How fast should a contractor call back a new lead?

Why speed matters

A homeowner who fills in a form for a new roof often fills in two or three. The first contractor to call books the visit, and the others call a booked customer. You do not need an industry study to see this in your own numbers: compare the close rate of leads called in the first hour with the ones called the next day.

Big jobs suffer most. A $2,000 repair and a $35,000 exterior often get the same treatment, so the job worth the most waits in the same pile as everything else.

Why leads wait

It is rarely laziness. Leads arrive from the website, the phone, ads, referrals and canvassers, and each channel lands somewhere different: the CRM, a rep's phone, a paper pad. Nobody is sure who owns which one, so some get two calls and some get none.

Adding office staff does not fix that. One way in does.

What to set up

Send every lead through one intake with the same eight questions: who, where, what work, roughly how big, insurance or cash, when, how they found you, and whether they have other estimates.

Route it by rule: by postal code, by type of work, by size, with emergencies and past customers flagged. The moment it is assigned, a clock starts. If the owner has not logged a call by the deadline, the lead goes to a manager.

Missed calls get a text straight away. After-hours leads get called first thing the next business day.

How to know it is working

Track three numbers by rep and by source: time from lead to first call, the share of leads called within your deadline, and close rate. The channel that sends the most leads is not always the one that closes, and once leads are timed, that shows.