options.
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Weeks 5–8
The pre-contract survey introduced and the remedial schedule separated, so discovered work stops distorting contract pricing.
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Weeks 9–12
Follow-up automated and win rate measured against incumbents rather than against quote volume.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Quotes are built from priced templates per equipment type, so a maintenance proposal takes minutes rather than an evening and reads the same every time.
Survey findings attach to the site, which means the remedial schedule references what was actually seen rather than being reconstructed later.
And follow-ups prompt themselves, so a quote sitting with procurement for three weeks gets a second contact rather than going quiet.
The breakdown call is a contract quote in disguise
There is one enquiry type that arrives ready to switch, and most lift companies treat it as a job.
A building rings you because their lift has stopped and their usual contractor cannot come until Thursday. That call is not really about a repair. It is a building telling you, at the exact moment it hurts, that the incumbent has failed them — which is the only moment a facilities manager is genuinely open to changing supplier.
Handled as a callout, it produces an invoice and nothing else. The lift gets fixed, the relief wears off, and in three months the contract renews with the company that let them down, because renewing is easier than deciding.
Handled as an opening, the repair quote carries a second page: what we found, what it suggests about how the equipment has been maintained, and what a contract with us would look like. Not as a pitch — as an observation about the machine, which is what you are qualified to make and what nobody else has told them.
The practical requirement is that it has to go out fast, ideally the same day, while the lift being broken is still recent. Which is a quoting systems problem rather than a sales one: if a second-page proposal takes an evening to write, it will not happen, and the moment will pass. Built from a template it takes minutes and it converts a callout into the most valuable thing in this business, which is somebody else’s contract.
Questions lift engineers ask
Should the pre-contract survey be free? Either works. What matters is that it is stated, because the alternative is pricing blind and being wrong in one direction or the other.
How do I compete with a large national? On response, on the named engineer, and on answering the handover question they answer with a call centre.
Do buyers really read exclusions? Procurement does, and it is often the thing that makes a quote look professional rather than evasive.
How long should a quote stay open? Long enough for a procurement cycle — commonly a month or more — and say so, because an expired quote restarts the whole conversation.
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