Prefer reading? Here is the whole video.
You've probably got about 4,000 old leads sitting in your CRM. At $100 each, that's $400,000 of leads you've paid for. And nobody's calling them.
Then every January, you go out and buy brand new ones.
That's found money, sitting there wasted in your CRM. That has got to change.
In this post I'll show you how to turn those old leads into booked appointments every single month, without spending a dollar more on marketing. We call it the Forever Follow-Up. I'll also show you the math on what that list is really worth.
Who I am
I'm Temi from Lead Phoenix AI. Over the last few years, we've generated over 10,000 leads for our clients and over $3 million in remodeling projects. One of those companies did $1.8 million in signed work in nine months.
More ads, more leads
Let's start with the money. Say you're doing $6 million a year in revenue, and you spend 5% of that on marketing. That's about $300,000 a year.
What is that actually buying you? For most remodelers, it's buying front-end leads. Most of the time, what I call rented leads: lead sites, Google, the expensive clicks.
So when you have a slow month, what do you do? Buy more ads. Buy more leads. But the day you stop paying, those leads stop coming.
And what happens to the people who filled out your form but didn't buy last month? They go into the CRM, and they just sit there.
Every now and then, someone in the office pulls a list. Maybe they call 150 people and get through to about 40. Then they stop, because everyone has a real job to do.
Think about this. You paid to get that homeowner. You called her two or three times. Then you went out and bought a new one.
Remember, that lead cost you $100. She hasn't bought yet. But she hasn't hired anyone else either. So she's still worth close to that $100. Leave her sitting in your CRM, and you're leaving that money sitting there too.
Not dead. Not yet.
Most owners think that if a lead didn't buy, she said no. But what if she didn't say no? What if she's just not ready yet?
The thing is, nobody went back to ask again.
Charlie Gindele built Renewal by Andersen of Orange County to about $45 million. His team used to tag these people in the CRM as "demo, no sale." So he changed the name to "not yet a buyer." And they kept reaching out every single week.
And get this. With one homeowner, it was the 27th time they reached out that the appointment got booked. 27 times. They sold a $40,000 job off it. And as he put it: "In some cases, we paid for that lead two, three years ago."
Think about who's sitting in your list right now:
- The homeowner who was always going to do it in the spring. You have to show up when she's ready.
- The one who was meant to call you back 18 months ago, and then life happened. Kids, work, whatever.
- The one who went with someone cheaper, and now regrets it. The only way you get that job is if you're still in front of her when it goes wrong.
The Forever Follow-Up
So what do we do instead?
First, when you teach homeowners before they're shopping, they're a lot cheaper to reach. Watch my previous videos and you'll see what I mean. Our question-led ads bring in leads at between $11 and $18.
But that's only half of it. If these people don't buy this month, we don't lose them. They stay in the system, and we keep helping them month after month. That's the Forever Follow-Up.
The plan is simple. We stay top of mind and follow up until they either say stop or they die.
Here's how it works:
- It reaches everybody, every month. Not just the 150 people someone manages to call.
- It reaches out with value. Not "hey, are you ready yet?" It gives them something useful, maybe another asset they can use for their remodel.
- Replies turn into booked appointments. Your sales rep isn't just getting a name on a list. They see the appointment with the whole history attached.
- It never stops. A person stops. Your team stops when things get busy. The system is still doing the same thing in January, the January after that, and through the summer. Every month.
Every message has to be worth reading, even if they never buy from you. So you're not sending "just checking in." You send something useful:
- What a job like theirs costs now
- What has changed in the city, or which rules have changed
- What their neighbors are building
If it's not worth reading, people will tune out your follow-up, and you become a nuisance.
The math: what it brings back
Let's do the math. Say you've got 600 past customers and 4,000 old leads. That's pretty normal for a remodeler doing about $6 to $8 million.
If someone is calling them by hand, you get through to maybe 40 out of 150. When a system handles it, every single one hears from you and gets moved through the funnel. Now you're having 300 conversations instead of 40.
On numbers like that, you're looking at somewhere between 15 and 40 appointments a month, from people you've already paid for.
What it looks like in real life
That's the model. Here's what it looks like in real life.
For one of our clients, we made a mini course: seven short videos, all about a change in the city's zoning rules. We sent it out to his list. In the email, we told them they could binge watch it, Netflix style. One homeowner wrote back to say they'd binge watched it that morning, and they were so happy to get it.
That's what we call value-led follow-up. And it brought back leads that had been sitting on his list doing nothing for almost two years.
It's not just us. Bob Quillin had a window company, and he ran a campaign just to his past customers. On the podcast, he said that one campaign brings in $750,000 to a million dollars a month. He called it a gold mine. It doesn't cost a lot, less than 1% of marketing. Because what does it need? Seven emails, sent three, four, five times a year.
Same money, more profit
This isn't about cutting your marketing budget. Not at all. It's about making every dollar go further. You keep the same spend and get more signed work out of it. That turns into more profit at the end of the year.
And profit is what buyers pay for. If you ever want to sell your company or exit, it comes down to net profit. Bob Quillin had about 20% net profit when he sold to Leaf Home. They told him one of the reasons they bought the company was the profitability.
So think about it. A company with a lead engine and a list of people who already know it is worth so much more than one that has to buy every lead from scratch.
Where to start
The Forever Follow-Up is the third system in the playbook, and it shows you exactly what to send and when. And if you'd rather have us build it for your company, there's a link for that too.
If you want to set up your own Forever Follow-Up, grab the free $1.8 million remodeling playbook.
Get the free playbook
