A CRM that records a lead only after booking can't show a home service business which leads nobody has contacted yet. A follow-up stage before the booked stage puts those leads on a list one person owns.
Spencer (not his real name) owns a basement waterproofing company. His second caller didn't have a list to call: when Stuart Trier reviewed the pipeline, nearly every lead in it was already booked.
A CRM that adds a lead only once an inspection is booked reports only on booked leads and excludes the rest.
In Spencer's pipeline, a lead automatically reached the Lead Scheduled stage as soon as the office booked an appointment. The stage before it, for new raw leads, was filled in by hand and received few of that month's leads.
When Stuart ran the leads report for the first 20 days of the month, it showed roughly 55 leads, all of them scheduled. That result is possible only when unbooked leads never get entered, and Stuart named the cause directly: the office administrator "only counts a lead if she schedules it," and Spencer confirmed that this was correct.
So where did a lead that nobody had contacted yet end up? Wherever the administrator put it, since the CRM had no stage for it. Seven raw leads did appear in the pipeline, and Spencer knew she entered some Facebook leads. But three new Facebook leads had arrived over a weekend, and she called them herself without entering them, while Spencer suspected that leads from email forms were filed in a folder in her inbox. He thought she was "picking and choosing" which leads to enter, and he hadn't yet asked her which ones she considered raw.
A raw lead, also called an uncontacted lead, is an inquiry (it can be a web form, a Facebook lead, a voicemail, a missed call, etc.) that has arrived but that nobody has contacted yet.
Meanwhile, a scheduled lead is an inquiry with a booked appointment; in a CRM, each lead type belongs in its own stage (some people call it a bucket or column).
Take an invented week with 10 inquiries, 7 of which end up with scheduled appointments. The pipeline shows 7 leads and zero losses, but in reality the other 3 inquiries, which still cost money or effort to attract, don't appear in any report. Since close rate is usually measured on scheduled leads, it can look healthy while raw leads go uncontacted.
The capacity a second caller adds depends on whether he has a list of leads to call. Because the phone isn't busy on Saturdays, Spencer's second caller worked that day. Spencer wanted him to call a set number of people each hour, with each outbound call recorded so Spencer could listen and pull a call-volume report. Spencer then described what that caller needed:
"I need a system with one area for the leads we still have to contact: someone filled out a web form, and we haven't reached them, or it's a Facebook lead we missed. That way he can call afterward, and we probably have a better chance of reaching them at those times."
— Spencer
Stuart answered that the administrator's list had to exist before the caller could use it:
"If she's only entering the people we've booked, there's nobody for him to call, because there's no list. We need to know where she keeps the list of people she hasn't been able to reach. Even a Google Sheet he can open is fine to start."
— Stuart Trier
That made the administrator's entry habits the limit on the second caller's work. With 20 leads on the list, he can make 20 first attempts, whatever his hours.
A Lead Follow-Up stage will help a second caller only if it is placed before the booked stage, receives every inquiry when it arrives, and has a named person who is responsible for calling the leads in it. Stuart proposed these steps for Spencer's pipeline, in this order:
Once the stage exists, the monthly report will show 5 differences.
| Report line | Pipeline that receives leads at Lead Scheduled | Pipeline with a Lead Follow-Up stage |
|---|---|---|
| Leads received in the month | Booked leads only (roughly 55 in the first 20 days at Spencer's company) | Every inquiry, booked or not |
| Leads not yet contacted | Invisible to the report | The count still waiting in the stage |
| Owner of an uncontacted lead | Whoever happens to remember it | The second caller |
| Share of inquiries that end up with a booked appointment | Always 100%, since only booked leads are counted | Booked leads divided by all inquiries |
| Close rate | Proposals accepted divided by booked leads | Calculated the same way, now shown next to the booking rate |
Before anyone builds the stage, you have to write down the path a lead takes. Stuart asked Spencer to meet with the administrator and ask one question at each step: when a lead comes in by phone call or email, what happens, then what happens, then what happens? Because you can't design a stage around a path you haven't described, writing out those steps is the first task in systemizing a home service business.
How can an owner tell whether a pipeline has the same blind spot? Pick 5 leads from last week that didn't end up with a booked appointment, and search for each one in the CRM. Every lead that doesn't turn up is a lead that was never entered into the system.
Response time is measured from the moment a lead arrives, and a CRM can measure it only if that arrival is recorded. Stuart said Spencer aimed to know how long it takes "from the time a lead comes in until we're on the phone with them." For comparison, he cited one of his clients whose average is under 30 seconds across 600 calls a month.
