Lead generation and marketing field guide for trades

What lead generation is, and the hierarchy of lead quality

Lead generation is the work of bringing a steady flow of qualified jobs to your business, and keeping enough of them in front of you that you never have to take a bad one to make payroll. The leads come from a handful of channels: referrals, online reviews, your Google Business Profile, your website, repeat customers, and paid ads. The job is to feed those channels, capture every lead they produce, respond fast, and track which channel paid off so next month's money goes where it worked.

The trades have a clear hierarchy of lead quality, and it rarely matches where the money goes. The cheapest leads close the best. A referral or a past customer already trusts you, so the sale is half done before you knock. The most expensive leads close the worst. A cold paid lead is shopping three other companies and leads with price. Most contractors have this backwards. They pour money into paid ads and ignore the referral and review channels that cost almost nothing and close at several times the rate.

This guide is about the pipeline, not the sales pitch at the kitchen table. The communication that earns the review and the repeat is covered in the customer communication and follow-up guide, and the takeoff that turns a booked lead into a priced job is covered in the roof measurement and estimating guide. Read those for the conversation and the number. Read this for where the work comes from in the first place.

Why a steady pipeline beats feast-or-famine

A steady pipeline is the difference between choosing your jobs and taking whatever walks in the door. Run feast-or-famine and you live two bad lives in rotation. In the feast you are slammed, you stop answering the phone, leads pile up unworked, and you book months out while a competitor who called back same-day takes the customer. In the famine you are desperate, you bid low to keep the crew busy, you chase the tire-kicker and the problem customer, and your margin goes with it.

The pipeline fixes both. With more qualified leads than you can take, you can say no to the 30-minute drive, the haggler, and the job outside your wheelhouse, and you can hold your price because the next call is already coming. That selection is where the money is. The contractor who can choose the good jobs out-earns the one with the same crew and the same skills who takes all comers.

The catch is that a pipeline is built, not found. It comes from feeding the cheap channels every week whether you are busy or slow, because the referral you earn in July is the job you book in November. The shops that crater are the ones that only market when the calendar goes empty, by which point the lead they start working today is six to eight weeks from a signed contract. You cannot turn a pipeline on. You can only have built one already.

The best leads: referrals and repeat customers

Referrals and repeat customers are the cheapest leads you will ever get and the ones that close the best, so they come first, before you spend a dollar on anything else. The reason is trust. A referred homeowner heard you do good work from someone they believe, so they call ready to hire instead of ready to shop. The numbers back it hard. Shops that track close rate by source routinely see referrals close at several times the rate of paid leads, with purchased aggregator leads well behind. Track your own close rate by source for a year and the ranking almost always holds, referrals on top, then your own paid search, then purchased leads. Your exact percentages will differ, but the order rarely does.

The cost gap is just as wide. A referral or a repeat customer can run roughly half to a third of what a paid customer costs to acquire, because you are not bidding against every other contractor for the click. Referred customers also tend to spend more over time and come back more often, which makes them worth more than the first job alone.

So mine these first. Every happy customer is a referral source and a future repeat, and most of them would gladly send you the neighbor if you asked, which almost no contractor does. The mechanics of the ask, the timing, and the review that travels with the referral are in the customer communication and follow-up guide. The point here is the priority: before you build a website or buy an ad, make sure you are capturing and working the leads from people who already like you.

Google: your Business Profile, the map pack, and Local Service Ads

For a homeowner without a referral, the search almost always starts on Google, and the large majority of local contractor searches happen there. Three things on Google decide whether they find you. Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that feeds the local map pack, the box of three businesses with the pins that sits at the top of a local search and takes a large share of the clicks, commonly cited around 40 percent. Fill the profile out completely: the right primary category, your service area, real photos of real jobs, accurate hours, and a steady flow of reviews, which is the single biggest lever on where you land in that pack.

Above the map pack sit Local Service Ads, the pay-per-lead units with the verified badge. You pay per lead, not per click, and you can dispute a junk lead. Google retired the green Google Guaranteed badge in late 2025 and folded it, Google Screened, and License Verified into one blue Google Verified badge, and dropped the old money-back guarantee, so do not promise a customer a guarantee that no longer exists. LSA rank now leans heavily on your Business Profile reviews, your response speed, and how close you are to the customer, not on how much you bid. Many trades see LSA leads in the rough range of $25 to $80 each, lower than most other paid channels, and book something like three or four of every ten.

