Why roofing leads go cold in minutes, not days
Most contractors treat a lead as something that keeps until the end of the day. It does not.
By Pierce Mason ·
The finding everyone quotes, and what it actually said
The widely cited lead-response research from MIT and InsideSales, and the follow-up published in Harvard Business Review as “The Short Life of Online Sales Leads”, found that the odds of qualifying an inbound lead fall sharply within the first hour, and that contacting within five minutes rather than thirty made an order-of-magnitude difference. Those studies were not run on roofing companies. Go and check them rather than taking a vendor’s word for it. But the mechanism they describe is not industry-specific.
Why roofing is harder than the average case
A homeowner with water coming through a ceiling is not shopping leisurely. They are working down a list. In most trades the buyer has some tolerance for a slow reply because the need is not urgent. Storm and leak work removes that tolerance entirely, and those are exactly the jobs worth the most.
The competitor is not a better roofer, just an available one
This is the part contractors find hardest to accept. The job usually does not go to the best workmanship or the fairest price. It goes to whoever picked up. Every hour you spend improving your close rate is spent on the leads you actually reached, which for most roofing companies is a minority of the ones they paid for.
What a realistic target looks like
Under five minutes is the number the research supports. Under a minute is achievable when first contact is automated, because the constraint is not effort. It is that your crew is on a roof and your office manager is already on another call. Anything that depends on a person being free at the moment a lead lands will fail during exactly the weeks that matter most.
How to find out what yours is
Not from memory. Pick twenty leads from last month, find the timestamp each arrived, and find the timestamp of your first outbound attempt. Most contractors who do this are unpleasantly surprised, and it costs an afternoon.
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What happens in the first sixty seconds.
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