Lead response for contractors

Every inquiry gets a reply in a minute or two and a named person who owns it, on the phone number and tools you already have. This is the fix most companies should start with, because it is the cheapest one to install and the easiest one to see working.

Who this fits

A contracting company that already gets enough calls, texts, and form fills to lose some of them. There is usually one person who answers the phone during the day, an owner who answers it at night when he can, and no list anywhere of who was supposed to call whom back.

It fits badly if nobody on your side can answer a customer within a business day. The reply this installs buys you time; it does not do the talking for you.

Signs it is broken

• Calls after four in the afternoon reach voicemail, and the voicemail says the same thing it said in 2019.
• A web form arrives on Saturday and gets read on Monday.
• Two people both thought the other one called the customer back.
• You find out a job went to somebody else from a neighbor, not from the customer.
• Nobody can say how many inquiries came in last week, or from where.

The lead response research Harvard Business Review published years ago points one direction: the odds of reaching and qualifying a lead drop sharply after the first hour. A homeowner ringing three companies in one evening usually goes with whoever gets back to them first.

One inquiry, start to finish

This is the shape of it. The wording is set with you before anything sends, and the company below is made up.

Behind that, the lead is filed with the source recorded, assigned to a named person with a deadline, and escalated to the owner if that deadline passes untouched. The estimator calls the next business morning already knowing what the job is.

What gets installed

• Missed-call text-back on your existing line, with wording you approved, firing in a minute or two.
• One place every inquiry lands, whether it came from the phone, a text, the website form, or a Google Business message, with the source recorded.
• A named owner and a deadline per lead, so the question of who calls back has an answer before it is asked.
• Escalation to the owner when a lead sits past its deadline.
• Stop rules: the sequence stops when the customer replies, books, declines, or opts out, and a person handles every reply.
• A weekly count of inquiries by source and how fast each one got answered, so the cost of the leak stops being a guess.
• A written runbook for your team, and a fallback: if a text fails to send, the caller still reaches your normal voicemail and the office still gets the alert.

Tools it runs on

Your existing phone number, in almost every case. Your existing CRM or job software if you have one, or a simple shared list if you do not. Texting runs through a business messaging provider registered in your name, which is a requirement in the United States for business texting, not an upsell.

Things that need discovery rather than a promise: an old phone system that cannot forward or report on missed calls, a CRM with no way to get data in or out, and any tool where your vendor controls the account rather than you. The free audit names those before you spend a dollar.

Client effort

About an hour of your time, spread over the two to three weeks. You approve the wording and the rules, you name the person who owns leads, and you grant access to the accounts the workflow touches. Access goes to accounts in your name, and never as a shared password over text.

Before it goes live, the workflow runs quietly in the background on your real inquiries without sending anything, so we can compare what it would have done against what your team actually did.

What it costs

$1,500 to install and $295 a month to run. The install covers discovery, build, background testing, training, the runbook, and the first thirty days of adjustments. The monthly covers monitoring, changes, and support, and it starts the month after go-live. Messaging and any software you add are billed at what they cost, on their own line. Month to month, cancel any month.

Limits worth stating

• No guarantee of more work. What gets measured here is response time, how many inquiries get an owner, and how many were never answered at all.
• A text back is not a person. It buys the conversation time; your team still has to have it.
• Business texting in the United States needs carrier registration, which can take a week or two before messages flow reliably. That waiting period is real and it is named up front.
• Routine automated texts send without a person reading each one. Templates and rules are approved by people first, and anything the rules do not cover stops and waits for a person.

Proof

Our own painting and flooring companies in Bellingham run this. That is operator evidence, not a customer result, and no measured client outcome is published here yet because the client sites built this year have not launched. The work examples on the home page are labeled by what they actually prove.

Questions