Ask Claude to Draft a Bid Follow-Up

When a bid has been sitting in sent status for a week or more without a reply, a short follow-up often unsticks it. This recipe walks Claude Desktop through composing one — pulling the bid, the customer, and the time-since-sent into context, drafting an email, and (optionally) sending it back through bids.send.

Prerequisites

• Claude Desktop installed and connected to BuildWorkPro. See Install in Claude Desktop if you haven’t done this yet.
• On the OAuth consent screen, granted at least bids:read. Add contacts:read so Claude can resolve the customer’s name and email.
• Optional: grant bids:send if you want Claude to send the email through BuildWorkPro for you. If not, you’ll review the draft and send it manually from your email client.

1. Open a new chat in Claude Desktop and confirm the connection.

   Click the tools icon in the message input. You should see buildworkpro listed with the tools you granted. If you don’t, see the troubleshooting section in the Claude Desktop install guide.

2. Ask Claude to find a quiet bid.

   List my bids in sent status that haven’t moved in 5 or more days.

   Claude calls bids.list with status=sent and filters the results by updatedAt. It returns something like:

   I found three bids that have been in sent status for 5+ days:

   1. Bid 123 — “Storefront Glass — Acme Construction” — sent 8 days ago, $18,500
   2. Bid 117 — “East Wing Glazing — Northside Builders” — sent 12 days ago, $42,200
   3. Bid 109 — “Curtain Wall Phase 2 — Riverline Group” — sent 6 days ago, $156,800

3. Invoke the draft_bid_followup prompt.

   Use the draft_bid_followup prompt for bid 123.

   Claude calls prompts/get with bid_id=123. The prompt loads the bid, the contact, and the time-since-sent, then asks Claude to compose a follow-up that fits the tone (8 days is “gentle nudge” territory, 30+ days is “checking in once more”). Claude returns:

   Subject: Following up on the Storefront Glass quote

   Hi Maria,

   Just checking in on the quote we sent over last week for the Storefront Glass scope at Acme Construction ($18,500). Happy to walk through any of the line items or adjust the schedule if that would help. If there’s a different decision-maker I should also include, let me know.

   Best, Ivan

4. Review and adjust.

   Read the draft carefully. Edit anything that doesn’t match your voice, fix the customer’s name if Claude got it wrong, double-check the dollar amount.

5. Send.

   • Manual path (recommended for first few times): Copy the body into your email client. The customer’s email is on the bid’s contact — verify it before hitting send.

   • Automated path: If you granted bids:send, ask Claude:

     Send bid 123 to the customer with the draft above as the message body.

     Claude calls bids.send with the body and the bid moves through the normal send pipeline (logged in the audit trail, recorded as an activity, the timestamp updates).

Watch out for

• LLMs make mistakes, especially with names and dollar amounts. Always read the draft before sending. Even small errors look careless to a customer. - Don’t grant bids:send to an AI client you don’t fully trust. The send is real — it goes to the customer’s inbox, with your domain in the From header. - The customer’s email comes from the contact record. If the contact has the wrong email, the follow-up goes to the wrong inbox. Verify before automating. - If the bid has been sent multiple times, time-since-sent reflects the most recent send. Ask Claude to summarize the bid’s history if you’re not sure how many follow-ups have already gone out.