Why Your Leads Aren't Converting: Finding the Leaks in Your Sales Funnel

You’re getting leads. But they’re not becoming jobs.

This is one of the most frustrating problems in home services. The lost demand after marketing works shows up as leads that never convert, even when the initial interest was real. Understanding marketing measurement reveals where the breakdown actually happens. You’re spending money on marketing, the phone rings, forms get filled out, and then… nothing. The leads just disappear.

Before you blame the lead source, take a hard look at what happens after the lead comes in.

Where leads actually die

Every lead goes through stages before becoming a customer. They fill out a form or call. You respond. They book an appointment. You give an estimate. They decide yes or no. Leads can fall out at every stage, and your job is to figure out where yours are disappearing.

Most contractors assume the problem is lead quality. They think they need better leads. But the data usually tells a different story.

Between lead submission and first contact, you typically lose 30-50% of leads simply because you’re too slow to respond. Between first contact and booking an appointment, you lose another 40-60% because you give up after one or two attempts. Then 50-70% of the estimates you give don’t close, often because there’s no follow-up after the proposal.

The compounding effect is brutal. If you start with 100 leads and lose at typical rates through each stage, you might end up with 8 closed jobs. That’s an 8% overall conversion rate, and most of those losses had nothing to do with lead quality.

The slow response problem

This is the big one, and almost every contractor gets it wrong.

The data is damning. Responding within 5 minutes makes you 21 times more likely to convert a lead compared to waiting 30 minutes. Responding within 1 minute increases conversion rates by 391%. And 78% of customers simply choose the first contractor who responds.

And yet the average business takes 47 hours to respond to a lead. That’s almost two full days. Even worse, only 27% of leads ever get contacted at all.

This happens in home services for understandable reasons. Your techs are in the field doing jobs, not sitting by the phone. Your office staff is juggling existing customers and scheduling. Leads come in after hours and on weekends when nobody’s working. There’s no real system for immediate follow-up.

These are understandable reasons, but they’re not excuses. They’re problems to solve.

The fix is simple in concept: respond within 5 minutes. In practice, it requires building systems like automated text responses, answering services, and lead routing that actually works. Learn more about speed to lead and the 5-minute rule.

The follow-up problem

Even when contractors do respond, they give up way too fast.

Here’s a stat that should concern you: 44% of salespeople give up after just one follow-up attempt. But 80% of sales require at least 5 follow-up touches to close. When you make 6 call attempts, your contact rate increases to 90%.

Most contractors make one call, leave one voicemail, maybe send one text, and then move on to the next lead when they don’t hear back. Meanwhile, their competitor is on their fourth follow-up while they’ve already written the lead off.

You have to remember that homeowners are busy people. They asked for an estimate while they were thinking about the problem, then got distracted by work, kids, dinner, whatever. Your one call came while they were in a meeting. Your voicemail got buried under fifteen others. That doesn’t mean they’re not interested in hiring you. It means you didn’t try hard enough to reach them.

A follow-up sequence that works looks something like this: On day one, within 5 minutes of the lead coming in, you call, text, and email. A few hours later if you haven’t connected, you call again. On day two you try again with a call and text. Day three another call. Day five you send an email with something useful. Day seven you make a final attempt and let them know you’re still available when they’re ready. Day fourteen you send a breakup message saying you’re closing their file but they’re welcome to reach out anytime.

That’s 8-10 touches over two weeks. Most contractors do 1-2 touches over 2 days and quit. The leads aren’t bad. The follow-up is bad.

Hatch analyzed over 132,000 HVAC campaigns and found that multi-touch follow-up achieves an 89.86% response rate compared to 8.56% for single-message campaigns. Their highest-performing sequence was 7 messages over 5 days: 5 texts and 2 emails. The gap between 8.56% and 89.86% is the gap between a contractor who sends one text and gives up and one who builds a system that keeps reaching out until the homeowner responds.

Wrong channel, wrong time

How you contact leads matters as much as how fast you do it.

Phone calls have the highest connection rate when people actually answer, but the problem is that people screen calls from unknown numbers constantly. Text messages have a 98% open rate and often get faster responses than calls because the homeowner can reply when it’s convenient instead of being put on the spot. Email has lower response rates but works well for sending detailed information and following up.

The best practice is to call first and then immediately text if you don’t get an answer. Something like: “Hi, this is Mike from ABC Plumbing. Just tried calling about your service request. When’s a good time to chat?” That text will often get a reply even when the call went straight to voicemail.

Your estimates don’t close

Let’s say you’ve fixed your speed and follow-up. Leads are booking appointments. You’re giving estimates. But they’re still not closing.

Industry data shows home service contractors close 20-40% of estimates on average. Top performers hit 50% or higher. Struggling companies hover around 10-15%.

If you’re below 20%, you should look at a few things. How are you presenting price? Are you selling value or just reading numbers off a page? Are you offering options like good-better-best, which increases close rates compared to single-price quotes? A plumber on ContractorTalk described implementing a good-better-best pricing model and watching close rates jump from 22% to 41% within 3 months. The key was pricing the middle option where he actually wanted to close. 60-70% of customers picked the middle option, which was exactly his target margin.

Tommy Mello of A1 Garage Door Service, a $200M+ revenue operation, tracks booking rates “down to the T” and targets 70%+ booking rates across all CSRs. He ties performance pay to booking success, not just commission. CSRs who can’t maintain 70% booking rates get retrained or moved to other roles. That level of measurement is what separates companies that close at 50%+ from those stuck at 20%.

Are you following up on unsold estimates? ServiceTitan data shows that contractors who use their follow-up feature recover 15-20% of unsold estimates. The feature automates reminders at 3, 7, and 14-day intervals, catching homeowners who needed time to think but would have been forgotten by a manual process. You have people who liked you enough to get a quote but just didn’t pull the trigger for whatever reason. A phone call a week later asking if they have any questions can bring a surprising number of them back.

Learn more about capturing lost leads and recovering these opportunities.

The real conversion killers

When you rank the problems by impact, slow response time kills more leads than anything else. Insufficient follow-up, meaning giving up after 1-2 attempts, is second. Not having systems so that manual processes break when you get busy is third. Weak estimate presentation where you’re not selling the value is fourth. Not following up on unsold estimates is fifth.

Notice what’s not on the list: bad leads.

Are there bad leads out there? Of course. You’ll get tire-kickers, wrong numbers, and people who just wanted a price to argue with their spouse about. But they’re usually 10-20% of leads, not 70%.

When contractors tell us the leads are garbage, we dig into their data and almost always find the same thing: slow response, weak follow-up, and no systems. The leads were fine. The process was broken.

Where to go next

Speed is the most important factor, and the 5-minute rule explains exactly why and how to fix it. To know if your numbers are good or bad, check marketing benchmarks for your trade. And to stop guessing about what’s working, set up proper marketing attribution.

The leads might not be the problem. Your process might be.