Latest news with #Corberry
Forbes
02-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
The Key To Customer Acquisition For Home Service Providers? Alignment
Michael J. Fox is a finance & marketing pro and founder of Corberry. He has successfully helped home service contractors scale operations. If you're spending thousands on digital ads and still struggling to grow, the issue probably isn't the ad creative or the platforms you're using; it's what happens after you generate leads. For most home service businesses, the real challenge isn't generating leads but converting them into booked jobs. Sometimes, it's a matter of targeting the wrong audience. Other times, it's a breakdown in follow-up, sales processes or operational readiness. Optimizing both lead generation and conversion systems is the key to maximizing revenue. Here's how aligning your marketing, sales and operations teams can dramatically improve your customer acquisition strategy. Ad Spend Is Getting Torched At Handoff When a potential customer clicks on your ad and calls or fills out a form, they're a hot lead. But if your team takes too long to respond, that lead will probably book with a competitor. That means the money you're spending on ads is getting wasted at the moment of handoff. Marketing gets the lead, but operations fumbles the conversion. If your customer relationship management platform, your dispatch and your sales flow aren't tightly integrated, you're not just inefficient; you're likely bleeding revenue. The Metrics That Matter Most Many agencies focus on vanity metrics like impressions and click-through rates, which alone don't drive revenue. However, these metrics can reveal issues with ad relevance or audience targeting, so you should analyze them alongside revenue-focused metrics like booking rate, close rate, average job value and your target return on ad spend. These are what drive your business. If you want to know what you should be paying per lead, you need to know what each booked job is worth and how well your team converts those bookings into sales. When you break it down, the real question is this: How much can you afford to pay for a lead while still hitting your ROAS target? That's the math that should drive every marketing decision. Why Team Alignment Changes Everything The most successful service businesses aren't winning because they have the biggest marketing budget. They're winning because their teams are aligned. Everyone is focused on the same goal: converting leads into revenue. The marketing team knows what kind of leads the sales team can close. The sales team knows how to communicate value. The service team knows what promises were made. And it all runs on shared data. Real-time dashboards give everyone visibility into performance. If booking rates drop, campaigns get paused instantly. If close rates are spiking, ad spend increases. When every team can see the same numbers, you stop guessing and start optimizing. Automation: The Difference Between Growth And Chaos It's hard to scale a home services business on manual processes. If your leads are routed manually or your systems don't talk to each other, you're setting yourself up to fail. The fastest-growing companies are using smart platforms that automate lead distribution, customer follow-up and service updates. Tools like ServiceTitan and Jobber give your team the ability to operate in real time, without the handoff friction. And here's the truth: Automation doesn't just save time. It saves deals. It ensures that no lead goes cold, no customer feels ignored and no revenue is lost due to human error. Misalignment Is Costing You Revenue Let's say you're getting 1,000 leads a month at a cost of $100 per lead. We've found that an average booking rate of 70% and a close rate of 60% are realistic for well-trained teams. With an average job value of $2,200, which is common for HVAC and plumbing businesses, you're generating around $924,000 in revenue each month. That sounds impressive until you realize what alignment can unlock. By optimizing your team's communication and improving systems, it's possible to increase your booking rate to 85% and close rate to 75%. These improvements have been reported to us by service providers using integrated CRM and automation platforms. In a nutshell, this is the cost of misalignment and the upside of fixing it. Train Your Team Before Scaling Your Spend Most companies make the mistake of scaling ads before fixing their back end. That's like pumping fuel into a car with a broken transmission. Before you spend a dollar more on acquisition, make sure your customer service representatives are trained to convert at a high rate. Sales scripts should be proven, practiced and consistent. Follow-up automation needs to be so reliable that no lead ever goes dark. Once your team and your systems are hitting consistent numbers, then you increase spend. That's how you scale with control. Five Tactical Moves To Realign Your Strategy You don't need another six-month strategic plan. You need five key changes, starting now. 1. Audit your full lead journey. Look at where leads fall off, and fix those points. 2. Unify your key performance indicators so that everyone across marketing, sales and service is working toward the same revenue target. 3. Connect your tech stack. Make sure your CRM, dispatch software and ad platforms are all integrated. 4. Align compensation with outcomes. If your customer service representatives and marketers are influencing revenue, tie their bonus structure to the right metrics. 5. Test alignment on one high-value service first. If it works there, roll it out across the board. These moves can help you achieve predictable growth. Build A Revenue Engine That Works If your leads aren't converting, the problem is probably alignment. And if you don't fix it now, you'll essentially be handing your leads to competitors. The home service businesses winning in 2025 are doing so because their systems are integrated, their teams are aligned and their decisions are backed by live data. You likely don't need more leads. You need your team operating as one cohesive unit. Your CRM and ad platform must sync in real time. You need follow-up automation running 24/7. And most importantly, you need a team where everyone, from customer service representatives to technicians, understands that they're in the revenue business. Forbes Agency Council is an invitation-only community for executives in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. Do I qualify?
