Home improvements
The appointment is the sale. The phone call is the appointment.
Windows, doors, conservatories, roofing, kitchens, bathrooms, driveways. Nothing gets sold on the phone — it gets sold in someone's front room two hours at a time. Everything the phone room does is judged on whether that visit happens and whether it was worth the drive.
Your problem isn't closing. It's sitting.
A home improvement floor doesn't lose money on calls that go badly. It loses money on appointments that never happen — the homeowner who forgot, the one whose husband was never going to be there, the one who was only ever collecting three quotes and had no intention of buying from anybody.
So the number that matters isn't leads or even appointments. It's appointments sat, and then the proportion of those that were worth a rep's afternoon. A floor booking forty appointments a week at a 55% sit rate is paying for two full days of driving that produced nothing.
How leads actually arrive
What goes wrong today
The lead sits until someone has time
A form filled in at 9:14 on a Saturday reaches a phone on Monday morning. By then two competitors have booked their survey and the homeowner has stopped answering unknown numbers.
Appointments booked without both homeowners
The rep drives forty minutes to be told the decision can't be made today. It is the single most expensive failure in this trade and it is entirely a phone-room qualification problem.
Nobody knows which vendor sells recycled data
Every vendor's leads look the same in a spreadsheet. Without connect rate and outcomes tracked per source, a vendor selling six-month-old enquiries three times over is indistinguishable from a good one until the quarter's numbers land.
Leads rung once and dropped
A no-answer at 2pm on a Tuesday means the homeowner was at work, not that they weren't interested. On most floors that lead is never rung at a different time of day, because nothing tells anyone to.
The rep's diary fills in the wrong shape
Three appointments in three towns in one afternoon is two hours of driving. Booking by available slot rather than by geography quietly costs a rep an appointment a day.
What the product does about it
The lead rings while they still remember filling in the form
A lead from any source lands and goes to the front of the queue, and an agent is talking to them in under a minute. On a shared lead that is the whole game — the first company to have a conversation books the survey.
Callbacks come back at the promised time, to the person who promised
"I'll ring you when my wife's home at seven" is a commitment. It returns at seven, to the agent who made it, with what they said last time on screen.
Every vendor's numbers, separately
Connect rate, appointment rate, sit rate and sold rate by lead source. That is how you find out that the vendor charging £22 is costing more per sat appointment than the one charging £40.
The retry cadence spreads across the day
Attempts land at different times rather than three times in ten minutes, so a homeowner who works nine to five eventually gets rung when they're home.
The write-up says whether both decision makers are confirmed
Your outcome list is yours, so "appointment booked" can require the fields that make an appointment real before it saves.
Where compliance sits
Home improvement selling isn't regulated by a conduct regulator in the way financial services is, so the rules that bind your calling are the general ones: PECR on marketing calls, TPS screening, Ofcom's limits on abandoned calls, and UK GDPR on the data itself. We've written those up properly, from the regulators' own material.
Two things matter specifically because of how this trade buys leads. The consent that permits a call on a bought lead was collected by somebody else, and satisfying yourself it covers you is your responsibility rather than the vendor's. And where finance is offered on the sale, that part of the business carries its own regulatory position.
This is not legal or regulatory advice. Your obligations under the rules that apply to you are yours to determine. What we can describe accurately is the calling rules that apply regardless of sector — PECR, TPS and CTPS, Ofcom's limits on abandoned calls, and UK GDPR — which we have researched from the regulators' own material and written up in full.
Read the UK calling compliance guide →A worked example
Illustrative figures for a six-rep floor, not a customer's real numbers. Change any of them on the lead cost calculator.
Move sit rate from 68% to 78% and nothing else, and cost per net sale falls to about £543 — roughly £1,400 a month, from a qualification change on the phone rather than anything a rep does differently.
Work it through with your own numbers →Questions from this sector
How fast should a home improvement lead be rung?
Immediately, and especially on shared leads where several companies received the same enquiry at the same moment. The published research on response time is US and over a decade old, so we won't quote a multiplier — but on a lead sold to four companies, being first to have a conversation is the entire advantage.
How do I tell if a lead vendor is selling me recycled data?
Track connect rate and appointment rate by vendor rather than by campaign. Recycled or aged data shows up as a low connect rate and a high "already had someone out" outcome, and it shows up within a fortnight if the outcomes are recorded against the source.
Can I stop reps driving to appointments where only one homeowner is there?
Not entirely, but you can make the phone room confirm it before the appointment saves. Outcome lists in Dialspace can require fields before a booking is accepted, so "both available" becomes a thing that was asked rather than a thing that was assumed.
Should the phone room quote a price?
That's your sales decision, not ours. What we'd say operationally is that the answer needs to be the same from every agent, which is what a script section on screen at the moment the question comes up is for.
See it on your own leads.
Half an hour with someone who has run a floor. Bring a lead source and a question.
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