The thread through all of it is reviews. They feed the map-pack rank, the LSA rank, and the homeowner's decision once they find you. More on that below, and the how-and-when of the review ask is in the customer communication and follow-up guide.

The website that turns a visitor into a call

Your website's only job is to turn a stranger into a phone call or a form, fast, on a phone. Most of your traffic is on a phone, standing in the yard looking at a problem, so the site has to load in a couple of seconds and put the phone number where a thumb can hit it. A click-to-call button in the header that dials you in one tap will out-convert a contact page buried two clicks deep every time.

Three things move the conversion. Speed, because a slow page loses people before it finishes loading. Mobile layout, because a desktop site pinched onto a phone makes a customer pinch and zoom to find your number, and they will not. And a short quote form that asks for the few things you need, name, address, phone, and the problem, not a twelve-field interrogation that gets abandoned halfway. Every extra field costs you submissions.

Put the proof on the page too. Real photos of your work, your review rating, your service area, and the trades you actually do. A homeowner who lands on a clean, fast page with real jobs, real reviews, and a number they can tap is most of the way to calling. One who has to fight the page on a phone is gone to the next result. The site does not have to be fancy. It has to be fast, it has to work on a phone, and it has to make the call one tap away.

What is speed to lead, and why does the first to respond win?

Speed to lead is how fast you respond after a lead comes in, and it is the highest-return habit in contractor marketing because the first company to respond usually wins the job. The widely cited research is blunt. Reach a web lead within about five minutes and you are far more likely to connect and qualify it than if you wait even half an hour. One well-known study found you are roughly twenty-one times more likely to qualify and reach a web lead when you respond within five minutes than after thirty, and a large majority of buyers go with whoever calls back first. Not the cheapest. The fastest.

The opportunity is that almost nobody does it. The average contractor response time runs around 40 minutes, and most shops never reply inside five minutes at all. So speed is a gap you can win on this week without spending a dollar. A lead that requested a quote and got a callback in three minutes is yours before the other two companies have listened to the voicemail.

Leads also go cold fast. The same lead that was hot at minute five is lukewarm at hour one and may have already hired someone by the next morning. The fix is mechanical, not heroic: a missed-call text-back that fires within seconds while you are on a roof, a single inbox so a lead never sits unseen, and a person or a tool that responds while the customer is still thinking about it. The conversation that follows that first response is in the customer communication and follow-up guide. The speed of the first response is the part you control today.

Paid ads: Google PPC, Local Service Ads, and Meta

Paid ads are the fastest way to turn money into leads and the most expensive lead you will buy, so treat them as the channel you turn up when the organic base is not filling the calendar, not the whole plan. Three buckets cover most of it. Local Service Ads, covered above, charge per lead and sit at the top. Google PPC, the regular search ads, charge per click and put you above the map pack for high-intent searches like emergency roof repair. In home services the blended cost per lead commonly lands around $90, and in competitive metros roofing leads can run $150 to $300.

Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram are cheaper per click but the intent is lower, since you are interrupting someone's feed rather than catching them mid-search, so they work better for storm-damage offers, financing, and staying in front of a service area than for someone who needs a roof today.

The discipline that separates a paid channel that prints money from one that drains it is tracking. Every paid dollar has to tie back to a cost per lead and, more important, a cost per booked job, because a channel with a cheap lead that never closes is more expensive than one with a pricey lead that books. Use a tracking number on the ad, ask every caller how they found you, and watch the cost per job by campaign, not the cost per click. Kill what does not book. Feed what does.

Cost per lead, cost to acquire a customer, and lifetime value

Two numbers decide whether a channel is worth keeping. Cost per lead is the spend on a channel divided by the leads it produced. Cost to acquire a customer, CAC, is the spend divided by the jobs it actually booked, which is the number that matters, because leads do not pay you, customers do. A channel with a $40 lead that closes at 10 percent costs you $400 a customer. A channel with a $150 lead that closes at 60 percent, like a referral, costs you $250. The cheap lead was the expensive customer.

