Speed to lead for tree services

Where tree companies lose leads

The inquiry arrives in a place nobody is watching: a Facebook lead notification, an inbox, a voicemail left while the owner is in a bucket truck. By the time someone looks, it's evening, and the homeowner already has an estimate booked with somebody else.

None of that shows up in an ad report. The campaign produced the lead. The lead was lost afterwards, and the ad gets the blame.

Measure it before you try to fix it

You can't improve a response time you don't know. Record when each inquiry arrived and when someone first contacted the customer, and look at the gap across a month. Most owners are surprised by it.

This is one of the reasons we built Arb Astra, our CRM for tree companies: it flags every lead by how long it has waited and reports how response time relates to how many leads become jobs, for that company's own data.

A routine a small company can actually keep

Put every source in one place, so there's one list to check rather than five apps. Decide who owns new leads during the working day, even if it's the owner between jobs. Call first; if there's no answer, send a text straight away saying who you're and that you'll try again. Try again the same day and the next.

Speed matters most for the leads that cool fastest. Facebook lead-form inquiries are lower intent than someone who phoned you, and a quick call is often the difference between a booked estimate and a name that no longer answers.

After the estimate

An estimate that isn't accepted isn't a lost job yet. A short follow-up a few days later, and again a week or two after, recovers work that would otherwise go quiet. Keep it simple: a reminder of what was quoted and an offer to answer questions.