The second call nobody makes

A roofing company on the north side of Spokane, four crews, four in the afternoon. I was standing by the printer with the woman who books the estimates. She has been there six years. On the file cabinet beside her sat a wire tray of curled bid copies going back most of a year. I asked her what happens to a bid once it leaves the office. She said she calls twice, and if nobody picks up she leaves it alone, because after the second voicemail it starts to feel like she is bugging people.

The owner sat ten feet away at his own desk. He had never heard her say it. He had spent the hour before telling me his lead sources had gone soft, and asking whether I knew anybody decent selling roofing leads.

Everything that happens after you send the price

Ask an owner how many leads came in last month and he can usually get close. Ask what became of each bid that went out and the answer changes shape. A rough number, then a story about the market. Every bid that came back as work is known by name. The rest sit somewhere with no owner.

An ordinary month in that shop ran like this: calls come in, most of them paid for. The estimator gets on the roof, measures, prices it, sends the number over. Two calls after that, sometimes one. Then quiet. Everybody assumes price and nobody has ever picked up the phone to find out. Meanwhile the customers from two years back, the ones who liked the work, have not heard the company's name since the check cleared.

Some of what that looks like from the inside:

You could not say today, without asking someone, how many bids went out last month or what happened to them.

A lead that lands at ten on Tuesday might get called back that afternoon or Thursday, depending on who picked up the phone.

You have customers from three years ago who have heard nothing from your company since the day they paid you.

When a bid goes cold the reason in your head is price, and nobody called to check whether that is true.

Referrals arrive on their own and you could not name what causes one.

Your salesman's week is full, and every appointment on it came from somebody else's phone call.

The customers you won in the last twelve months look a lot like the twelve before that.

The software will not make the call

We need better software for this. I have heard that sentence in more contractor offices than I can count, and it is usually the first thing a man reaches for once he admits bids are going cold on him. Sometimes a CRM. Sometimes a module in the estimating package that nobody ever switched on. He has generally priced it out before I get there.

So he buys it. Somebody gives up a Saturday importing three years of contacts, and a consultant explains pipeline stages on a video call to a man who wants his phone to stop ringing at six. For about five weeks it gets used. Then the work piles up, the estimator quits entering bids from the truck, and by the third month the office is keeping the true list in a spreadsheet because the one in the software is wrong.

Software records follow-up. Somebody still has to do it. A system reminds a named person to call on a named day, and with no named person and no agreed day, you have bought a more expensive place to keep the same silence.

Under it sits a plain gap. Nobody has said whose job the second call is, how many attempts count as trying, or what has to be true before a bid can be called finished. In most shops a bid is finished when it is sent. That one habit is the whole thing in miniature.

The owners who have already worked out that this is about follow-up land in a ditch of their own. They set a cadence, five touches, and then spend all five asking the same question. Did you get a chance to look at that? A man with nothing new to tell you will not answer that call twice. Each contact has to carry something of its own: a question about the decking, a warning that shingle pricing is about to move, an opening on the crew schedule in two weeks. And none of it compounds while the losses go unrecorded. A shop that never writes down why it lost will keep bidding the work it always loses, and will keep calling that a market.

Two closing rates and the gap between them

Take that company. Fourteen bids go out in a week and about six of them never get a second contact from anybody. Their own history says a bid that gets worked properly closes near one in five, and a bid left alone after the first call closes near one in eight. At an average residential re-roof of $14,800 and a gross margin of 28 percent, which puts $4,144 of gross profit on a job, the gap between those two rates, six bids a week across a year that holds fifty of them, is a little over $93,000 in gross profit.

That is one line of it. It counts nothing for the customers from prior years nobody calls, and nothing for the referrals nobody asks for. Both are cheaper than anything he was buying.

Costs like this land in front of the work rather than on it. His crews were good, his trucks were paid off, and the building could have delivered more roofs than the front end was selling. Sales makes the revenue, operations delivers it, finance funds it, and the smallest of the three sets the size of the company. In that shop the smallest of the three was a phone call nobody owned. More leads would only have landed in the same tray and waited on the same two calls.

Two weeks where nothing gets closed

This one asks you to stop something. For the next two weeks, nobody in your company marks a bid dead, lost, cold, or closed. Not the estimator, not the coordinator, not you on a Friday afternoon clearing your desk. Every name stays on the list until there is a written outcome beside it: signed, a no with the reason in the customer's own words, or a date when a specific person calls again.

Print one sheet and tape it up where the estimates get made. Six columns: customer, date the bid went out, dollar amount, who sent it, date of last contact, next date. Whatever software you own can sit these two weeks out. Paper, because a sheet cannot be filtered or closed, and anyone walking past sees how long it has got.

Then watch what breaks. That is the part you are paying for.

By the middle of the first week the sheet is longer than anyone in that office expected, because the names that used to disappear are still sitting there. Some lines will not fill in. A bid with no dollar amount beside it, a name with no phone number under it, one house written down twice by two different men. Those holes have been deciding for you which customers anybody could chase. Somewhere in the second week a person says out loud that there is no time to call all of these. That sentence is the finding. Write down who said it and what else that person carries in a day, because you have just located the ceiling on your sales, and it is somebody's Tuesday rather than a market.

The other thing that gives way is comfortable ignorance about losses. To write a no on that sheet, somebody has to ring the customer and ask why. Those calls are awkward for about nine seconds. A fair number turn into work, because the customer never hired anyone, he just stopped thinking about his roof.

On the second Friday, sort the sheet by date of last contact and start at the bottom. Count the bids that never got a second contact and add up their dollars. Then make those calls yourself, oldest and biggest first, and open with the plain truth: we bid your roof a while back and I never got back to you properly, did you get that taken care of? Two rules come out of that afternoon and they are the only two you need. The second contact belongs to a named person with a date on it. A bid is finished only when an outcome is written beside it.

The tray by the printer empties out

Six weeks along, the change arrives as things that quit. Monday stops opening with the question of where the next quarter's work comes from, because there is a sheet on the wall that answers it. Nobody says any more that the customer must have gone with somebody cheaper, because there are written reasons up there now and price is only some of them.

That Spokane shop kept the sheet long after the two weeks were up and never did buy the software. Ninety-one bids from the previous year had gone out with a single call behind them. They worked that list over three weeks and sold four roofs off it, and two of the four had not hired anybody at all. The coordinator still calls twice. The estimator makes the third call, and it sits on his schedule with a name and a date, so it happens.

She had it right about how it feels. A third call does feel like bugging somebody, all the way up until the man on the other end says he has been meaning to get back to you and asks whether you can still fit him in before the weather turns. Then it feels like service. She had worked in that office six years. Nobody had ever told her which one it was.

Lead Generation and Follow-Up is nine statements in the Business Check-in, and this article deals with most of them. The rest of the check-in asks the same kind of question about the other ten parts of a business, and it takes about ten minutes.