Against CAC you set lifetime value, LTV, which is what a customer is worth over every job and referral they bring, not just the first ticket. A roof is mostly a one-time sale, but the same customer is the gutter job, the repair after the next storm, and the three neighbors they send you. That is why a referred customer, who costs less to get and refers more, is worth more than the paid customer even at the same first job.

The rough discipline: know your CAC by channel and make sure LTV comfortably clears it. When CAC by channel is a number you actually have, the budget decision makes itself. You spend more where a customer is cheap and worth a lot, and less where a customer is expensive and one-and-done. Most contractors never calculate either number, which is why they cannot say which half of their marketing is wasted.

Track where every lead came from

The most common marketing failure in the trades is not tracking the source. Ask any contractor which channel produced their last ten jobs and most cannot tell you, which means they are guessing every time they spend. You cannot spend where it works if you do not know where it works.

The fix is a habit and a place to put it. Ask every single lead how they found you, at the first contact, and record the answer the same way every time: referral and from whom, Google, the yard sign, the truck, the repeat call, the ad. The from-whom on a referral matters, because it tells you which past customers to thank and lean on. Do this for ninety days and the pattern is undeniable. You will usually find that a small number of cheap channels produce most of your good jobs and that some paid channel you have been feeding produces calls that never book.

This is where a field tool earns its keep. FieldOS captures the lead source on the lead itself and carries it all the way through to the booked, won, and lost outcome, so you are not reconstructing it from memory or a stack of notes. When the source is a field on every job, the report writes itself: leads by source, close rate by source, and revenue by source, side by side. That report is the difference between a marketing budget you can defend and one you are guessing at.

Capture every lead in one place

A lead you do not capture is money you already spent and threw away. Calls go to voicemail and never get returned. Form submissions sit in an inbox nobody watches. A text to the owner's personal phone gets buried under twenty others. A sticky note on the truck dash blows out the window. Every one of those is a lead you paid to generate and then lost before anyone worked it.

Capture means every lead, from every channel, lands in one place where nothing falls through. The call, the web form, the text, the referral someone mentioned at the job, all of it in a single list with the source attached and a clear next step, so no lead sits unseen and unworked. The shops that grow are not the ones with the most leads. They are the ones that lose the fewest.

FieldOS is built for this. A lead from the phone, the website form, or a text drops into one workspace with its source, the customer's details, and where it sits in the pipeline, so the next action is always obvious and nothing rides on someone remembering. Capture and speed-to-lead are the same fight: a lead that lands somewhere visible gets a fast callback, and a lead scattered across voicemail, inbox, and sticky notes gets a slow one or none. Put them all in one place and you stop leaking the leads you already paid for.

Follow up the unsold quotes instead of quoting and ghosting

Most contractors quote a job once and never follow up, which is the quiet leak that costs the most, because the customer who did not sign today is not gone, they are just not ready yet. The sales research is consistent. Most sales that close take five or more follow-up touches, yet most salespeople give up after one or two attempts, and a large share never follow up at all. A big fraction of people who ask for a quote will not buy for weeks or months. Quote and ghost and you hand all of them to whoever does follow up.

The follow-up does not have to be pushy. A quick check-in a few days after the quote, another the next week, then a lighter touch over the months that follow, is enough to be the company they call when they are finally ready. The reasons they stall are usually money, timing, or a spouse who has not weighed in yet, none of which are a no. They are a not-right-now, and not-right-now becomes a yes for whoever stayed in touch.

This is exactly where a pipeline and a tool save you, because no human remembers to chase forty open quotes by hand. FieldOS keeps every unsold quote in front of you with the next follow-up date attached, so the quote that needs a nudge surfaces instead of going cold in a drawer. The wording of the check-in and the timing of the review ask are in the customer communication and follow-up guide. The point here is to do it at all.

Make referrals systematic, not a thing you hope for

Referrals are your best channel, so do not leave them to luck. Most contractors get referrals by accident and have no idea how to get more, when the move is simply to ask, every time, at the moment the customer is happiest, and to make it easy and worth their while.

