Turning Old Leads Into New Projects

Most contractors are sitting on thousands of old leads that never became a job, and most of them have no idea how many. In this episode, Meredith Medlin and Caitlyn Noble of FatCat Strategies explain why a brand-new lead is the most expensive lead a business will ever buy, and why the fastest revenue available to many contractors is already paid for and sitting quietly in their CRM. 

They introduce the Dormant Database Method - Mine, Match, Move - a repeatable framework for segmenting old leads by why they went cold, matching each segment with the right message and offer, and executing a multi-channel outreach cadence that gets them back on the calendar. The episode closes with a cautionary tale about a contractor whose agency never once looked inside his own database, and a five-step action plan listeners can put into motion this week.

Want to find out how we can create a custom digital marketing game plan for your contractor business? Schedule a call with us at fatcatstrategies.com.

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Intro: Welcome to Digital Marketing for Contractors, a podcast for home improvement contractors to help you crush your lead goals and take your business to the next level. Join us each episode as we give you powerful insights and practical tips on the best digital marketing strategies to help you grow your home improvement business. Let's get started.

Meredith: Welcome back to Digital Marketing for Contractors. I'm Meredith Medlin.

Caitlyn: And I'm Caitlyn Noble. If you are running a business that needs hundreds of leads a month, you have generated thousands of leads over the years, and a big chunk of those never became a project. Today is about going back and turning some of those old leads into new signed jobs.

Meredith: Okay, Caitlyn, I wanna start with a number that makes most contractors a little uncomfortable. If I walked into your office right now and asked you how many leads are sitting in your CRM from the last three years that never turned, turned into a job, could you tell me?

Caitlyn: Honestly, most owners could not, and that is the whole point. There is a pile of leads in almost every contractor's database that they already paid for. They paid the ad cost. They paid the call center to set the appointment. Sometimes they even paid a salesperson to drive out and give the demo, and then nothing.

Meredith: Nada. The lead just goes quiet and sits there.

Caitlyn: It sits there. And here's the first thing that gets me fired up: a brand-new lead is the most expensive lead you are ever going to buy. I know. We generate them for you.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: I hear the complaints. An old lead is one of... an old lead is one you have already paid for, so when a contractor tells us they need more leads, sometimes the fastest money is not out in the market. It is already in the building.

Meredith: So today, we are going dumpster

Caitlyn: You love dumpster diving

Meredith: database. and my dog

Caitlyn: I was... God bless. I was about to say

Meredith: my sweet

Caitlyn: Trash Panda Her

Meredith: loves trash can

Caitlyn: is a dumpster diver.

Meredith: He is. God, he's rotten.

Caitlyn: Okay,

Meredith: But I, I promise today is going to be the most profitable dumpster diving that you do all quarter.

Caitlyn: Ooh.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: Let's get into it.

Meredith: All right. So Caitlyn, why do old leads get ignored so consistently?

Caitlyn: Mm, a few reasons. The biggest one is psychological. A sales team gets a rush from a fresh inquiry. Somebody just raised their hand. The, the appetite is there. It feels alive. An old lead feels like a rejection you already lived through. Nobody wants to go call the person who told them no.

Meredith: Exactly, and it feels a little bit

Caitlyn: Ugh

Meredith: picking at a scab.

Caitlyn: It does.

Meredith: Hate that.

Caitlyn: Y'all, we have obviously call notes in front of our like, show notes in front of us, and so, like, I'm kind of reading ahead, too, and I'm

Meredith: Mm

Caitlyn: "Oh, we're gonna, we're gonna go there."

Meredith: We're going there, aren't we?

Caitlyn: We're going there. Okay.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: Cool. So the second reason is process. Most contractors have a very tight rehearsed process for a brand-new inquiry, speed to lead, set the appointment, confirm it, issue it to a rep, but almost nobody has a written process for what happens to a lead 90 days after it goes cold. So it just falls into the CRM and disappears.

Meredith: And I think there's a third reason, which is that owners assume that an old lead means it's a dead lead, but those two things are definitely not the same.

Caitlyn: Mm. They are absolutely not the same thing. In our experience, a homeowner who asked about new windows eight months ago did not stop needing windows. The timing was off. Maybe they were getting three quotes, and they went with somebody else who, has since done a mediocre job. Maybe they had a kid heading off to college, and the money was tight that spring. Maybe they just got busy and forgot to call you back.

Meredith: So the need didn't go away. The moment just passed.

