Before you cancel
your marketing

The one page

The four checks

You can run all four checks on this page, so print it, pull last month, and fill it in. The chapters after it explain how to get each number and what it means.

If you can answer all eight lines, skip to the last chapter and read what your answers mean. If you can't answer one of them, that's already the finding, and the first thing to fix is how you're recording the work.

Chapter one

Check the clock before you check anything else

If you're looking at cancelling at the end of month one, you may be judging a month that hasn't had time to finish.

In roofing I usually see three to four weeks from a homeowner opting in to a signed contract. Somebody paying fifteen or twenty or thirty thousand dollars for a roof takes time to be sure, and there's often a spouse, a lender and an insurance adjuster in the middle of it.

Now put that against how month one actually runs. You start with an agency on day one. The first leads take a few days to arrive. Your first quote goes out somewhere around week two. If your cycle is four weeks from opt-in, that quote isn't due to close until around week six.

If your cycle really is four weeks, a lead that landed on day twenty and got quoted on day twenty five isn't closing by day thirty. So when you sit down at the end of month one to decide whether the marketing worked, a chunk of what you paid for hasn't had time to close yet.

You can check that arithmetic yourself before you take my word for it. The last two weeks of leads in any first month haven't had enough time to show up as revenue in that first month. If you judge the whole month on closed dollars, you're judging a fortnight of it on work that hasn't had time to happen.

So before you look at anything else, write these down.

If the clock has not run out, stop buying leads

This is the part I say out loud to clients and it costs me money every time. If you have ten or twenty quotes sitting out there and your cycle hasn't finished, don't pay anybody for another month of leads yet. Pause the ad spend, work the quotes you already own, and get revenue out of them first.

I've made that recommendation many times, usually when you're already tight on cash. Paying for a second month of leads while the first month is still unworked gives you forty dead quotes instead of twenty. Buying more leads leaves that follow-up problem in place, hides it under more work and makes it more expensive.

• Know your cycle before you judge the month.
• If the cycle hasn't run, you haven't reached the point where you can judge it.
• Quotes already out the door are the cheapest revenue you have access to.

Chapter two

Check one. How fast did somebody call the lead?

Leads to appointments. You're measuring the time to the first attempt.

A lead you dialled in four minutes and didn't reach still counts as four minutes. What you're measuring is how long a homeowner sat there waiting to hear from anybody, because that's the window where they call the next roofer.

1. Export last month's leads with the timestamp each one arrived.
2. For each lead, find the time of the first outbound call in the activity log.
3. Subtract, and write the gap in minutes next to every lead.
4. Sort that column and read off the middle value, which gives you your median.

On the account this guide came out of, a husband and wife roofing company, my team was calling inside five minutes during business hours. That's the number to hold yours against.

Chapter three

Check two. How many times did somebody follow up?

Leads to appointments. Count every attempt, whether anybody answered or booked.

Most leads that never book were contacted once and never got another call. They didn't pick up, and quietly fell off the list. So the number that matters is how many real attempts each one got before somebody gave up on it.

1. Filter to the leads that never booked an appointment.
2. Count every logged attempt on each one. Calls, texts and emails all count.
3. Write the count next to each lead, then take the median.
4. Separately, count how many got exactly one attempt and then nothing.

On that same account we followed up twice a day for seven days, so a lead got up to fourteen attempts before anybody wrote it off. Twelve leads came in during that first week and they'd booked nothing off them. Once we changed how we handled those same leads, the appointments started happening.

Chapter four

Check three. Does every quote have a day and a time?

Quotes to sales. This is the one that usually comes back worst.

When we went through that company's quotes, nearly every one ended with the homeowner saying they'd call when they were ready. It's easy to take that as an answer, but it leaves you with no date and nobody's name against the next step. The only person who can move the job is the one person with no reason to hurry.

A live quote sounds like Thursday at four, I'll call you. There's a date on it and there's a name next to it, with the same job, same homeowner and same price on the paper.

1. List every quote you sent last month.
2. For each one, look for a specific date and time written down for the next contact.
3. Mark it yes or no. A date with no time counts as no.
4. Count the no's, and add up what those quotes were worth.

By the end of month one, that company had quoted twenty jobs and closed zero dollars, and none of those quotes had a next step on it.

Chapter five

Check four. Who called after the quote went out?

Quotes to sales. If the answer is nobody, you've got jobs sitting in your pipeline right now.

Write down who actually called, because somebody either picked up the phone after that price landed or they didn't, and the CRM will tell you which.

1. Take the same quote list you just checked.
2. For each quote, write the name of whoever called after it went out, and the date.
3. Leave it blank where nobody did.
4. Count the blanks, and total what those quotes were worth.

On that account we had the wife follow up after the husband delivered the quote, so it was a different voice from the man who'd just handed them a price. We paused their ads for a week and they did nothing but work the quotes they already had. A week later they'd closed five deals for fifty five thousand dollars, and every one of them came out of leads they already owned. The lead source stayed the same throughout.

Chapter six

Put your numbers in

Put in seven figures off last month and every dollar below is worked out from what you type. Nothing leaves your browser until you ask for the report, and the calculator uses no industry averages.

Chapter seven

What your answers mean

Read this after you've filled the numbers in, because reading it first makes it too easy to guess your answers.

What this is and what it is not

The benchmarks in here come from one husband and wife roofing company over one month, in their market, at their pricing, with their crew. Fifty five thousand dollars isn't a number I'm promising you, and anybody who quotes you a figure off a single case study is selling you something. The three to four week cycle is what I usually see in roofing. I haven't measured an average across the trade.

What I'll stand behind is that you can check where things are getting stuck. Twenty quotes and zero dollars leaves you with a reason to look at what's happening after the lead comes in. You can check that yourself, today, for nothing, and you should do it before you cancel anybody.

• Run the four checks on last month before you make any decision.
• If the clock hasn't run, the answer is not yet.
• If you run it and still can't find where the jobs are getting lost, send me what you found.