Most contractors try to fix slow months by buying more leads. But the leads you already pay for are leaking out the bottom, and the data on why is fifteen years old. These issues are at the heart of lead leakage for home services companies. Here is what actually closes the gap.<\/p>
When the month is slow, almost every contractor reaches for the same lever: buy more leads. More mailers, more Google spend, more aggregator credits. It feels like the obvious fix. It is the wrong one.<\/p>
You do not have a lead problem. You have a leak. The leads you already pay for are slipping out the bottom of the bucket, unanswered, after hours, lost to whoever picked up faster. In the realm of home services, this kind of lead leakage is all too common. Pouring more in does not fix that. It just makes the leak more expensive. And the strange part is that we have known exactly why this happens for almost twenty years.<\/p>
In 2007, two researchers did something most contractors never get to do. They proved, with hard data, exactly how fast you have to answer a lead before it goes cold.<\/p>
The finding was brutal and specific. Call a lead back within 5 minutes instead of 30, and you are 100 times more likely to reach them and 21 times more likely to qualify them. Not 21 percent. Twenty-one times. Harvard Business Review followed in 2011 with the number that should have changed everything: the average company took 42 hours to respond to an inbound lead.<\/p>
So the problem was named. The math was published. Everyone in sales has cited it since. And then, for fifteen years, almost nothing got better.<\/p> If awareness fixed problems, speed-to-lead would be solved by now. It is not. The recent data is worse than the data that scared everyone in 2011.<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure> A 2024 study of 1,000 companies found the average response time, among the companies that bothered to respond at all, was 1 day, 5 hours, and 17 minutes. And 63.5% never responded. Another 2024 study of 114 companies found that not a single one called a lead within 5 minutes. Zero.<\/p> In the context of home services, lead leakage is particularly problematic; it is its own kind of bad.<\/p>\nThe trend<\/h2>
The numbers got worse, not better<\/h6>