Caitlyn: Exactly. Those windows were still old.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: And a home improvement project is not a one-time impulse. Research on buyer behavior generally suggest that a meaningful share of people who request a quote are not ready to buy in that first window, but a good portion of them do buy eventually from somebody. The question is just whether it is you or a competitor.

Meredith: All right. Let's put a finer point on the money side, too. When you buy a fresh lead, you're competing against every other advertiser for that homeowner's attention. When you re-approach an old lead, you already have their name and their address and the product they were interested in and often the quote that you gave them the first time, so you're not starting from zero. You're starting from the, like, two-yard which, woo, if we're looking at 100...

Caitlyn: I know.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: I've seen, I've seen my team score some touchdowns from the two-yard line.

Meredith: Amen.

Caitlyn: And that is why we tell homeowners, "Before you increase your ad budget, ask whether you have squeezed the database you already have." It is not that new lead la, la, la.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: It is not that new lead generation is wrong. Of course you need it. It is that the old leads are the cheapest yards on the field, and the most contractors leave them on the table. I love that this is football.

Meredith: we should've said, "Leave them on the sidelines."

Caitlyn: Leave them on the sidelines.

Meredith: Okay, so we agree money is there. Let's talk about how to actually go out and get it. So step one of the dormant database method, mine.

Caitlyn: I apologize. Mining is exactly what it sounds like. You are going into your CRM, whether that is MarketSharp, Lead Perfection, Job Progress, JobNimbus, Leap, whatever you use, and you are pulling out the leads that never became jobs.

Meredith: And the mistake people make here is they pull one giant list of everybody and then feel overwhelmed, and they just walk away and quit.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: The magic is in segmenting because an old lead is not just an old lead. There are very different reasons that a lead went cold, and each reason needs a different approach.

Caitlyn: This is the part I really want listeners to write down.

Meredith: Unless you're driving. Don't do that.

Caitlyn: And note it. We break the dormant database into a handful of buckets based on how far the lead got before it stalled. Meredith, let's walk through them.

Meredith: Let's do it. I am more than happy to. Bucket one, baby, the raw inquiry that never set an appointment. Somebody filled out a form or called in and, for whatever reason, an appointment never got on the calendar.

Caitlyn: Ugh.

Meredith: These folks raised their hand, and then they fell through a crack.

Caitlyn: Crack is usually a speed-to-lead problem in the original follow-up, which is its own episode. But for now, just know those leads exist, and they are gold.

Meredith: Bucket two, cancel prior to issue. They agreed to an appointment, they called back, and they canceled before it ever got handed to a sales rep. Something spooked them or their schedule blew up, and, you know, they were interested enough to say yes once.

Caitlyn: But...

Meredith: It just didn't work out for whatever reason.

Caitlyn: Yeah.

Meredith: Which is fair.

Caitlyn: Yeah. No, definitely.

Meredith: Bucket three?

Caitlyn: Bucket three, and this is a big one, the demo no sale, also called sit no sale. Your rep, rep... I, we, there's a reason we don't actually film ourselves doing this.

Meredith: Silly goofy.

Caitlyn: Your rep drove out, took the measurements, showed the colors and the product, gave the quote, and the homeowner did not sign. Those people saw your whole presentation. They know your product. They know your price.

Meredith: Which makes them incredibly warm even months later. Bucket four, your past customers, people who already bought from you once. If they bought a bath from you two years ago, they may be window customers this year.

Caitlyn: Exactly.

Meredith: Don't treat your customer list as closed just because the first job is done.

Caitlyn: And bucket five, the one everybody forgets, aged aggregator leads, the Angie, Modernize, HomeAdvisor, leads you paid for that went nowhere at the time. You already spent that money. Those are fair game to work with again.

Meredith: So that is five buckets, raw inquiry, cancel prior to issue, demo no sell, past customers, and aged aggregator leads. Caitlyn, why does the segmenting matter so much before we ever send a single message?

Caitlyn: Because the message that reactivates a demo no sale is completely different from the message that reactivates a raw inquiry. Duh. The demo no sale person already knows your price. Waving a generic get a free quote offer at them does nothing because they already got the quote. But a past customer, they do not need convincing that you do good work. They need a reason to come back for a different product.

Meredith: Right, and if you blast one identical email to all five buckets, you are gonna get mediocre results.

Caitlyn: Mediocre.

Meredith: And then... Can I get an amen?

Caitlyn: Amen.

