A guy left a comment about a quote tool he'd started using and the line that stuck was simple:
"Saved me so much time driving out to houses for nothing"
That's the whole problem in nine words. Not that he can't get leads. That too many of them cost him an evening and paid him nothing.
A free estimate isn't free. It's free to them.
What a trip out actually costs you
Run it once and you'll never look at it the same way.
Twenty minutes there, forty on site, twenty back. Call it an hour and a half door to door, plus fuel, plus the write-up you do that night at the kitchen table. Two hours of your life, minimum.
If your time's worth $75 an hour, that estimate cost $150 to give away. Do six a week, close two, and the four that went nowhere cost you $600. Every week. That's a truck payment, spent driving to people who were collecting bids for a job they'll do next year, or never.
Nobody puts that on a spreadsheet, which is why it goes on forever.
Three questions before you drive
You don't need a sales script. You need to know three things before your keys are in your hand.
- When do you want this done? "As soon as possible" is a job. "Sometime this spring, we're just getting an idea" is research. Both are fine. Only one of them is worth an evening this week.
- Have you got other quotes? Not to be defensive about it. If you're the fifth bid on a small job, you're a price check and they've already picked somebody. If you're the first, you've got a real shot and you should go today.
- Roughly what were you expecting to spend? This is the one people flinch at. Ask it anyway, softly. "Most jobs like this run somewhere between X and Y, does that sound like the range you had in mind?" If they wanted a quarter of that, you just saved yourself a night.
That's a two minute phone call. It's not rude, it's not a hard qualify, and most customers actually appreciate it, because they don't want to waste an evening either.
Ranges over the phone, not prices
The usual objection is that you can't quote without seeing it. Correct. Nobody's asking you to.
A range isn't a quote. "Water heater swaps generally land between $1,800 and $2,600 depending on what's back there" doesn't commit you to anything, and it does the filtering for you before you spend an evening. The person who was hoping for $600 says so, and now you both know.
Guys resist this because they're afraid of being shopped. Fair. But the person who hangs up on a range was going to hang up on the number anyway, they'd just have made you drive out first to hear it. Losing that call on the phone is a win, not a loss. Different from actually losing a job on price, which usually turns out to be something else entirely.
Let the form do the asking
The best version of this doesn't involve a phone call at all. It happens before you ever hear from them.
Most contractor contact forms ask for name, email, phone, and message. That form catches everybody, which is why you end up on the phone at 8pm sorting out who's serious.
Add three fields and the sorting happens on its own:
- What's the job? A dropdown of the services you actually want. Not a text box. The dropdown also stops people asking for work you don't do.
- When do you need it done? This week, this month, just planning. Three options, that's all.
- Address or zip. One field that tells you instantly whether it's 12 minutes away or 50.
Now the ones worth calling are obvious before you've said a word. And the ones that aren't still landed in your inbox, so you can get to them Sunday instead of losing a Tuesday evening.
One warning, and it's the thing I find broken more than anything else: a longer form is only worth it if the form works. Go submit your own form right now and see where it lands. Half the sites I look at, the answer is nowhere.
Some of it you can see without leaving the shop
Half the questions you'd drive out to answer, a photo answers.
Ask them to text you three pictures. Wide shot, close shot, and whatever's behind or under the thing. For a lot of service work that's enough to tell you if it's a two hour job or a two day job, and enough to tell you if you even want it.
It also tells you something about the customer. The one who sends three clear photos within the hour is organized, ready, and probably going to be fine to work with. The one who won't send a photo but insists you come look tonight is telling you what the rest of the job will be like.
You still go look before you give a firm number on anything real. But you go look at the ones worth looking at, which is the entire point.
The ones you should still drive to
Don't over-filter yourself into an empty week.
Go see the repeat customer, even for something small. Go see the one who came from a referral, because a referral closes at a rate no lead source touches. Go see the job that's twenty minutes from a job you're already on. And go see anything big enough that a 20 percent chance still beats a sure thing on a small job.
Filtering isn't about doing fewer estimates. It's about not doing the same four dead ones every week.
Saying no without being a jerk
You're allowed to not go. You just have to say it like a person.
"Honestly, for that budget I'd be wasting your evening as well as mine. Here's roughly what it'd take to do it right, and if that's ever workable, call me back."
That's it. No lecture about what things cost. Half of those people call back in six months with a real budget, because you were the only one who didn't waste their time either.
The other half tell somebody you were straight with them. That's not nothing in a town where everybody knows everybody.
What I'd change this week
Add the three fields to your form. Ask the three questions on the phone. Keep a note for a month of every estimate you gave and whether it closed.
That last one is the whole thing, honestly. After a month you'll see the pattern in what you're driving to, and it'll be embarrassingly obvious which kind of call is wasting your evenings.
Two columns on a phone note. Where you went, did it close, and where the call came from. Nothing fancier than that, because anything fancier doesn't get done past week two, and the version that gets done beats the version that's better.
If your form is still just name and message and you want the fields that do the filtering, send me the page it's on. I'll tell you what to add, and it's usually a fifteen minute change you can make yourself.