Home improvement and installers
Between the form and the money there is a survey, a quote and a fortnight of silence. That gap is where the whole argument about which advertising works is settled.
You fit kitchens, bathrooms, windows, doors, conservatories or roofs. The average order is four figures or more, somebody visits the house, and a quote goes out before anything is decided.
Leads are up and installs are flat. Somewhere between the enquiry and the signature the picture changes, and nothing you are shown explains where.
What changes
What you can say afterwards.
All four of these are about the same thing: following the money past the point where most measurement stops.
What a signed contract costs, by product
Windows and kitchens have different close rates and different values, so a blended cost per lead across both is a number that describes neither.
Which leads are worth a surveyor's afternoon
A survey costs you a half day whether or not it closes. Knowing which sources produce people who are actually ready changes what you bid on before it changes anything else.
Where the quote stage loses people
Measured as its own step, with the time between the visit and the follow up recorded. In most firms this gap is a week longer than anybody thinks it is.
Whether the finance offer pays for itself
Interest free credit closes deals and costs margin. That trade is measurable and almost nobody measures it.
What we keep finding
Four things we see in nearly every installer.
The lead is the conversion and the install is somebody else's problem
The advertising is judged on form fills, the sales team is judged on closes, and nobody owns the number that joins them. So the channel producing the most forms wins the budget even when it produces the fewest kitchens.
Time wasters are cheap and get bid up accordingly
People collecting three quotes to beat down a fourth convert at a fraction of the rate and cost less to acquire. Optimising toward cost per lead is, in practice, optimising toward them.
The survey is never measured
The single most expensive step in the funnel, several hours of a skilled person, is usually the one step with no number attached to it at all.
Seasonality is treated as a surprise every year
Conservatory enquiries do not arrive evenly across twelve months and neither does roofing work. Budgets that ignore this overspend in the slow quarter and run out in the good one.
The install is the only part of this business that is unambiguous. Everything before it is a chain of steps most firms can describe and very few can count.
The change
What the funnel looks like before and after.
Measured now
- Form submitted
- Nothing
- Nothing
- Nothing
- Revenue, in a different system, monthly
Measured properly
- Form submitted, with the product and the postcode
- Contact made, and how long it took
- Survey booked, and survey attended
- Quote issued, with its value
- Contract signed, sent back to the ad platforms with the real number
What is included
The work, month to month.
- Every funnel step defined once, agreed with your sales team, then measured
- Offline conversion import, so a contract signed in March is credited to the click in February
- Lead quality scored by what happened next, not by how the form looked
- Landing pages per product, because a kitchen buyer and a roof buyer want different proof
- Finance uptake tracked against margin, so the offer is a decision rather than a habit
- Seasonal budget plan agreed in advance, with the slow months named
- Call recording reviewed for what people actually asked before they booked a survey
Questions people ask
The ones that actually arrive.
Our sales team will not use the CRM properly.
That is the real project, and pretending otherwise wastes your money. We would rather build the smallest thing the team will genuinely keep up with, usually three fields on a form they already open, than a perfect pipeline that is abandoned by week six.
We buy leads from a lead generation company as well.
Then the comparison you need is cost per signed contract from bought leads against cost per signed contract from your own advertising. Firms are usually surprised by which side wins, and it is not always ours.
Can you do the showroom side as well?
Yes, as a measured channel. Appointments booked into the showroom, attendance rate, and what an attended appointment is worth. A showroom that is treated as a building rather than as a step in a funnel is usually the least examined asset in the business.
How much of this needs new software?
Less than you would expect. Most of it is configuration of things you already pay for, plus one piece of plumbing between your sales system and the ad platforms. We would rather connect what exists than sell you a new stack.
Proof
An Australian taxi company
More calls, at less than half the cost, by telling Google which callers paid.
A different trade, the same problem: a conversion count that looked healthy and could not be traced to money taken.
Read the case study- more booking calls
+27%
more booking calls
- lower cost per call
−56%
lower cost per call
- average cost per click
$2.10
average cost per click
Where this usually starts
Two pieces of work, in this order.
Businesses that sell the same way
Your turn
Bring the number you do not trust.
30 minutes. Most of these conversations start with somebody describing a report they have stopped believing.