Resources · Lead Generation Resources
Lead generation resources
Most home service businesses do not have a lead generation problem. They have a lead handling problem, and it is far cheaper to fix.
- No lock-in contracts
- Month to month after the first 90 days
- You own every account and asset
- Reported in booked jobs, not impressions
In short
How quickly should a contractor respond to an enquiry?
Within minutes, not hours. In a trade where a homeowner contacts three firms at once, the business that answers first wins a disproportionate share of the work. An automated acknowledgement should reach them inside a minute and a human inside five. Most contractors call once and give up; a short sequence across five days recovers a meaningful share of lost enquiries.
Start here
Before you spend another pound on generating enquiries, work out what happens to the ones you already get. How fast are they answered? What happens to the ones nobody reaches? How many were never followed up a second time?
Lead response research consistently finds that contacting an enquiry within the first few minutes dramatically outperforms even a thirty-minute delay. In a trade where three firms are being contacted at once, that is often the entire difference between winning and losing the job.
The checklist
Work down it in order. Each item is worth more than the one below it.
- Measure your current response time honestly. From enquiry received to a human speaking to them. Most owners guess ten minutes and the real number is over an hour.
- Get enquiries to your phone in seconds. SMS and email alert with the service, the postcode and the number already in it, so calling back takes one tap.
- Send an instant acknowledgement. An automatic message so the homeowner knows they reached a real business and stops ringing your competitors.
- Follow up more than once. Most contractors call once and give up. A short sequence over five days recovers a meaningful share of enquiries that would otherwise be lost.
- Shorten your form. Name, phone, postcode, service. Every extra field costs you completions, and you can ask the rest on the call.
- Put the phone number above the fold. As a tappable link, on every page, on mobile especially. This is fixed in five minutes and forgotten on most trade websites.
- Track a booked job, not just a lead. Five pipeline stages: enquiry, contacted, quoted, won, lost. Without this, nobody can tell which marketing produced money.
- Ask for a review after every job. Automatically, the same day, with a direct link. Reviews drive map pack rankings, and map pack rankings drive the urgent work.
- Never buy shared leads if you can avoid it. The same homeowner sold to four firms is a race to the bottom you did not agree to enter.
- Ring back the ones you lost. A polite call four weeks after a lost quote recovers work more often than any advertising channel, and it costs nothing.
Questions
What is a good response time?
Under five minutes to a human. Under sixty seconds to an automated acknowledgement. Anything over an hour and you are effectively donating the enquiry to whoever answers faster.
Do I need a CRM?
You need five stages you will actually use. That can be a simple pipeline tool or a spreadsheet you update daily. A complicated system nobody updates is worse than a simple one that gets used.
How many follow-ups is too many?
For a home service enquiry, three to four attempts across five days is normal and welcome. They contacted you. Giving up after one voicemail is the most common and most expensive mistake in the trades.
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