The honest case against
We sell pay-per-lead generation, and it is the wrong purchase for a meaningful proportion of the businesses that enquire about it. Here is the list we use to disqualify people on the first call, published so you can save yourself the call.
One: you cannot answer the phone
This is the most common one by a distance. Bought leads have a short half-life. The customer is contacting several businesses and the first credible one to answer takes a disproportionate share of the work.
If calls routinely go to voicemail during business hours, you will pay for enquiries and lose them to someone faster. Fix that first — with staff, with a diverted number, or with an answering service — before spending anything on generating more calls.
Two: your close rate on warm enquiries is poor
If fewer than one in five people who contact you wanting the work end up booking it, the problem is at the quoting end, not the marketing end. More enquiries will make the leak more expensive rather than smaller.
Work out what an enquiry is actually worth to you using what a lead is worth. If the arithmetic only works at a close rate you have never achieved, you do not yet have a business case.
Three: quotes take you more than a day
A customer who waits three days for a written quote has already received two others. Even when you win, you win on price, because delay removes every other basis for choosing you.
If quoting is a weekend job that keeps getting pushed, that is the constraint. Fix it with a template, a price book, or an hour blocked out daily. It will do more for revenue than any campaign.
Four: your average job value is small
The model has fixed costs — ranking, ads, tracking, management — and those costs do not shrink because your jobs are small. Below a certain job value there is not enough contribution in a won job to cover the cost of the enquiries that produced it.
Businesses doing high-volume, low-value work are usually better served by repeat customers, a strong Google profile they manage themselves, and route density. The Google Business Profile guide costs nothing to act on.
Five: your territory has thin search demand
Some areas simply do not generate enough monthly searches to support a campaign. No amount of optimisation creates demand that is not there, and a supplier who sells you a territory anyway is taking your money for something that cannot work.
We check this before quoting and we decline territories regularly. If we tell you your postcodes are too thin, it is not a negotiating position.
Six: you are already at capacity
If you are booked out six weeks and turning work away, more enquiries will not help. They will cost money, annoy the callers you cannot service, and generate reviews from people you never worked for.
Raise prices first. If you are turning work away, your prices are too low, and that is a change that costs nothing and takes effect immediately. Come back to marketing once capacity has caught up.
Seven: you want to own the asset
If your objective is equity rather than cash flow, renting enquiries gets you nowhere. Five years of bought leads leaves you owning nothing, as set out in why rank-and-rent works.
That is a legitimate reason to choose local SEO instead, or to run it yourself using local SEO for tradies. The commercial comparison is in pay-per-lead versus a retainer agency.
If none of these apply
Then the model is worth considering, and the next things to read are how pay-per-lead works for the mechanism and exclusive versus shared leads so you know what you are being sold by anyone, us included.
Our pricing variables are on the pricing page, the trades we cover are on the industries page, and you can contact us or call 0468 062 773 for availability.
Frequently asked questions
Why would you publish this?
Because a badly matched client leaves inside three months, disputes the invoices and tells other operators the model does not work. That costs us more than the revenue was worth. It is cheaper and more honest to let people disqualify themselves here than to discover it after three invoices.
What should I do instead if this describes me?
Usually fix the conversion end first. Better callback speed, faster quotes, a clearer quoting process and a habit of following up will lift revenue more than any marketing spend, and they cost nothing but attention. Once warm enquiries convert reliably, buying more of them starts to make sense.
Does this apply to retainer agencies too?
Most of it, yes. Marketing amplifies what already exists. A weak conversion process wastes a retainer just as efficiently as it wastes bought leads, it simply does so more slowly and with a longer report attached. Several points below apply to any marketing spend at all.
Can these problems be fixed?
Most of them, in weeks rather than years. Callback speed, quote turnaround and follow-up are process problems, not capability problems. Thin territory demand and a business that is already at capacity are the two that cannot be fixed by trying harder, and those are genuine reasons to spend nothing.