Why Fast Follow-Up Beats Better Marketing

78% of customers go with the first contractor to respond.

Not the best reviews. Not the lowest price. Not the fanciest website. The first one to pick up the phone or text back.

That stat should change everything about how you think about marketing. But most contractors are still obsessing over the wrong things.

The math nobody wants to do

Take two HVAC contractors. Same market. Same ad budget. Same everything except response time.

Contractor A responds in under 5 minutes. Contractor B takes the industry average: 47 hours. Nearly two full days.

Same $3,000 monthly ad spend. Same 50 leads coming in.

Contractor A books 10 jobs. Contractor B books 2.

Same investment. Five times the return. The only difference is how fast they got back to people.

Why speed works better than better marketing

Responding within 1 minute increases conversion by 391%. After 5 minutes, your odds of qualifying that lead drop 80%. After 30 minutes, you’re basically throwing dice.

Most marketing advice tells you to optimize your landing page, test different headlines, improve your ad creative. That stuff matters on the margins. But if you’re spending money to generate leads and then taking two days to call them back, you’re pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

The homeowner who submitted a form at 8pm has already called three other companies by the time you see it at 10am. They booked someone at 9:15 last night.

The 5-minute window

MIT studied lead response times across industries. The findings were brutal.

Contacting a lead within 5 minutes makes you 100x more likely to reach them and 21x more likely to qualify them. Wait 30 minutes and your odds crater.

Home service is even more compressed. Someone with a broken AC in July isn’t filling out forms for fun. They need help now. Every minute you don’t respond, the urgency is pushing them toward whoever picks up.

The contractor who texts back “Got your message - calling you in 2 minutes” within 30 seconds owns that lead. The rest are fighting over scraps.

Read more about the 5-minute rule and why it matters.

What fast follow-up actually looks like

You don’t need to personally answer every lead at 11pm. You need systems that buy you time.

An auto-text that fires within 10 seconds of a form submission changes everything. “Thanks for reaching out to ABC Plumbing - we got your message and someone will call you within 10 minutes.” That homeowner stops calling other companies. They wait for you.

Then you actually call in 10 minutes. Or 5. Or 2.

The text isn’t the sale. The text is a placeholder that prevents them from moving on. It signals that you’re responsive and professional before you even talk to them.

Some contractors use virtual receptionists for after-hours calls. Others have their best salesperson as the first point of contact for all leads, regardless of time. The specifics matter less than the commitment to speed.

Your marketing can’t fix slow

You could have the best Google Ads in your market. Perfect landing page. Five-star reviews everywhere. If you take 47 hours to respond, you’re handing those leads to competitors.

The contractor with a mediocre website who answers in 60 seconds books more jobs than the contractor with a $15,000 custom site who checks messages twice a day.

Marketing generates opportunities. Speed converts them.

Every dollar you spend on ads, SEO, or marketing is wasted if your follow-up is slow. You’re paying to put leads in someone else’s pipeline.

Where leads actually go

A homeowner needs their water heater replaced. They Google it, click on three different contractors, fill out forms on two of them.

Contractor A texts back in 45 seconds with a friendly message and a callback promise. Contractor B’s form goes into a CRM that someone checks after lunch.

Contractor A calls at the 8-minute mark. Homeowner picks up. They have a brief conversation, schedule an estimate for tomorrow.

When Contractor B finally calls 6 hours later, they get voicemail. The homeowner already has an appointment. They’re not answering unknown numbers anymore.

This plays out hundreds of times a day in every market. The leads aren’t bad. The timing is.

The inbox zero myth

Some contractors convince themselves they need to finish the current job before checking leads. They tell themselves they’ll batch their follow-ups at the end of the day when they can focus.

By then, those leads have already spoken to three other companies.

Fast follow-up isn’t about dropping everything. A 15-second text doesn’t interrupt your job. It just holds the lead until you can give them proper attention.

The contractors who win have a system: immediate auto-response, callback within 15 minutes, actual conversation that same day. The ones who struggle are treating lead follow-up like email - something to check when convenient.

Cost comparison nobody makes

Contractors will spend weeks negotiating a 10% discount on ad spend. They’ll pay a consultant $2,000 to improve their landing page conversion by half a percent.

Meanwhile, responding faster would 5x their conversion rate for free.

The math works like this: if your cost per lead is $150 and you convert 20% of leads, each job costs you $750 in marketing. If faster response bumps that conversion to 40%, each job now costs $375.

Same ad budget. Half the acquisition cost. More jobs on the calendar.

No amount of marketing optimization delivers that kind of improvement. Speed does.

Speed as competitive advantage

Private equity has rolled up 800+ home service companies since 2022. They have real marketing budgets, sophisticated CRMs, and the ability to outspend you 10:1 on ads.

But they also have layers. Regional managers. Call centers that put people on hold. Decision trees that slow everything down.

You can answer your own phone. You can text back in 30 seconds because you’re the owner and that’s your number. You can schedule an estimate for tomorrow afternoon because you control your calendar.

Speed is one of the few advantages that actually gets harder to maintain as companies grow. The independent contractor who commits to fast response is playing a game the PE rollups can’t easily win.

What this means for your budget

If your response time is slow, adding more marketing spend is wasteful. You’re generating more leads to ignore.

Fix the speed problem first. Get an auto-responder set up. Put a system in place where leads get a human callback within 10 minutes during business hours. Figure out after-hours coverage.

Then increase your marketing spend. Now you’re actually capturing what you pay for.

The contractors spending $10,000 a month on marketing with 47-hour response times could spend $5,000 with 5-minute response times and book more jobs.

The uncomfortable truth

Nobody wants to hear that their marketing isn’t the problem. It’s easier to blame the leads, the platform, the competition.

But if 78% of customers go with whoever responds first, the problem isn’t your marketing. The problem is what happens after the lead comes in.

You can have the best marketing in your market and still lose to the competitor who’s just faster.

Read more about follow-up automation and how contractors are solving this.