The cheapest lead you'll ever buy is the one that already called you
Every shop we've sat with can tell you what a lead costs. Almost none can tell you how many walked in the front door and left without being written down.
FIG 1 · CALL → JOB → SIGNED → BOARD
Spend an afternoon watching the phone at a seven-truck shop and the pattern is boring and expensive. The line rings during a rooftop job. It rings at 4:52 while someone's closing out a ticket. It rings Saturday. Each one of those is a customer with a broken system and a credit card, and each one takes about eleven seconds to become somebody else's revenue.
Missed isn't the only leak
The calls you do answer leak too. A tech takes the job on speaker, gets the address roughly right, forgets the PO number, and never writes down that the unit is eleven years old — which was the whole replacement conversation. By the time anyone follows up, the story is gone.
If a call isn't written down, it didn't happen — and you can't coach, quote, or forecast against something that didn't happen.
This is why we started with listening instead of talking. Nobody's afraid of a notepad. Once the notepad also tells you that eleven of last week's calls were replacement-shaped and four of them never got a quote, the conversation about who answers the phone gets a lot easier.
What to measure on Monday
Three numbers, no software required: how many calls came in, how many turned into a booked visit, and how many of your open estimates are older than nine days. If you can't answer all three by lunch, that's the leak — not your marketing spend.
Want your three numbers?
Forward your line for two weeks. We'll hand you the week your phone actually had.