Forbes
15-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Strong Operations: The Foundation Of Marketing For Home Service Providers
Michael J. Fox is a marketer and founder of Corberry. He has successfully helped home service contractors with their websites and marketing. getty A strong marketing campaign is useless without strong operations. Most home service contractors blame their agency or marketing team when the leads slow down. But the problem often isn't the marketing. It's what happens after the leads come in. Your cost per click, conversion rates and overall ad performance are directly tied to your internal operations. If your team can't convert leads into booked jobs and completed sales, it doesn't matter how good your campaign is. You'll lose money every time. High-performing marketing doesn't start with creative—it starts with operations. Let's take a look at some ways to build a strong foundation. Your maximum cost per click should never be random—it must be tied to real business performance. Here's the formula I use: Max CPC = (average job value x booking rate x close rate) ÷ target return on ad spend Here's a more detailed explanation: • Booking Rate: This is the percentage of leads that your customer service representatives turn into booked appointments. • Close Rate: This is the percentage of booked appointments that your technicians turn into paying jobs after providing an estimate. • Target ROAS: This is the revenue goal you set for each dollar spent on ads, based on your profit margins. If your team is hitting the right KPIs, you can afford to bid more and dominate the top ad spots. If customer service representatives are booking 85% of leads, technicians are closing 65% of estimates and your average job value is $2,500, you can confidently outbid competitors and dominate search. When your performance drops, bids should lower accordingly, not because you're wasting money, but because the lower conversion rates mean your leads are less valuable. Lower bids protect your margins when operational performance is weaker. This is the part many marketers miss: You can't optimize your ad budget without live insight into your internal performance. Traffic only matters if your operations team can turn it into paying customers. That's why you should never separate marketing from operations. Adjusting bids up or down based on real KPIs ensures you spend smarter, protect profitability and avoid wasting money when performance slips. Friction kills revenue. Missed calls, slow dispatch and manual follow-ups inflate your cost per sale. The best contractors don't just market better—they operate smarter. Tools like ServiceTitan, Housecall Pro and Jobber eliminate inefficiencies by automating scheduling, dispatch, reviews and follow-ups. The result? Faster service, fewer mistakes and higher customer satisfaction. When operations run smoothly, close rates climb, margins grow, and you can afford to outspend competitors on ads—without wasting a dime. Most home service contractors don't fail because their marketing is bad. They fail because their internal operations aren't built to handle the leads effectively. Before assuming your ads aren't working, ask yourself: • Is our call center booking at or above 85%? • Are our technicians closing at least 65% of estimates? • Is our average job ticket consistently above $2,500? If the answer to any of these is no, the gap lies in your operations, not your marketing. Marketing performance is directly influenced by your internal ability to handle leads. Before reevaluating your ad strategy, focus on improving call handling, sales training and pricing consistency. That's where most revenue gets lost. Agencies get fired when leads don't convert, but often, the real failure is in the field. If the internal team can't deliver on the demand, no amount of ad tweaking will change the outcome. If marketing, sales and operations are working in isolation, revenue suffers. I've seen this firsthand—leads get lost, follow-ups stall, and customers feel the gaps. To fix it, your systems need to talk. Leads should move straight from your ads into your customer relationship management platform, with everyone—marketers, customer service representatives and technicians—seeing the same pipeline. This isn't about collaboration for appearances. It's about fixing handoffs and holding every team accountable for the same outcomes. When customer service representatives share call insights with marketing and techs flag repeat issues back to operations, you can spot friction faster and tighten your conversion path. This level of alignment doesn't just improve communication; it directly reduces lead leakage, shortens sales cycles and maximizes your ad ROI. Scaling only works when your foundation is solid. That means clear standard operating procedures, streamlined systems and unified tools like ServiceTitan or Jobber. Most importantly, your team must be trained and ready before the surge hits. Otherwise, growth won't elevate your business—it will overwhelm it. When your team isn't ready, you get missed calls, delayed jobs and marketing that outpaces delivery. The trick isn't to grow and then fix; it's to standardize now so growth becomes smoother, not messier. When your process holds up under pressure, your brand reputation and ROI stay intact. Too many treat reviews like an afterthought. In reality, they're the final touchpoint for one customer and the first trust signal for the next. I don't believe in chasing reviews manually. Automated systems for requesting and managing reviews ensure that every satisfied customer gets a request without delay. That consistency lifts your local SEO, boosts click-throughs and lowers acquisition costs over time. When reviews are built into your workflow, you're not just protecting your reputation; you're fueling growth. Consistent positive reviews strengthen ad extensions like seller ratings by showing strong star ratings alongside your ads. This improved visibility boosts click-through rates, raises your quality score and lowers your CPC. You don't win by doing more; you win by doing it smarter. When you refine workflows, break down silos and automate where it makes sense, your business operates like a well-oiled machine. Audit inefficiencies, automate the small stuff, align your teams, and tie ad spending to real performance. The future of marketing isn't about better ads; it's about better businesses. The more operationally sound you are, the more aggressively and confidently you can market.
