You Don't Have a Marketing Problem

This week I became the thing every dealer says they need more of. A lead. Money in hand, a deadline, ready to book today. I called twelve companies to get some work done on a house. Two of them booked me. The other ten let me go, and most of them will never know it happened.

We're building a new home. A few weeks ago the builder called to say they were running two months ahead of schedule, which I'm fairly sure has never happened in the history of homebuilding. Suddenly I had a long list of trades to hire and a short window to do it. Custom closets. Landscaping. A pool. A painter. An electrician. I'm slammed right now and out of town all of next week, so I needed a stack of estimates booked fast.

Every dealer I know has the same reflex when they want to grow. We need more appointments, so we need to go market. Buy leads, run ads, make the phone ring. I want to tell you what I learned spending a week on the other side of that phone.

Twelve Calls

I did my homework on every one of them. Good reviews. Clean websites. Real customers saying real things. These looked like solid businesses, the kind you'd be glad to have in your house.

Then I started dialing, and the wheels came off.

Six of the twelve went to voicemail, and I didn't leave one. I'm not going to leave a message and sit by the phone hoping somebody calls a stranger back. I've got work to do today. One number was dead. Not busy, not voicemail, disconnected. That same company posts on Instagram almost every day. They are very clearly in business. They just can't be reached by anyone trying to hand them money.

One company I filled out the form on their website. I'm still waiting.

Two companies I got a live person on the first call. They took all of my information, my name, my address, the work I needed, and then told me someone else on their team handles the scheduling and would call me back that day or the next. Neither one ever called. One of them asked me to text my details over instead, so I did, and then nothing.

Two companies answered the phone and booked me on the spot. Easy. Done. Those two got my business.

Here's the whole week in one place.

Twelve calls. Two bookings. Ten companies lost a ready buyer, and here's the line that should bother you most. I don't have a single missed call from any of them. Nobody is calling me back. The ball was never in my court. These places didn't even leave themselves a missed call to feel bad about later.

The Marketing Worked

Think about everything those ten companies already did right.

They built websites good enough for me to trust. They collected reviews from real customers. They showed up when I searched. Some of them are running ads. The one with the dead phone number is putting out content every single day. All of that costs money, or time, or both, and all of it worked. It did exactly what marketing is supposed to do. It put a ready buyer on their line with a deadline and a checkbook.

Then the phone rang, and that's where the money died.

Every dollar they spent to make me dial was gone the second nobody picked up, or nobody followed up. They didn't have a marketing problem. Their marketing was fine. They had a problem catching what their marketing already brought them.

The Same Week

Here's the part I can't leave out, because it would be easy to read all of that as me pointing at a bunch of contractors and shaking my head.

The same week I was getting ghosted as a buyer, my own team was sitting in a room pulling our call logs apart.

We run a phone tree on our main line. Press one to book a consultation, two to schedule an install, three for customer service. The consultation line is the one that makes us money, so that's the one we were staring at. How many calls we were missing on it. How many hangups. How fast we were calling people back. What our book rate actually looked like once you followed every single call all the way through to the end.

We have a high book rate. We work at it. And we still found money on the floor. We ran the numbers, and if we could answer every call that comes into that line and lift our book rate to a number we think is realistic, not a fantasy number, a reasonable one, we'd add around $150,000 a month in revenue. No new marketing. No additional inbound calls. Just catching what's already ringing.

$150,000 a month, sitting there, at a company that takes this seriously and went looking for it on purpose.

So picture what's happening at a shop that has never once pulled its call logs.

Be Your Own Customer

The first move here costs you nothing, and you can do it today.

Be your own customer. Call the phone number on your website, call the one on your Google listing, call the one on your Yelp page, and find out whether they're all active, whether they're all even the same number, and whether anyone picks up. The company with the dead line and the daily Instagram posts never once called their own number, or they'd have known it was disconnected months ago.

Then try to book yourself. Go through your own phone tree the way a customer does. Fill out your own web form and time how long it takes someone to respond. Sit inside the experience you're putting people through. You will find friction you didn't know was there, because you built the whole thing from the inside and you've never once stood on the outside of it.

You don't need a consultant for this. You need an hour and the willingness to see what your customers see.

When You Can't Answer the Phone

Once you know where calls are slipping, the real question is what the cheapest honest fix is.

If you're running a real operation, you've got options. An overflow service can catch the calls your front desk can't, and we've gone down that road before. An after hours line keeps the calls that come in at night and on the weekend from just vanishing. AI phone answering is getting good enough now to actually book an appointment, and a virtual assistant can do a lot of the same work for less than you'd think. None of these are perfect, and the point isn't to go buy one tomorrow. The point is that dropping calls you already paid to generate is the most expensive thing you can do, so almost anything that catches them pays for itself.

And if you're a one man show, in houses all day, the problem is different, and so is the fix. You can't answer the phone, because answering it means walking out on the customer standing in front of you, and that costs you the sale you're already inside of. I know that one personally.

Years ago, when it was just me, I was busy enough to be in houses most of the day and small enough that I was the only person who could answer the phone. I'd be sitting with a customer and feel my phone go off in my pocket. I knew it was probably another customer, another job. And I'd let it ring, because picking up in the middle of a consultation was a good way to lose the one I had.

So I got creative. I put out an ad for part time help in the middle of the day, ten to two, the exact window when I was out running appointments and missing everything. I built the job around a stay at home parent. Four days a week, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, so they'd have a weekday that wasn't the weekend to run errands. Hours that fit neatly between school drop off and pickup.

I got a flood of applicants. College educated, sharp, way overqualified, just wanting a little money of their own and a job that worked around their kids. I hired someone great. She learned the business fast because she was smart, she loved the job because it fit her life, and she stayed with me for years. That cost me almost nothing, and it caught the calls I'd been letting die in my pocket.

The Cheapest Lead You'll Ever Get

Before you spend another dollar trying to make the phone ring more, go find out what happens when it rings now. Be your own customer. Pull your own call logs. Find the money you already paid for and never picked up.

The cheapest lead you will ever get is the one already calling you, and most of us are letting it go to voicemail.