Case Study: The $650K Hiding in This Home-Services Contractor's Leads

Cris runs a one-call-close home-improvement business. He wanted what every owner running paid leads wants: confidence that no lead worth real money was quietly slipping away before his team could reach it.

On paper, his call center looked healthy. The typical lead got a callback fast, with a median time to first call of 6.6 minutes. But that median hid a punishing tail. Nearly 30% of Cris’s leads weren’t reached until more than 30 minutes had passed. And the numbers showed exactly what that cost: once a lead crosses the 30-minute mark, its odds of becoming a sale roughly cut in half. So close to a third of the leads Cris was paying for were landing in the zone where they convert at half strength.

What made it worse was that nobody could see it happening. The team was buried in manual data entry instead of decisions. Reports were always a step behind, so getting a straight answer meant a scramble. Cris had the uneasy feeling there were untapped gold mines sitting in the pipeline, aging out unseen, and no way to point at them in the moment. Every slow lead was advertising money already spent, converting at a discount no one had chosen.

When Cris met with CDA, he quickly realized the problem wasn’t his team’s effort. It was visibility. No one could see which leads had just arrived and which were minutes away from going cold.

So Cris gave the call center that picture. The team got a live view of every lead ranked by how long it had been waiting, plus a companion view of exactly who still needed a call right now. For the first time, the call center manager could reorder the day around the leads most likely to close, instead of finding out at the end of the week which ones had been missed.

The change showed up fast. In the first seven weeks, the median time to first call fell from 6.6 minutes to 2.5, now beating ASHI’s own 5-minute goal. The slow zone collapsed: the share of leads waiting more than 30 minutes dropped from nearly 30% to about 15%. Ten percentage points of leads moved into the 0-to-5-minute critical window, the window where they close at full strength.

The result CDA measured over that window: roughly $650,000 in additional potential sales, from leads Cris was already paying for. Nothing about his ad spend changed. The only thing that changed was how fast the right leads got reached.

Nobody pays for a prettier report. Cris rescued $650K from leads he was already paying for. Money that had been walking out the door every time a lead went cold.