Why More Leads Doesn't Mean More Jobs for Home Service Businesses

If you’re answering 73% of your calls (the industry average) and generating 100 leads per month, you’re missing 27 calls. Double your ad budget to get 200 leads, and now you’re missing 54 calls. You spent twice as much and lost twice as many opportunities.

You’re not failing to generate demand. You’re pouring more water into a bucket with a hole in it. Every new lead your ads generate has the same 27% chance of hitting voicemail and disappearing forever.

This pattern plays out across thousands of home service businesses every month. You spend more, your marketing agency reports more leads, and your actual booked jobs barely move. The missed leads piling up behind the scenes are invisible unless you know where to look.

What your marketing report calls “more leads”

Your marketing dashboard shows impressions, clicks, form fills, and call volume. Those numbers go up when you increase spend. That feels like progress.

But lead count measures marketing activity, not business results. A lead that rings your phone at 7pm on Saturday and goes to voicemail is counted the same as a lead that books a $4,000 job. Your cost-per-lead metric treats both identically.

According to BrightLocal and ServiceTitan data, 26% of calls to contractors go unanswered during business hours. On weekends, that number jumps to 41%. If you’re running ads seven days a week but only answering phones five, you’re paying full price for leads you’ll never talk to.

When marketing measurement stops at lead count, you can’t see the difference between a lead generation problem and a lead handling problem. And most contractors are dealing with the second one.

Where your leads actually die

Leads don’t disappear in one dramatic failure. They leak out at three specific points, and each one has hard numbers behind it.

The missed call. BrightLocal research found that 85% of callers whose calls aren’t answered will not call back. That’s not a second-chance situation. One missed ring and that homeowner moves down their list to the next contractor. If your answer rate is 74% (the industry average), you’re permanently losing roughly one in four leads before anyone on your team even knows they existed.

The slow follow-up. For leads that do come through a form or online request, speed determines everything. InsideSales and Drift data shows the average speed-to-lead in home services is 47 minutes.

Meanwhile, leads contacted within 5 minutes are 21x more likely to convert than those contacted after 30 minutes. Most contractors aren’t even in the ballpark. The gap between 5 minutes and 47 minutes is the gap between winning the job and losing it.

The single attempt. ServiceTitan data shows 62% of customers hire the first contractor who responds. When a homeowner submits a request, they’re usually contacting two or three companies at once.

Whoever calls back first gets the conversation, builds the rapport, and books the appointment. If you’re the third to respond, you’re competing for the 38% that’s left, assuming they even pick up. And most contractors make one attempt, then move on.

These three failure points, missed calls, slow response, and single-attempt follow-up, are where the majority of your lost demand ends up. Increasing ad spend doesn’t fix any of them. It just feeds more leads into the same broken process.

Tommy Mello treats booking rate like a profit lever

Tommy Mello built A1 Garage Door Service into a $200M+ operation. When he talks about KPIs, he doesn’t lead with cost per lead or ad spend. His number one metric is booking rate, and A1 achieves 89% - converting calls into scheduled appointments - compared to the industry average of 42%.

He tracks every CSR’s individual booking rate using ServiceTitan’s Contact Center Pro. As Mello explained in a December 2024 ServiceTitan webinar: “I know my booking rate down to the T. I know how many minutes it takes for our average call. I understand all the capacity built into ServiceTitan, and I know every single CSR and what their booking rate is.”

Mello uses performance-based pay tied to these KPIs, where top CSRs earn $60-70/hour. The math is simple: an 89% booking rate versus a 42% booking rate, on the same lead volume, produces dramatically different revenue.

You don’t need to run a $200M company to apply this. You just need to know your own booking rate and treat it with the same seriousness you treat your ad budget.

How to audit your lead-to-job pipeline in one afternoon

You can find the biggest leaks in your pipeline with a few hours of focused work. No consultants needed. No expensive software. Just your call records, your CRM, and a spreadsheet.

Step 1: Pull your call data from the last 30 days. Your phone provider or call tracking tool will show total inbound calls, answered calls, and missed calls. Calculate your answer rate. If it’s below 80%, you’ve found your first major leak. Separate weekday and weekend numbers because they almost always tell different stories.

Step 2: Check your form and online lead response times. Look at when each web lead came in and when someone on your team first responded. Calculate the average. If you’re above 15 minutes, you’re losing winnable jobs. If you’re above an hour, you’re handing them to competitors.

Step 3: Count your follow-up attempts per lead. Open your CRM or call log and pick 20 recent leads that didn’t book. How many times did your team try to reach each one? If the answer is once, that’s your second leak. Contractors who follow up three to five times close significantly more of the leads they already have.

Step 4: Calculate your lead-to-booked-job rate. Total booked jobs divided by total leads (calls plus forms plus online requests). If you’re below 30%, you have pipeline problems worth fixing before you spend another dollar on lead generation. Track this by lead source to see which channels actually produce jobs, not just activity.

Step 5: Estimate the revenue sitting in your leaks. Take your missed calls and multiply by your average job value and your typical close rate. A contractor missing 15 calls a week with a $1,200 average job and a 40% close rate is leaving roughly $7,200 per week on the table. That number makes the cost of fixing the problem obvious.

This audit gives you a snapshot of where demand enters your business and where it falls out. Pipeline’s methodology for measuring intent and lead capture formalizes this same process with ongoing tracking.

Fix the leaks before you spend more

Nexa, one of the larger contractor answering services, reports their clients average a 37% increase in appointment bookings. One Tampa contractor saw conversion rates jump from 45% to 67% after adding professional call handling, without changing any marketing spend. The leads were always there. They were just going to voicemail.

That’s the leverage most contractors miss. Before you negotiate a bigger ad budget or sign up for another lead generation service, work through these fixes in order.

Answer the phone. If your answer rate is below 85%, that’s your highest-ROI fix. An answering service, a dedicated CSR, or even a virtual receptionist for $150-300/month can close the gap. Every unanswered call is a customer you already paid to acquire walking away permanently.

Speed up your response to web leads. Set up an automated text that fires within 60 seconds of a form submission. Something simple: “Got your request. We’ll call you within 10 minutes.” That text alone keeps the homeowner from calling the next contractor on their list. It buys you time without requiring someone to be glued to a screen.

Follow up more than once. Build a sequence: call, then text if no answer, then call again the next day, then one more text. Most contractors stop after one try. The ones who follow up three to five times are working the same leads harder and booking more of them. Without effective lead capture systems, even good follow-up can’t save leads you never knew about.

Track booked jobs, not leads. Change what you report on. Stop celebrating lead count and start tracking booked jobs per marketing dollar spent.

When your marketing agency shows you a report, ask one question: how many of these leads turned into revenue? If they can’t answer, you’re flying blind.

The metric that actually matters

Your marketing spend should be measured against one number: booked jobs per dollar spent.

A contractor spending $3,000/month and booking 15 jobs is outperforming a contractor spending $10,000/month and booking 12 jobs. The second contractor has “more leads.” The first contractor has more money in the bank.

When you understand how home service businesses lose high-intent demand, the math gets simple. Every lead you already generate but fail to answer, respond to, or follow up with is a lead you’ve already paid for. Fixing your capture rate is the cheapest way to grow.

Before you increase your ad budget, before you hire a new marketing agency, before you add another lead source, answer one question: what percentage of the leads you already get are turning into booked jobs?

If that number is below 30%, your next dollar should go toward answering the phone, not generating more rings. Learn why SEO underperforms when capture systems are weak, and start measuring what matters.