Before you approve another ad budget, do one uncomfortable exercise. Open the last hundred leads and count the contact attempts on each. Not the intentions. The attempts that actually left your building.
In almost every service business I have opened up, the honest average sits between one and two. One call, maybe a voicemail, occasionally a text. Then the lead quietly becomes a name in a list.
That is not a lead quality problem. That is a lead that got one shot at a moment you did not choose, on a day they were on a ladder or in a meeting or picking up a kid.
And the fix is not more people. It is a cadence written once that runs without anybody deciding to run it.
What a single touch costs
Two numbers do most of the arguing here.
Treat that second pair as directional rather than gospel, because the original study behind it has never been properly traced. The direction is not in dispute, and your own pipeline will prove it faster than any citation.
Here is the arithmetic that matters. You buy 80 leads a month at $45 each, which is $3,600. You touch each one 1.4 times on average and book 12 jobs at $850, so $10,200 of revenue against $3,600 of spend.
| Same 80 leads | 1.4 touches | 5 touches |
|---|---|---|
| Leads reached and engaged | 34 | 56 |
| Jobs booked | 12 | 19 |
| Revenue at $850 | $10,200 | $16,150 |
| Cost per booked job | $300 | $189 |
Seven extra jobs, no extra spend, and your cost per booked job falls by more than a third. The leads did not improve. The follow-up did.
The cadence, step by step
Six messages. Two weeks. Written once, running forever.
The whole cadence takes an afternoon to write and about a day to wire. It is the highest-return afternoon most service businesses will spend this year.
What the six messages actually say
Message one, within minutes, by text. Her name, your company, one question: repair or replacement. Nothing else. This message exists to prove a human company received her request.
Message two, same day, by phone. If she has not replied, call once and leave a voicemail that says you have already texted, so the text stops being a mystery number.
Message three, day one, by email. Two available times and a line about your service area. Email carries detail that text should not.
Message four, day three, by text. The objection you hear most, answered before she raises it. In most trades that is either price transparency or how soon somebody can actually get there.
Message five, day seven, by text. One sentence of proof. A recent job of the same type nearby, or your review count. Short.
Message six, day fourteen, by text. The door close: Assuming you got this sorted, I will stop chasing. If not, reply and I will pick it back up. This one earns more replies than messages three, four and five combined, and it is the one everybody is too nervous to send.
What changes once it is in
The obvious change is the booked jobs. The one owners actually notice is quieter: nobody has to feel guilty about the follow-up list any more, because there is no list. There is a sequence, and it already ran.
Your ad spend also starts telling the truth. When every lead gets five touches, a channel that still does not book is genuinely a bad channel, and you can cut it with confidence instead of suspicion.
A lead that ignored you on Tuesday is not a dead lead. It is a lead that was busy on Tuesday.
The measurable: average contact attempts per lead, and cost per booked job. Watch them together. When touches go up and cost per booked job goes down, you have stopped buying your way out of a follow-up problem.