Meredith: Amen. And they're gonna conclude, you're, you are gonna conclude that the database reactivation didn't work, when in reality you just used the wrong message on the wrong bucket.

Caitlyn: Somebody got lazy.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: One practical tip on the mining itself. When you pull these lists, get them clean. You want a homeowner name, the best contact info, the product they were interested in, the date of the original inquiry, and the stage where they stalled. If your CRM is set up well, that is a, a report you can run in an afternoon, right this second.

Meredith: Yeah.

Caitlyn: If it is not set up well, this is a great reason to finally get it organized.

Meredith: And just a quick note on compliance, because we have to say it.

Caitlyn: Have to.

Meredith: When you reactivate old contacts by phone or text, you need to be mindful of consent and do not call rules, and you need to honor anybody who has previously opted out. So work with your team and make sure that the list is scrubbed appropriately before you start dialing or texting. Yes, we are marketers, not attorneys, so make sure you check your own requirements before you move forward.

Caitlyn: Good call. All right, you have mined and segmented. Let's go to step two. We're gonna match.

Meredith: Matching. Matching is where the strategy really lives. For each bucket, you are matching a message to an offer to the specific reason that the lead stalled. So let's go bucket by bucket quickly.

Caitlyn: Ooh, that's easier said than done.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: Raw inquiry that never got an appointment. The match here is easy and low pressure. You are basically saying, "Hey, you reached out a while back about windows. We never got a chance to connect. Are you still looking?" You are removing the friction and reopening the door. No hard sell, just a warm human reopen.

Meredith: Cancel prior to issue. This person got cold feet or they got busy. The match is reassurance plus convenience. So, "Totally understand. Life gets hectic. We would still love to, you know, get you that no pressure home estimate whenever the timing works."

Caitlyn: As we're pressuring you.

Meredith: As we're doing it right now. But that's, you know, just try to lower the stakes.

Caitlyn: Correct. Sorry, yes, in all seriousness, that you're reaching back out, which is great. Demo no sale. This is the most interesting one because the match is usually about a reason to revisit the number. Maybe there was a current seasonal promotional offer. Maybe financing terms have changed. Maybe you can honestly say the product line was updated. You are giving them a legitimate new reason to reconsider a decision they already made.

Meredith: Yeah, and you never want to reactivate a demo no sale by insulting their original decision.

Caitlyn: No.

Meredith: So you're not gonna be saying, "Hey, you made a mistake." You're gonna say instead, "Circumstances changed, and I thought of you and wanted to reach out."

Caitlyn: 100%, y'all. Prices continue to increase on all of these products. That is one of the easiest things to go back and say.

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: if you want to keep that price that we initially talked

Meredith: We'll honor that original

Caitlyn: we'll honor that. Yeah. Anyways, that's just one example. My favorite, past customers. The match is loyalty and a new product. You trusted us with your roof. We also do siding and gutters, and we would love to take care of you again. These convert well because the trust is already built.

Meredith: And we've got aged aggregator leads. So the match there is patience and a fresh introduction because those homeowners may not even remember your company by name, but you are almost always reintroducing yourself.

Caitlyn: Okay, now let's make this concrete, and before I do, I wanna be really clear for everybody listening, we are about to use a made-up company with made-up numbers to illustrate the idea. This is a fictional It is not a real client, and these are not real statistics. We just want to show you how the math can work.

Meredith: Okay, so flagging it clearly. Again, this is fictional.

Caitlyn: Okay.

Meredith: Here we go.

Caitlyn: Let's do it. Thank you. So picture fictional windows and doors company. We'll call them Redline Windows and Doors. I'll say it again, made up. Let's say Redline has been in business for six years and averages a healthy flow of leads every month. Over those six years, hypothetically, they have accumulated a few thousand leads that never became jobs. Raw inquiries, some cancel prior to issue, and a stack of demo no sales.

Meredith: So in our fictional scenario, Redline decides to work the demo no sell bucket first because those are the warmest. Let's say, purely as an illustration, they pull 300 demo no sell leads from the past two years.

Caitlyn: And let's imagine they run a thoughtful re-approach with a genuine seasonal offer. In this made-up example, a small percentage of those 300 agree to have a rep come back. That's great. And of those, a handful sign, even if only a few projects come out of that one bucket. Remember, Redline already paid to generate those leads and already paid for the original demos, so the cost to produce those new jobs is dramatically lower from a job, than a job from a brand-new cold lead.