A referral program does not need to be complicated. Tell every satisfied customer you grow by word of mouth and you would appreciate them sending a neighbor, hand them a couple of cards, and give them a real reason to do it. A reward that works in the trades is usually cash or a gift card for a referral that turns into a job, often something like $50 to a few hundred dollars depending on the ticket, paid when the referred job closes. The number matters less than the fact that it exists and that you actually pay it promptly, because a referral reward you forget to send kills the next referral.

Two rules keep it honest. First, the reward is for a real referral that books, not for a fake review or a paid testimonial, which crosses an FTC line covered in the standards section. Second, track who refers, so you know your top sources and can thank them by name. The customers who send you three jobs a year are worth more than any ad, and they should hear from you like it. The timing and the script for the ask are in the customer communication and follow-up guide.

Reviews drive your Google rank and your close rate

Reviews are not a vanity metric. They are the input that feeds your local map-pack rank, your Local Service Ads rank, and the homeowner's decision once they find you, which makes more reviews into more leads almost mechanically. The shops that rank in the map pack and on LSAs tend to be the ones with both a high rating and a high volume of recent reviews. A common benchmark is something like a 4.5-plus average and 50 or more reviews to compete in a busy market. Star rating alone is not enough. A 5.0 with eight reviews loses to a 4.7 with three hundred, because volume and recency signal an active, real business.

The way you get there is a steady ask, not a one-time push. A handful of new reviews every month beats a burst that then goes quiet for a year, because both Google and the reader weigh recent reviews more. Ask at the moment the work is done and the customer is happy, make it a one-tap link to your Google profile, and respond to the ones you get, the good and the bad.

What you cannot do is fake them, buy them, or have the office write them, all of which the FTC now bans outright with real penalties, covered in the standards section. The full playbook for when and how to ask, and how to handle a bad review without making it worse, is in the customer communication and follow-up guide. The marketing point is the loop: good work, the ask, more reviews, a higher rank, more leads.

Trucks, uniforms, and yard signs: local visibility

Branding in the trades is not a logo exercise. It is being seen, again and again, in the neighborhoods you work, so that when a homeowner finally needs you they already know your name. A wrapped truck parked in a driveway for a two-day roof job is a billboard the whole street sees, and it costs once and works for years. The same goes for a clean uniform that tells the customer the person at the door is who they expected, and a yard sign in the lawn of every completed job.

The yard sign is the most underused cheap channel in roofing. Your crew just spent two days on a roof the whole street watched. Put a sign in the yard and the neighbors who were quietly wondering who to call now have an answer, with social proof attached, because you did good visible work right there. Storm-chasing competitors understand this. Plenty of local shops doing better work do not bother.

Consistency is the whole game. The same name, color, and logo on the truck, the shirt, the sign, the invoice, and the website means five impressions register as one company instead of five strangers. You are not trying to win a design award. You are trying to be the name a homeowner has already seen on the truck, the shirt, and the sign before they ever search, so that when they do, they are looking for you by name.

Seasonal demand and storm response

Roofing demand is lumpy, and the work comes in waves you can see coming. Spring and fall are busy, deep winter is slow in cold climates, and a hailstorm or a windstorm can produce a year of leads in a week. Plan the pipeline around the calendar instead of being surprised by it. Market ahead of the busy season so the leads land when you can take them, and keep enough in the pipeline through the slow months to hold the crew.

Storm response is its own discipline. After a hailstorm a market floods with out-of-town storm chasers, and the local shop that responds fast, that homeowners already know from the truck and the reviews, wins the work the chasers churn. Speed-to-lead and a known local name matter most exactly when demand spikes, because everyone is calling at once and the first credible local contractor to answer gets the job. The pipeline you built in the quiet months is what lets you ride the spike instead of drowning in it.

