Owning a plumbing company is stressful. The constant pressure to keep your schedule full and crews busy increases the need for more leads and jobs booked, ASAP. It’s tempting when lead generation companies promise to fill your pipeline with a list of “qualified” leads at a reasonable price. After all, who doesn’t want a shortcut to finding new customers?
Why do companies buy leads?
Buying leads feels like the perfect solution for trying to grow your plumbing business. Unfortunately, paying for pre-sourced leads is not all it’s cracked up to be. Here’s why many plumbing contractors and other home service businesses fall into the lead buying trap:
- Quick and easy: Pay money, get your leads, and make calls
- Less complicated than marketing: Not dealing with ads or websites
- Provides immediate contracts: No waiting for marketing efforts to pay off
- Appears cost effective: Fixed price per lead looks good on paper
- Promises “qualified” prospects: Claims that leads are pre-screened
But here’s the truth: if it seems too good to be true, it probably is. While buying a lead list looks great on the surface, it can hurt your business more than it helps.
7 reasons you should stop buying lead lists
1. Competing against your neighbors
The lead list of “homeowners needing plumbing services” or “recent emergency plumbing requests” has likely been sold to many other local contractors in your area.
Now you are all actively fighting for a response from a customer who is overwhelmed with the number of phone calls and texts. If they do respond, you are in a bidding war with other plumbing companies for the same jobs. This could lead to lower average tickets or wasted labor on quotes that don’t convert to paid jobs.
2. These leads are ice cold
When a customer finds you through Google, Yelp, Angi or Thumbtack, it’s typically when they have an urgent service need. Unlike a purchased lead list that might be several months old by the time you receive it.
By the time you call that plumbing lead, they have already fixed the problem, hired someone else, or are fed up with being bombarded from cold calls. The last thing you need is your team wasting time calling dead end leads instead of serving actual customers and following up with real prospects.
3. Quality issues waste your resources
Leads that don’t meet the criteria to be served by your plumbing business are unqualified leads. This can be due to a variety of reasons like bad phone numbers, wrong addresses, people who moved months ago, or people looking for an entirely different service. When you’re running a busy plumbing company, calling dead leads is a distraction.
4. The real costs of lead lists adds up fast
If you pay $30-50 per lead but only cover 5-10% of them (which is common with purchased lead lists), you’re spending from $300 to $1,000 per job. If your average job size isn’t large enough, then you will lose money on these jobs. Even worse, your techs won’t have capacity for potential profitable jobs.
5. Missing out on emergency service opportunities
When your team is working through a list of cold leads, homeowners in your service area are actively searching online for immediate help with their plumbing needs. For plumbing contractors who handle emergency services, these are the valuable leads you want to call you. They are people who need your services right now, not someone who might have been interested in possible service three months ago.
6. No control over types of plumbing jobs
Companies selling leads lists often send any lead they can get within the industry, regardless of if they are a fit for your service offering. If you are a plumbing company that focuses entirely on water heater installation, and you receive leads for toilet replacement and sewer line trenching, then it’s probably not beneficial. Typically lead lists are not well qualified to understand the service needed.
7. No brand awareness benefit for your plumbing business
Every dollar spent on purchased lead lists is a dollar that is not invested in building your own brand. While your competitors are building trust through Google Local Service Ads, Yelp reviews, and SEO optimized websites, you are chasing cold contacts.
How to get leads without buying lead lists
Start building your own marketing system!
This might sound daunting, but it doesn’t have to be that hard. The extra effort to get started will pay off in the long run. Instead of buying low quality leads, invest in marketing channels that you control and manage.
Here are a few great ways to get started:
- Build a professional website that shows up when people need plumbing help
- Optimize for local SEO so your company appears in “plumbing near me” searches
- Maintain an active Google Business profile and start getting reviews
- Establish a presence and positive reputation across home service directories (Yelp, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor)
- Run digital campaigns and targeted ads that reach people actively looking for help
- Use social media to showcase your work and build trust with your customers
Focus on quality leads
It’s better to have a handful of leads from homeowners actively seeking plumbing services than hundreds of leads from contacts who may have been casually interested in plumbing work several months ago. When you own your marketing efforts, you have better control over the quality and type of leads coming to your business.
Track and measure to find out what works
Capture performance metrics to understand which marketing efforts are generating the most results for your business. Use this data to determine what channels to invest in and what channels to cut. This helps build your marketing strategy to get the most valuable leads for your plumbing business.
Need some help? Schedule a free marketing audit with VIIRL Marketing.