Meredith: And that's the entire argument of our episode

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm

Meredith: packaged in one fictional story. The revenue is close to found money because the acquisition cost was already spent years ago.

Caitlyn: Yeah, I want to stress those numbers were illustrative. Your real activation rates depend on your market, your product, your offer, and how good your original data is. But the principle holds up. Warm buckets plus a matched offer tends to produce jobs at a very low effective cost.

Meredith: One more matching tip before we move on. Do not lead with a discount desperation play. If every reactivation message is, "Here's a big old discount. Come on back," your trained your, the, you train your database to wait for desperation pricing, and the strongest matches lead with relevance and timing, and they use the offer as a nudge. It's not the whole pitch.

Caitlyn: On a e-commerce side of things, we do not do e-commerce, but, like, from a personal experience, you know about the abandoned cart rule.

Meredith: Oh, 100%.

Caitlyn: Yeah, like you, from e-commerce, like you abandon the cart, and you are most likely, if you've already given this company your information or have an account, you're gonna get an email or text message probably within the next day with a 10% off.

Meredith: Mm-hmm

Caitlyn: I mean, yeah, I, but I know it, and so I wait.

Meredith: Mm-hmm.

Caitlyn: Okay, let's move on to step three, which ironically is move.

Meredith: All right, move. This is the execution. This is where a lot of good intentions go to die because owners build the list, write the message, and then it never actually goes out anywhere consistently. So let's make it simple for everyone.

Caitlyn: Okay, cool. The first principle of move is that reactivation is multi-channel. One email is not a campaign. In our experience, the contractors who get real results touch each old lead through a combination of email, text, and a live phone call. The phone call is the one everybody wants to skip and is usually the one that books the appointment.

Meredith: Speed to lead shows up here, too, in a pretty interesting way. When an old lead replies to your reactivation email or text, that reply is a brand-new hot signal. If somebody answers, "Yeah, actually, we are still thinking about it," your team needs to jump on that like it's a fresh inbound inquiry. Same level of urgency.

Caitlyn: Yep, that's such a good point. A response to a reactivation campaign should light up your call center exactly like a new form fill. Do not let it sit in an inbox for two days.

Meredith: Amen. All right, let's talk cadence. What does a move sequence actually look like?

Caitlyn: Absolutely keep it human and spaced out. A simple version might be an email to open the door, a text a couple days later for the people who did not respond, and then a live phone call from a real person for the ones still quiet. Then you let it rest and maybe circle back weeks later with a different angle or a seasonal offer. You are not hammering people. You are showing up a few times politely over time.

Meredith: And I would add, assign it.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: This cannot be the thing that everybody does when they have spare time because nobody ever has spare time, first of all.

Caitlyn: Right.

Meredith: Whether it's a specific call center rep, a slower shift, or a dedicated afternoon each week, somebody owns working the dormant database. If nobody owns it, it's not gonna happen.

Caitlyn: Sure doesn't. This is also a beautiful use of your slow season. When the fresh leads dip, that is the perfect window to point your call center at the database. It keeps the team productive, and it fills the calendar during the months that would otherwise be quiet.

Meredith: And that's a nice callback to our slow season episode a couple ago.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: But the angle here is different. The episode was about surviving the dip before. This is about mining the money you already have during the dip, if that makes sense.

Caitlyn: I love it, yeah. One more move tip. Use the channel that matches the age and warmth of the lead. A demo no sell from four months ago may respond great to a personal text. A five-year-old aggregator lead probably needs a softer email reintroduction before you ever call. Match the intensity of the outreach to how warm the bucket is.

Meredith: So that is the dormant database method. Mine your CRM and segment into buckets. Match a message and offer to why each bucket went cold. Move on them through email, text, a real phone call, and speed to lead on anybody who responds to your campaign

Caitlyn: And measure it, which we should touch on before we wrap

Meredith: All right. Quick one on measurement because if you do not track this, you will never know it worked and you will quietly stop doing it, I promise.

Caitlyn: Yes. The metrics you care about are familiar ones, just applied to old leads. Set rate of the old leads you reached. How many people, or how many booked an appointment? Sit rate, or issued appointments. How many of those actually happened? And close rate, how many became signed jobs?

