Leads Not Answering, and What That Gap Is Telling You

You dial, it rings out, you leave a message, nobody calls back. Before you blame the list, do this today: take twenty form fills from last month, write down the minute each one arrived and the minute somebody at your shop first replied, and look at the gap. Leads not answering is usually that gap and nothing else. If most of yours sat over an hour, you have found it in about fifteen minutes of paperwork.

He is standing in front of the crack with his phone in his hand. He has walked past it for a year, something made him look properly this morning, and he is worried enough to type his number into a form. For about ten minutes he is the most reachable he will ever be.

Then his wife calls, the dog gets out, he goes back to work, and the whole thing slides from urgent to Saturday. By the time your office gets to him at four in the afternoon he is a different man, and he is no longer sure he wants to know what it costs.

Harvard Business Review published a piece in March 2011 on how fast an online sales lead goes cold, and its research found that most companies answer nowhere near quickly enough. That was written about software firms. In a trade where a worried homeowner already has three other shops holding his number, it reads worse, not better.

Do not guess at this one. Owners nearly always believe the shop answers faster than it does, because they remember the lead they grabbed in the truck and forget the eleven that sat in an inbox until the office opened.

The two figures that matter are the share answered inside five minutes and the share that waited an hour or more. Write both somewhere you will see them again next month, because this only improves when it is counted.

The text going first is the part most shops get backwards. A man under a house with a flashlight will answer a text and will not answer a call. The text also puts your number in his phone with a name attached, so when you ring at five minutes you are not an unknown number.

The other half of it is who does the job. When it belongs to whoever is free, it happens when somebody is free, which is never at 60 seconds. It has to run by itself, or it has to be one person’s only task.

If you close the gap and they still go dark, the problem is upstream of your phone. A homeowner who never asked to be called, who filled in a form for a free guide, or who was sold to four shops in the same minute will dodge you whatever you do, and no answering routine rescues that.

That is where speed stops being the fix and the source has to change. In the version I run, the homeowner picks his own time right after he answers the qualifying questions, so for most of them there is no gap to measure at all. The text at 60 seconds and the call at 5 minutes only fire for the ones who did not pick a slot.