Qualify the lead before you chase it

Not every lead is a job, and chasing the ones that never were is how you burn a day driving to give a free quote to someone who was never going to buy. Qualifying is the quick filter on the first call that tells you whether a lead is worth your time, on four points: budget, scope, timeline, and decision-maker. Does the work fit what they can spend, or are they price-shopping a number they will not pay? Is the scope something you actually do? Is the timeline real, or are they just getting estimates for an insurance file with no intent to proceed? And is the person you are talking to the one who can say yes, or do you need the spouse or the property manager in the room before any decision happens?

You do not interrogate. You ask a few questions on the first call and listen for the answers. A lead with a real problem, a real timeline, a budget in the range, and the authority to decide is worth a same-day visit. The tire-kicker who wants a ballpark over the phone, will not give an address, and is collecting six quotes for sport is worth a polite number and no windshield time. The takeoff and pricing that follow a qualified lead, where the measurement drives the bid, are in the roof measurement and estimating guide. Qualifying is what makes sure you only spend that effort on leads that can close.

How do you measure marketing: leads, booked, sold, and ROI by channel?

You measure marketing with a funnel, not a feeling. Three conversion steps tell you where the money goes and where the leaks are: leads to booked appointments, booked to sold jobs, and the cost and revenue tied to each. Watch each step by channel and the problem shows itself. A channel with plenty of leads that never book has a lead-quality problem. A channel with booked appointments that never sell has a pricing or a sales problem, not a lead problem. Same symptom, opposite fix, and the only way to tell them apart is to track the steps separately.

The number that ranks your channels is return by channel: revenue from a channel's jobs against what you spent to get them. A channel that costs $2,000 a month and produces $30,000 in booked work is one you feed. One that costs the same and produces $4,000 is one you cut or fix. Roofing close rates vary widely by source, with paid and aggregator leads often closing in the low double digits or worse and referrals several times higher, so a blended close rate hides which channel is carrying you.

Track the few numbers that matter and review them monthly: leads by source, close rate by source, cost per booked job by source, and revenue by source. That is a one-page report, and it turns marketing from a gamble into a set of decisions you can defend with your own numbers.

Run a pipeline in your CRM so nothing slips

A pipeline is just every lead sorted by stage, so you always know what to do next and nothing slips through. The simplest version has four stages: new, quoted, won, and lost. A new lead needs a fast first response. A quoted lead needs follow-up until it closes or dies. A won job moves into scheduling and the work. A lost job gets a reason recorded, because the pattern in why you lose is a marketing and a pricing lesson you cannot learn if you do not write it down.

Without a pipeline, leads live in a phone, an inbox, a notebook, and someone's memory, and the predictable result is that quotes go unfollowed and leads go cold. With one, every lead is visible, every stage has an owner and a next step, and the dollars in each stage tell you what your near-term revenue looks like before the month closes.

This is the core of what FieldOS does for a trade business. Leads come in with their source attached, move through new to quoted to won or lost, carry their follow-up dates and their photos and their notes, and roll up into the source and close-rate reports the metrics section described. The same record that captures the lead, holds the follow-up, and tracks the source is the pipeline, so the marketing measurement and the day-to-day job management are one system instead of three. Nothing slips because nothing lives only in someone's head.

How much to spend: marketing as a share of revenue

A common rule of thumb puts contractor marketing somewhere around 8 to 12 percent of revenue, leaning higher when you are growing or new and lower when the calendar is already full, but treat that as a starting range, not a law, because it varies with your market, your margins, and how much of your work comes free from referrals. A shop with a strong referral and repeat base can grow on less. A newer shop with no reputation yet often has to spend more, sometimes 15 to 20 percent, to get known. Spend too little, under about 5 percent, and most shops stall.

The percentage matters less than where the money goes, and the rule there is simple: spend on what tracks. A dollar on a channel whose cost per booked job you can measure is an investment. A dollar on a channel you cannot measure is a hope. Put the first money into the cheap, high-close channels, referrals, reviews, and your Google profile, which cost time more than cash, then add paid ads on top once the organic base is working and you can track what each campaign books. Set the budget as a share of revenue, then let the source-and-close report move the money to what works. Verify the right number for your market against your own close rates and margins, not a blog's average.