Meredith: And the number that makes the owner smile is effective cost per job from reactivation. Because when you compare the cost of running a database campaign against the revenue it produced, and you remember you already paid to generate those leads originally, the return tends to look very different from your fresh lead channels

Caitlyn: Tag these leads separately in your CRM so that you get clean lead source attribution. You want to be able to say at the end of the quarter, "The reactivation campaign produced this many appointments and this much revenue." If it lives in the same bucket as everything else, you lose the story

Meredith: And that story is what convinces you to make a reactivation a permanent repeating part of your marketing, not a one-time science experiment

Caitlyn: Mm, which is really the goal. This should become a habit, not a rescue mission

Meredith: All right, this is the part of the show where we give you a few things you can actually do on a Monday morning, Saturday I don't know. Pick, pick a morning

Caitlyn: Whenever. Pick a morning. Do 'em.

Meredith: Do 'em. All right. What's number one?

Caitlyn: Number one, run one report. Just one. Go to your CRM and pull a count of every lead from the last two years that never became a job. Do not work them yet, just look at the number. That number is your wake-up call

Meredith: Number two, pick your warmest bucket, for which most contractors, this is the demo no sell list.

Caitlyn: Mm-hmm

Meredith: And just go ahead and pull that segment. Get the name, the product, date, and the quote if you have it

Caitlyn: Number three, write a short human reactivation message for that one bucket. Not a discount blast, a genuine we thought of you, is the timing better now message that mass matches why they went cold

Meredith: And number four, assign an owner. Decide who is going to send it and who is going to make the follow-up phone calls, and then put it on the calendar for this week. If it is not assigned and

Caitlyn: Nope

Meredith: it will not happen

Caitlyn: Correct. And last but not least, number five, set up a way to tag reactivation leads separately so you can measure what you get. That is it, five steps, and you could genuinely have appointments on the calendar by the end of the week from leads you already paid for

Meredith: Okay. I know I said I was gonna let y'all go before.

Caitlyn: Nope

Meredith: Nope. You're stuck here with us because we have a horror story for you today.

Caitlyn: Mm.

Meredith: And this one fits today's topic perfectly, and I wanna be clear up front, this is a representative, a composite story. We are not naming the agency, and we have blurred the details, but the pattern is one that we genuinely have seen more than enough times for comfort

Caitlyn: Set the scene, Meredith

Meredith: Here I go. So picture a contractor doing solid revenue, paying a national marketing agency a healthy, sizable retainer every month. Every single month, the agency's report is all about new lead volume, new clicks, new forms, new leads, new, new, new, new. And every month, the contractor's also quietly adding to this enormous pile of leads that never converted because the agency's whole pitch is built on selling him more new leads

Caitlyn: Of course. There's no incentive for that agency to help him work the old database. That does not sell a bigger retainer

Meredith: Exactly. So years go by, thousands of leads pile up in his CRM, completely untouched. I'm talking demo no sells, cancellations, oral inquiries, all of it is just sitting there. Nobody at the agency ever once suggested working those leads. And when the owner finally got frustrated with how impersonal the whole relationship had become and started asking harder questions to the agency, he realized his agency had never even looked inside his CRM.

Caitlyn: Mm

Meredith: They were selling him new leads out of the front door while a gold mine was rotting in the back room

Caitlyn: And here is the part that stings. When he finally pulled and worked a chunk of those old demo no sells himself with a simple matched human reapproach, he booked real appointments and closed real jobs out of leads he had already paid for years earlier, money that has been sitting in his own database the entire time

Meredith: So the moral of the story is not just, okay, well, that agency sucked, although, come on now, but the moral of this story should be that good marketing from a good marketing partner, they should care about the leads that you already have, not just the new ones that they can sell you. Your database is an asset, and if nobody is helping you work it, you're leaving signed jobs on the table every single month

Caitlyn: Mm, and that is exactly the kind of thing we think about at Fat Cat. I swear I was just on a call right before we recorded this talking about that because we are not just trying to sell you the next click. We want the whole engine to work

Meredith: All right, guys. That is our show. If you take one thing away today, let it be this. Before you spend another dollar on a new lead, go look at the ones you already own. Mine your database, match the message to why each lead went cold, and then move on them

Caitlyn: And if you want help building a reactivation system into your marketing, or you just want a second set of eyes on what is hiding in your CRM, this is what we do. You can book a strategy call with us, a free 30-minute strategy call at fatcatstrategies.com

Meredith: All right. This has been Digital Marketing for Contractors from Fat Cat Strategies. All right, everyone, go dig up some old gold in your CRM, and we will see you next time.

Caitlyn: Bye.

Outro: Digital marketing for contractors is created by Fat Cat Strategies. For more information, visit fatcatstrategies.com.