The first five minutes after a lead comes in
The business that answers first usually gets the job, and it is rarely the cheapest quote.
Somebody fills in your form on a Tuesday morning. They also filled in two others in the same sitting, because that is what people do when they want something fixed. By the time you climb down off the roof at four and see the email, one of those two has already been out, looked at it and left a number.
You did not lose that job on price. You lost it at about half past ten, while you were working.
Speed beats almost everything else you could change
Owners spend a lot of time on the things they can see. The ad copy, the photos, the price. Those matter. None of them matters as much as how long somebody waits for a reply, because the wait is what decides whether you are in the conversation at all.
The reason is not that fast businesses are better. It is that somebody with a problem is making a short list, and the short list closes. First real answer gets to quote. Everybody after that is arguing with a number already on the table.
You are not competing to be the best quote. You are competing to be the first one.
The lead you paid for is the one going cold
If you are running ads, this gets expensive in a way that is easy to miss. You paid for that click. The money is gone whether or not anybody calls the person back. A lead that sits four hours has usually cost you twice: once to acquire, once in the job you did not get.
It also makes your ad account look broken when it is not. The keyword that produced the inquiry gets judged on whether work came out the other end, so a slow callback ends up switching off a term that was doing its job.
The first reply should not depend on you being free
This is the whole fix, and it is not complicated. Something automatic goes out the moment the form is submitted: a text that confirms you have it, says when you will call, and gives them a way to pick a time themselves if they would rather.
That is not a replacement for you ringing them. It is a holding move that keeps you on the short list until you can. The person stops shopping because somebody answered, and you make the real call when you are off the job.
Decide who owns it before you need to
On a quiet week any system works. The test is a Thursday with two crews out, a van problem and somebody off sick. That is when leads sit, and it is also when you are most likely to be spending on ads.
So decide it once, in advance, rather than fresh every time:
- Who makes the callback, by name, not whoever happens to see it first
- How long a lead is allowed to sit before somebody else picks it up
- What happens to inquiries that land in the evening or on a Sunday
- What gets said when you cannot give a real price yet
The last one catches people out. Going quiet while you work out a quote reads exactly the same to the customer as not caring, because they cannot tell the difference from where they are sitting. A message that says you have got it and you will have a number by Thursday holds the job. Silence does not.
The hours you cannot cover are the ones that matter most
Look at when your inquiries actually arrive. For most home service businesses a serious share of them land in the evening and at the weekend, because that is when people sit down and deal with the thing that has been bothering them.
That is also precisely when your competitors are not picking up. An automatic reply at nine on a Sunday evening is worth more than the same reply at eleven on a Tuesday, because at nine on a Sunday you are the only one who answered.
What this is worth before you raise the budget
If you are thinking about putting more money into ads, fix this first. More budget sends more people into the same gap, and a bigger pile of leads nobody answers quickly is not an improvement. It is the same problem, more expensively.
Sorting out the follow-up costs nothing like what a month of extra spend costs, and it raises the return on every lead you are already paying for. It is the cheapest thing on the list and almost always the last thing anybody does.
Keep reading
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