Lead Intake

The numbers are unforgiving: response within minutes multiplies contact rates, and the majority of after-hours callers who reach voicemail simply dial the next name. Intake is also where qualification happens — the right questions separate a roof replacement from a gutter question before anyone spends an hour on-site.

Speed dominates because of what a service enquiry actually is. Someone with a leaking roof is not evaluating vendors; they are working down a list until somebody answers. Every minute of delay is a chance for a competitor to end the search. This is why response time beats almost every other intake variable, and why an answered phone outperforms a beautifully designed form that gets checked twice a day.

The leaks are usually structural rather than personal. Calls ring to a phone someone is holding while on a roof. Form submissions land in an inbox nobody owns. After-hours enquiries queue until morning, by which point the job is booked elsewhere. Nobody in the business is measured on response time, so nobody defends it. Each of these is fixable with a process rather than a hire.

Qualification is the half that protects margin instead of volume. A handful of questions asked consistently at first contact — what the problem is, the property type, timeline, whether insurance is involved, whether the caller owns the building — routes each enquiry correctly and prevents the expensive failure mode of sending a crew to something that was never going to close.

The honest test is to audit yourself: call your own business at 7pm on a Saturday and submit your own form, then time both. Most owners discover the gap immediately.

This is why we treat intake as part of the acquisition system rather than the client's problem after handoff: visibility that fills a leaky funnel is measurable waste. Lead capture and intake covers the system version, and attribution is what proves where the caught leads came from.