A contractor tells us the leads from their last agency were poor quality. It is the single most common complaint we hear, and about half the time it is true.
The other half, the leads were fine. They sat in a shared inbox until somebody got back to the office.
What a web enquiry actually is
Picture the person who just filled in your form. They are at a laptop or on a phone, they have a problem they have decided to deal with, and they have two or three other contractors' sites open in other tabs.
They are not waiting for you. They are working through a list. The business that responds first gets to frame the conversation, and frequently gets the job regardless of price or quality — not because they were better, but because the customer stopped looking.
By Thursday that person has had a conversation with somebody else, possibly had a quote, and has moved on. The lead was never bad. It expired.
Why it happens, which is rarely laziness
In almost every case we look at, the cause is structural rather than attitudinal. Nobody is ignoring enquiries on purpose.
- Enquiries go to an info@ inbox that nobody specifically owns, so everybody assumes somebody else has it
- They go to one person who is on a roof until five and genuinely cannot answer
- They arrive as email, which gets checked in batches, rather than as a text, which gets looked at immediately
- There is no target, so there is no sense that two days is a failure rather than normal
- Nobody measures it, so the problem is invisible to the person who could fix it
That last one is the root of it. Ask most contractors how long a web enquiry waits and you will get an estimate. Measure it and the real figure is almost always worse — often by a lot.
The fix is mostly mechanical
This is not a culture problem requiring a change of mindset. It is a routing problem with a short list of fixes.
- Route every enquiry to one named person, with a named backup for when they are unavailable
- Alert by text rather than email. The phone is already in their hand
- Set a target everybody knows — fifteen minutes during business hours is realistic for most contractors
- Measure it and make the number visible. What gets reported gets done
- Send an automatic acknowledgement that sets a real expectation, so the gap before a human call is not silence
- Where a human genuinely cannot answer — evenings, weekends, the second simultaneous call — have something that can
The arithmetic that makes this urgent
Suppose you generate forty enquiries a month and close eight of them. Now suppose a quarter of those enquiries are going cold before anyone calls back.
Recovering even half of that — and faster follow-up reliably recovers more than half — adds jobs without a dollar of additional ad spend. Compare that against what it would cost to generate enough extra leads to produce the same number of jobs at your current response time.
This is why we look at response time before we look at campaigns. Spending more on generating leads while a quarter of them expire unanswered is paying to fill a bucket with a hole in it, and the hole is cheaper to fix.
After hours is the other half
For home services a large share of enquiries arrive in the evening and at weekends, because that is when homeowners sit down and deal with the thing that has been bothering them.
If those all wait until Monday, a meaningful portion of your marketing spend is producing enquiries that go to whoever answered first on Saturday. Options range from a rota, to an answering service, to an AI receptionist that handles the predictable questions and captures the details — but doing nothing is a choice with a price.
The short version
Before you buy more leads, measure how long the ones you have wait. If the answer is hours rather than minutes, fixing that will produce more jobs than any campaign change — and it is cheaper than every alternative.