Here is a thing that sounds fake and is not. Two remodelers can buy the exact same leads, from the exact same source, at the exact same price, and one of them books three times as many estimates.
The difference is usually not the pitch. It is how many minutes went by.
What speed to lead actually means
Speed to lead is the gap between a homeowner submitting a form and a human from your company making contact. Not logging it in a CRM. Contact.
The research on this has been consistent for over a decade across a lot of industries. Contact inside five minutes and your odds of a real conversation are far better than at thirty minutes. Wait until the next morning and most of that advantage is gone.
The homeowner did not lose interest in their kitchen overnight. They talked to somebody else.
Why remodeling is worse than most industries
Two reasons, and they stack.
You are on a jobsite. A software company has somebody sitting at a desk whose only job is to answer. You are under a sink. The lead comes in at 10:40 and you see it at 4:15 when you get in the truck. That is not laziness, it is the actual shape of the work.
A remodel is a shopping decision. Nobody gets one bid on a $60,000 kitchen. They are going to talk to three contractors, and the order matters more than anybody admits. The first contractor in the door sets what normal looks like. Price, timeline, what is included. Everyone after that is measured against it.
Being first is not just about availability. It is about who gets to frame the project.
The part that makes exclusive leads dangerous
This is counterintuitive and it costs contractors real money.
When you buy a shared lead from a marketplace, you know five other guys got it. That urgency makes you call immediately. The system is bad, but it forces good behavior.
When you run your own ads, the leads are exclusive. Nobody else got that submission. So nothing is pushing you, and the lead sits until this evening.
Except the homeowner did not agree to be exclusive to you. They filled out your form, and then they filled out two more, and the fact that nobody else has your specific lead does not mean nobody else is talking to that person.
This is the single most common reason a contractor tells me Facebook ads do not work. The ads worked. The leads arrived. They just cooled off in an inbox.
A lead that goes cold looks like this
Somebody fills out your form at 9:15 on a Tuesday morning while their coffee is going. They are interested for about twenty minutes. That is the window where they are actually thinking about their bathroom.
By noon they are at work. By evening they are making dinner. By Thursday the whole thing has moved down the list, and when your number finally shows up on Friday it is a call from a stranger about something they were briefly excited about three days ago.
They are the person still sitting at the table after everyone else got up and left. They are not waiting for you. They just moved on.
How to fix it without staring at your phone
You are not going to answer forms from under a sink. The fix is not discipline, it is a system that responds whether you are available or not.
1. Automated text inside sixty seconds. The moment the form submits, the homeowner gets a text from your business number. Their name, your name, one question. Something like: "Hey Sarah, this is Mike from Perras Remodeling. Saw you're looking at a kitchen. Is this the best number for you?" That text does more work than anything else on this list, and it costs you nothing to run.
2. An alert you cannot miss. Not an email. Email is where leads go to die. A push notification or a text to your phone that reads differently from every other notification you get.
3. A human call inside the hour. The automated text buys you time, it does not replace the call. The realistic target for a working crew is contact inside an hour, with the text holding the spot until then.
4. A follow up sequence that runs on its own. Most contractors try once, maybe twice. A sequence of six to eight touches across two weeks, mixing text, call, and email, picks up a real number of people who were just busy on Tuesday.
5. Let the form do the qualifying. If the form asks project type, timeline, and whether they own the home, you know before you dial whether this is a kitchen in March or somebody pricing a countertop for fun.
What to measure
Two numbers, and you can pull both this week.
Median time to first contact. Not average, median, because one lead you called four days later will wreck an average and hide the real pattern.
Percentage of leads contacted inside five minutes. Most contractors guess they are around fifty percent and find out they are under fifteen.
Fix those two and your existing lead sources get better without you spending another dollar. That is the cheapest improvement available to most remodeling companies, and it is sitting there right now.
FAQ
What is a good speed to lead time? Under five minutes for first contact. Automated text hits that in seconds. A human call inside the first hour is the realistic target for a crew that is actually working.
Should I text or call first? Text first, then call. Text gets opened almost immediately and does not require them to be free to talk. The call is what converts, but it lands much better when a text with your name arrived first.
How many follow ups? Six to eight across two weeks. Most contractors stop at one or two and leave real jobs on the table.
Does this matter more than the ads themselves? For most remodelers, yes. An average ad with instant response beats a great ad with next day response nearly every time.
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