The 4 Ways a Contract Stalls (and the Follow-Up That Fixes Each)

Most follow-up on an unsigned contract is one email: “Just a reminder to sign.” It goes out on day three, again on day seven, and after that somebody quietly gives up.

The trouble is that “unsigned” isn’t one situation. A contract nobody has opened has nothing in common with one that’s been opened four times and set aside. Treat them the same and your reminders start to feel like nagging, which is a big part of why they so often don’t work.

Here are the four places a contract actually gets stuck, and what to send for each.

1. Sent, but never openedWorth a follow-up after 24 hours

If a day goes by and it hasn’t been opened, the likeliest explanation is a boring one: they never saw it. The signing email doesn’t come from you. It arrives separately, from a different sender, so it can end up in Promotions, in spam, or under forty newer emails.

So don’t remind them to sign. Tell them where to look:

• Where it probably went: the Promotions or Updates tab, or spam.
• The exact subject line to search for.
• An easy way out: “Reply and I’ll send it again.”

Keep it light, and blame the inbox rather than the person. “It’s probably in a filtered folder” gets a reply. “You haven’t opened my email” gets silence.

If that doesn’t work, the next follow-up shouldn’t be another email. When email isn’t getting through, more email won’t fix it. Send a short text instead.

2. Opened, but not signedWorth a follow-up 48 hours after they open it

This one is completely different. They’ve read it, and something stopped them. It’s usually one of three things: a question they’d rather ask than guess at, something in it that needs changing, or the timing.

A reminder doesn’t help with any of those. A question does:

Is there anything holding this up? If it’s simpler, just reply with the one thing that’s stopping you.

One rule matters more than the rest here: never say you saw them open it. Knowing when someone opened a contract is useful for deciding when to follow up. Put it in the email and people feel watched.

Two days after opening is about right. Soon enough that they still remember it, and late enough that it doesn’t look like you were waiting by the phone.

3. About to expireWorth a follow-up a week before the deadline

Most contracts come with an expiry date. When one lapses nothing is lost exactly, but the whole thing has to be sent again and signed from scratch.

This is the only one of the four where urgency is fair. You didn’t invent the deadline to push them. It’s real, and saying so plainly is doing them a favour:

This expires in the next few days, and if it does we’ll have to start again. It takes about three minutes.

Just don’t borrow that urgency for the other three. Once every reminder sounds urgent, nobody believes any of them.

4. DeclinedWorth a phone call straight away

A decline feels final, but it often isn’t. Plenty of the time it means one thing is wrong: a date, a number, a misspelled name, a clause they didn’t expect.

Two mistakes lose the deal here. The first is carrying on with reminders to sign something they’ve just refused. The second is sending the same contract again, unchanged.

What works instead:

• Stop every reminder immediately.
• Get the reason to whoever owns the deal, fast. If the signer typed one when they declined, it’s the most useful thing that person will read all day.
• Call before you email. A ten-minute head start is plenty.
• Then send a short note thanking them for saying so, and offering a corrected copy.

Three follow-ups, then a person

However a contract stalled, set a limit. Three automated follow-ups is plenty: an email written for that particular stall, a text a couple of days later, then DocuSign’s own reminder, the one with the signing link in it.

After that, stop and hand it to a human. A fourth automated message won’t get the signature. It teaches people that your emails can be ignored, and on a contract that impression outlasts the deal.

The step everyone forgets: stop when it’s signed

The quickest way to make a business look careless is a reminder about a contract that was signed yesterday. Every follow-up needs an off switch, and a signature, or a decline, should flip it the moment it happens.

Once it’s signed, send their copy straight away. Attach it and link to it, so it survives a full inbox. Then get out of their way.

Doing this without a spreadsheet

None of this is complicated. It’s just hard to keep up by hand, for every contract, every day, which is exactly the kind of thing that slips.

So we built it into six ready-made workflows for GoHighLevel. They work out which of the four stalls a contract is in, send the follow-up that fits, hand it to a person after three tries, and stop the moment it’s signed or declined. See the six workflows and the emails they send.