Phil Risher says home-service businesses blame ad platforms for bad leads, but the real problem is not tracking what happens after leads arrive. His company was spending $200 per lead with a 10% booking rate until they built a call script and follow-up sequence, which pushed it to 33%.
You could blame Facebook, you could blame Google, you could blame Yelp, but a weak backend is usually the issue. If you're spending money on ads and you don't know your booking rate or your close rate, that is a weak backend because you don't know your numbers when a lead hits your business, what actually happens to it. At my home service business, the leads would come in, every single call would say, how much does it cost to do this thing? My CSRs would give them the price and then poof, they're gone forever. We didn't know that our booking rate was 10% of all the leads and we just spent $200 to get a lead. Once we built a call script and a lead nurture sequence that would nurture the leads to help get to a job, we jumped up to 33% booking rates. This saved us a whole lot of money and also fixed the issue of just spending more on marketing to grow our business. The lesson here is you do not need to just spend more on ads to grow your business. You need to make sure that your backend, your bucket, your leads, your estimate process is tight. Then you put the marketing spend on top, and that's how you really scale.
