Why the contractor who answers first usually gets the job
The cheapest fix in contractor marketing, and the one almost nobody has actually made.
Parker Scherer · · 5 min read
How fast should a contractor respond to a lead?
Inside five minutes, and ideally inside sixty seconds. A homeowner filling in your form is usually filling in two or three others in the same sitting, so the contractor who replies while that is still what they are doing gets a conversation and the rest get voicemail. It is the cheapest improvement available to most contractors because it adds no cost per lead at all.
The enquiry was never exclusive
A homeowner deciding to remodel does not contact one contractor. They open three tabs, fill in three forms, and go back to their evening. Nothing about that process rewards the best contractor. It rewards the available one.
By the next morning the homeowner has had a conversation with somebody, has a site visit in the diary, and has mentally started the project. The second and third contractors are now interrupting a decision rather than participating in one.
You are not competing to be the best contractor who replied. You are competing to be the first one who did.
Why it does not get fixed
Because it is not a marketing problem and nobody sells it. An agency is paid to produce leads, and producing leads is visible work with a dashboard attached. What happens in the four hours after a form submits is somebody else's job, usually the owner's, usually from a truck, usually badly.
It also feels like the small thing. More leads feels like growth; replying faster feels like admin. The arithmetic says otherwise: doubling your close rate and doubling your lead volume produce the same number of jobs, and only one of them costs money.
What the fix actually is
A sequence that fires the moment the form submits, regardless of the hour, and keeps going for weeks past the point a person would give up.
- A text inside sixty seconds that reads like a person, names the project they enquired about, and asks one question. Not a thank-you-for-your-enquiry autoresponder.
- An email with the thing they actually wanted, which is usually a price range and some examples of that job.
- A voicemail drop if there is no reply within the hour, so the missed call is yours rather than theirs.
- Then a sequence that runs for six weeks. A $70,000 kitchen is not decided in one conversation, and most contractors follow up twice and stop.
- Routing by the answers in the form, so the enquiries worth a drive reach a human faster than the ones that are not.
What it is worth
More than new traffic, in almost every case we have looked at. It costs nothing per lead, it works on the leads you are already paying for, and it compounds with everything else: every pound spent on ads or search gets more valuable the moment the follow-up stops leaking.
It is also why we will usually recommend fixing this before spending more on acquisition. Generating more leads that then sit for four hours is paying twice for the same mistake.
Questions people ask
- How fast should a contractor respond to a lead?
- Inside five minutes, ideally inside sixty seconds. The enquiry is almost never exclusive, so the first real reply usually wins the conversation.
- Does automated follow-up feel impersonal to homeowners?
- Only when it reads like a template. A text that names the specific project and asks one real question reads as responsive, not automated. The alternative being compared against is usually silence.
- How long should a follow-up sequence run?
- Six weeks or more for remodeling work. A large project is not decided in a single conversation, and most contractors stop after two attempts.
Keep reading
- What a kitchen remodel actually costsThe most searched question in remodeling, answered with ranges and the five things that move them.
- Angi, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor and what a lead really costsShared marketplace leads look cheap per lead and are rarely cheap per job. Here is the arithmetic.
$200,000 in signed work in 90 days, or you do not pay us. One remodeler per market.
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