Commercial and B2B leads run on relationships

Commercial and B2B roofing work comes from a different pipeline than residential, and it runs on relationships more than on ads. The buyers are general contractors, property managers, facility managers, and building owners, and they hire by reputation and by who they already know and trust. You get on the list by being known, by doing a good job that a GC remembers on the next project, and by getting onto bid lists and staying in front of the people who control them.

The cycle is longer and the touches are more, so the follow-up discipline matters even more than in residential, because a commercial relationship might take a year of staying in contact before the first bid invitation. The pipeline thinking is the same, just slower: track every contact, every bid, and every relationship, and follow up patiently, because the GC who ignored you for ten months calls when their usual roofer drops the ball. A handful of good commercial relationships are worth more than any single residential channel, and they are built, not bought.

Common mistakes

• Responding slowly, so the competitor who called back first books the job while your lead goes cold.
• Never tracking which channel a lead came from, so you cannot tell which half of your marketing is wasted.
• Ignoring the cheap referral and review channels while pouring money into the most expensive cold paid leads.
• Quoting a job once and ghosting, instead of following up the unsold quote the five or more times most sales take.
• Spending everything on paid ads with no organic base, so the leads stop the day the ad budget does.
• Running no pipeline, so leads live in voicemail, inbox, and sticky notes and quietly slip through.
• Chasing every tire-kicker instead of qualifying for budget, scope, timeline, and decision-maker first.
• Faking, buying, or writing your own reviews, which the FTC now bans with real per-violation penalties.

What to track for each channel

You cannot manage a channel you do not measure, and the measurement is a short table you can keep on one page and update monthly. For each channel, record what it costs, how many leads and booked jobs it produced, the close rate, and a note on lead quality, so the worst-performing channel cannot hide inside a blended average.

Keep it honest and keep it current. A channel that looked good last quarter can rot when a competitor outbids you or your reviews stop coming, and the only way you catch it is a number you update, not a number you remember.

Field checklist

Standards and references

Marketing is not code-governed the way a roof assembly is, but a few real rules and well-established practices shape how you do it, and getting them wrong carries cost. The marketing fundamentals that hold up across the trades are the ones this guide is built on: speed-to-lead, where the first credible response usually wins; cost per acquisition measured against lifetime value, channel by channel; and the priority of referrals and reviews ahead of cold paid. Those are practices, not laws, but they are about as close to settled as marketing gets, backed by widely cited response-time and follow-up studies. Verify the specific costs and percentages against your own market and your own numbers, because a benchmark from a blog is a starting point, not your reality.

The platform rules are real and worth knowing. Google sets the terms for the Business Profile and for Local Service Ads, including the verification behind the badge, which changed in late 2025 when the green Google Guaranteed badge and its money-back guarantee were retired and folded into a single blue Google Verified badge. Follow Google's current rules for categories, service areas, and reviews, because violations can get a profile suspended, and a suspended profile is a channel switched off overnight.

The hard legal line is the FTC. The Federal Trade Commission's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials, in effect since late 2024, bans fake reviews, buying positive or negative reviews, reviews written by insiders without disclosure, and suppressing honest negative reviews, with civil penalties that have run into the tens of thousands of dollars per violation. The advertising you run also has to be truthful and substantiated under the FTC's general rules against deceptive advertising. Ask for honest reviews, disclose any connection, never fabricate, and you stay clear of it. Confirm the current rules, since enforcement and thresholds change.

Terms and metrics

Marketing carries its own shorthand, and the same idea shows up under a few names across an ad dashboard, a CRM, and a sales conversation.

Speed to lead

How fast you respond after a lead arrives; minutes, not hours, and the first credible response usually wins

CPL (cost per lead)

Channel spend divided by the leads it produced

CAC (cost to acquire a customer)

Channel spend divided by the jobs it actually booked; the number that matters more than CPL

LTV (lifetime value)

What a customer is worth across every job and referral, not just the first ticket

Close rate / conversion

The share of leads or quotes that turn into booked, sold jobs

GBP / map pack

Google Business Profile and the top-three local results box it feeds

LSA

Local Service Ads, Google's pay-per-lead units with the verified badge

Pipeline

Every lead sorted by stage, commonly new, quoted, won, and lost

Related tools

Calculators and readiness checks for this work

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