Not enough leads? Why a £1m service business still runs dry

Of the last four business owners who came through this website asking about coaching, three gave the same answer when asked what was holding the business back. Leads, or the way they sell.

None of them were start-ups. They were established trades and specialist service firms with teams of six people or more and good reputations. And all three were worried about where next quarter’s work was coming from.

I hear this more than any other problem, so here is what I tell them.

The leads problem is usually a sales system problem

Most service businesses get to their first £500k on the owner’s name. Referrals, repeat customers, the bloke you met on a job three years ago who now runs facilities for a housing association. It works brilliantly, right up until it doesn’t.

Somewhere between £500k and £2m two things happen at once. The team gets big enough that you need a steady flow of work to keep everyone busy, and you get so busy running that team that you stop doing the thing that brought the work in. Nobody is ringing old customers. Quotes go out late. The enquiry that came in on Thursday afternoon gets a reply on Tuesday.

Then the pipeline dries up, you panic, you go back out selling, the work comes back, you get busy delivering it, and round you go again. Feast and famine. Most owners I meet have been on that loop for years and think it is just how their industry works.

It isn’t. It is what happens when sales lives in one person’s head and diary.

How many leads does your service business need?

Before anyone spends money on ads or a lead generation agency, I want three numbers. Your average job or contract value. How many quotes you send in a month. How many of those you win.

Here is a worked example. Say you want to turn over £1m and your average job is £8,000. That is 125 jobs a year, or roughly 10 or 11 a month. If you win 30% of what you quote, you need about 35 quotes going out every month. If you can lift that win rate to 40%, you need about 26.

That second number matters more than people think. The gap between them, roughly nine quotes a month, is a lot of site visits, phone calls and evenings spent pricing. Getting better at winning the work you are already quoting is often faster than finding more people to quote for.

Most owners can’t tell me these three numbers off the top of their head. That’s fine, they just need writing down. Put them on one page and look at them every week. If you want a starting point, this guide covers the weekly numbers an owner should track.

Answer every enquiry the same day

When I look at a new client’s enquiries, the first thing I check is how long the reply took. It is nearly always longer than they think.

Someone who fills in a form on your website at 8pm is usually filling in two or three others. The business that rings them back first, with a proper answer and a date for a visit, has the best chance of winning it.

You don’t have to answer every one yourself. You need one named person responsible for replying the same working day, a short script for that first call, and a simple list of every enquiry with where it came from and what happened to it. A spreadsheet will do. The point is that nothing falls through the gap between you being on site and you getting back to the office.

Go back through your old quotes

This is the quickest win I know, and most owners I work with have never done it.

Pull out every quote you sent in the last twelve months that didn’t turn into work. Ring each one. Not to push, just to ask what happened. Some went with someone else and will tell you why, which is gold. Some never made a decision and still need the work doing. Some had a budget problem that has since gone away.

On a business sending 30 quotes a month and winning 30% of them, that is around 250 quotes a year that didn’t convert. Every one is a conversation with someone who already asked you for a price. It costs you a few afternoons.

Pick two channels and own them

Owners with a leads problem often try to fix it by doing everything at once. A bit of social media, a bit of networking, a trade directory, a new website. Six half-done channels give you nothing you can measure.

Pick two. For most local service businesses one of them should be your existing customer base: maintenance and service contracts, annual check-ins, the customers you did one job for and never spoke to again. Recurring work is the most valuable revenue a service business can have, and it changes what the whole business is worth.

The second depends on who buys from you. If you sell to homeowners it is probably your Google Business Profile and your reviews. If you sell to businesses it is usually referral partners: the accountants, surveyors, facilities managers and main contractors who already talk to your customers. A handful of those relationships, looked after properly, will usually bring in more work than any directory listing.

Then give each channel a number. Reviews asked for this month. Partners met this quarter. Old customers called. If it hasn’t got a number, it won’t get done.

Make your website answer the questions buyers type

Something has changed this year that most owners haven’t noticed. One recent enquiry found us through ChatGPT. The owner asked it a question about his business, it gave him an answer that included us, and he got in touch.

AI tools and Google both reward the same thing: plain answers to the questions your customers actually ask. What does it cost? How long does it take? Do you cover my area? What happens if something goes wrong? If your website is a homepage and a contact form, there is nothing for them to read, and they have less reason to recommend you.

Write down the ten questions you get asked most on the phone. Answer each one on your website in plain English, with real figures or ranges where you can. It is one of the cheapest bits of marketing you can do, and it keeps working while you are on site.

Give sales an hour, every week, in the diary

In the army we never left the important things to whenever there was a spare minute, because there never was one. Sales in an owner-led business needs the same treatment.

One hour, same time every week. Mine is Monday morning. Look at the three numbers. Look at the enquiry list. Decide who gets a call that week and who makes it. That hour is the start of taking sales out of your head and putting it into the business, which is the only way it survives you being busy.

Over time that hour turns into a process somebody else can run. That is the real goal. A business where the work keeps coming in while you are on holiday, or on site, or doing the thing you are actually good at. If you are the bottleneck on everything else too, start here.

What to do this week

1. Write down your average job value, quotes sent per month and win rate.
2. Work out how many quotes you need each month to hit your target.
3. Name one person who replies to every enquiry the same working day.
4. Pull every lost or undecided quote from the last twelve months and start ringing them.
5. Pick two channels, give each one a monthly number, and drop the rest for now.
6. Put a one-hour sales slot in your diary for the same time every week.

If you want help building that properly, this is a big part of what I do with service business owners and trades and construction firms. The free seven-question planner is a good place to start, or book a free coaching session and we’ll go through your numbers together.