Spencer's office had already added one piece of this. After the company fixed its text messages, a missed call triggered an automatic text, and Spencer showed one unanswered call from that morning that the person got back to right away. Stuart added one caution: people answer a text that contains a question, but replies can drop off once the person can tell that an automation sent it.
Leads bought from aggregators need the same speed. Stuart's rule is that staff must call as soon as the lead arrives, because the person behind an aggregator lead has never seen the company's name, and a callback 24 hours later is too late.
A pipeline with nothing before Lead Scheduled can't measure the leads that never reached that stage. With a Lead Follow-Up stage in place, the monthly report can show 2 rates: booked leads as a share of all inquiries, and proposals accepted as a share of booked leads. Use the first rate to see where leads are lost, and the second to see how many of the booked leads end up as paying customers.
Before buying more leads, count the leads you already paid for but never contacted. One crawl space company was weighing more lead purchases when it found that its office called each new lead once and then stopped trying. After the office adopted a standard of 3 attempts per lead, weekly lead volume rose from 19 to 26-27 (the full story is in how one weekly meeting fixed lead follow-up). While that case study shows how often to try, the Lead Follow-Up stage gives each attempt a place to be recorded.
Any trade that receives inquiries faster than one person can answer them needs the same stage:
The second caller can call only the leads the CRM knows about. Start by searching the CRM for 5 recent leads that didn't end up with a booked appointment. If any lead can't be found, add the stage, ask whoever answers the phones to log every inquiry manually for 2 weeks, and automate the entry afterward. Then ask the second caller for one report after his first quiet Saturday: how many leads he called, how many he reached, and how many ended up with a booked appointment.
That report will show what the second caller adds to the business, and it should be added to the weekly scorecard, next to the booking rate and the close rate.
Give the two jobs to different people. Whoever answers the phones and reads the web forms should enter every inquiry, since that person sees each lead first, and then a second person should work through the list. Titles are only half the story, though: an administrator who works 9 to 5 can't make the evening calls a second caller handles. And when each job has a single owner, a lead can't end up on 2 lists or on none.
Set a cutoff by creation date, as Stuart did when he found 53 old contacts, left over from last year, mixed in with the current raw leads. Choose the number of days from how long your leads usually take to turn into booked appointments, and move anything older into a separate stage that a weekly review can clear. With a cutoff in place, the list is short enough to work through in one sitting. But when the top of the list is full of stale contacts, callers learn to ignore it.
Add 2 new fields to the stage, one for the inquiry's arrival time and one for the first-attempt time, and review a sample of 10 leads each week. Time every missed call from the moment it comes in. An after-hours inquiry should be timed twice: once from its arrival and once from the next time the office opens. Keeping the 2 times separate lets the weekly sample show whether a delay comes from office hours or office habits.
Stuart described his own sequence to Spencer this way: 1) a phone call the next day, 2) a text the day after, 3) and then another call and another text. After each attempt, the caller should log a note with the time and set a reminder for the next one, so anyone who opens the lead can see someone is working on it. For an electrical company, Stuart suggested an even longer sequence: 10 follow-up texts and 10 voice drops (pre-recorded voicemail messages), with enough humor to make some recipients laugh.
Ask a question in the text, because people answer questions. Stuart cautioned that fewer people answer once they can tell the text is automated. After the first 2 weeks, count how many missed-call texts received a reply, and rewrite the message if few did. Counting replies will also give the owner a baseline, and after that you will be able to measure each rewrite against it.
No. A typical home service coaching program tells owners to follow up faster, but Stuart started with Spencer's pipeline report and found the follow-up list it depended on didn't exist. The list is one piece of a system that also covers who enters leads, who calls them, and which report the owner reads each week. Speed advice alone leaves out where the leads are recorded.
Client details in this article have been changed to protect confidentiality. Any resemblance to a specific business is coincidental.
Stuart Trier is the Founder and CEO of Clear Results. Over the past 20 years, Stuart has built, bought, and sold 11 companies across the home service, healthcare, and marketing industries. He built his first company from startup to $8M in revenue in 3 years before a successful exit, then built a chain of 28 healthcare clinics and sold the business to a publicly traded company. Following that acquisition, Stuart spent 3 years working alongside the CEO, helping lead the organization through a take-private transaction before participating in a nine-figure exit to a Fortune 10 company. Today, he's the lead investor behind an electrical services platform operating across 3 U.S. states, and has worked directly with owners through 1,800+ strategic advisory sessions.
