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Lead quality is something that's absolutely crucial to pay attention to when you're advertising, and there are a lot of myths about it that I’m going to bust in this video. My name is Peter Lewis, I’m the owner here at Service Allies. Smash the subscribe button, hit the notification bell—we’re coming out with great new content every week, and I’m excited to dive into this with you today.
There are a lot of misconceptions about lead quality and what it actually means. Let me know if this sounds familiar. You start your remodeling business and realize, “Okay, I need leads. I need customers.” Then, out of nowhere, you get a call from someone—you don’t even know how they got your number. They say, “Hey, I’m with [company]. Do you need leads?” You say yes.
So they tell you, “Great, we’ll get you all these leads and send them to you.” You sign up, and here’s what happens: you call those leads, a lot of them don’t pick up the phone, and when they do, they either aren’t interested, can’t afford you, or are hard to book. Before you know it, you’ve spent thousands of dollars without making money. So you think, “Alright, those were bad quality leads.” And from then on, every time you do marketing, you judge lead quality by how easy it is to close.
That’s the problem. In this video, I’m going to help you understand what lead quality really is, what to look for in a marketing firm, and how to convert the maximum number of leads—even turning so-called “low quality leads” into real profit.
There are two things to consider when it comes to lead quality. First is urgency and trust. Second is purchasing power. I group urgency and trust together because they determine how much someone actually wants to buy from you when they first see your ad. Each lead sits somewhere on this spectrum.
If someone has a really urgent need or already trusts your company, they’ll land high on the urgency and trust side. Those are the easy closes—especially if they also have money. On the other hand, people who see your ad on Facebook or YouTube might not be urgent yet. They just click to check you out. They don’t know you, don’t fully trust you, and maybe their need isn’t immediate. Those leads are much harder to close right away. They’ll ask a lot of questions, they’ll hesitate, and if you don’t control the conversation, you’ll lose them.
But if someone has seen your ad repeatedly for months, even for a luxury item, they’ll eventually build that trust and urgency. When they finally reach out, they’re much easier to close. That’s urgency and trust—how much someone wants to buy apart from their financial ability.
Now let’s talk about purchasing power. This is about whether someone can actually afford your services. If someone has $50,000 in cash or strong credit, they can buy. But if someone makes $50K a year, has bad credit, and lives in a small house, they don’t have the financial ability to afford a big remodel—even if they want it.
Here’s where people make mistakes. When they struggle to reach or close leads, they assume it’s a purchasing power issue: “Oh, these people were just tire kickers. They were bad leads.” But that’s not always true. Leads from social media will always be spread across the spectrum: some with high urgency, some with low urgency, some with strong purchasing power, some with weak.
Let me share a story. At my last agency, SevenX Direct, we worked with HVAC contractors. In Dallas–Fort Worth, we had a few companies sign on, but after two or three months, they said, “All the leads suck. We can’t close anyone.” At the same time, another company—One Hour—signed up in the same market, in the off-season. Within their first month, they closed $100,000 in sales from the exact same type of leads.
Why? Because the first companies could only close leads in the top-right corner of the spectrum—people with both urgency and money already lined up. They were only used to getting inbound Google leads: customers who had already read reviews, decided to buy, and called directly. That’s a small slice of the market.
One Hour, on the other hand, had a refined sales process. They called leads back immediately, controlled the conversation, qualified prospects properly, and built urgency and trust during the call. They also had strong financing options with multiple vendors, so they could serve people at lower purchasing power levels too. That allowed them to sell to a much larger portion of the market.
The takeaway? It wasn’t that the leads were better. It was that their ability to close and serve those leads was better.
Here’s another example. We once ran a contest giving away a free AC unit. Leads cost about a dollar each, and we generated around a thousand. Half were below the purchasing power line, but the other half were above. None of them had urgency or trust yet—they just wanted a chance at winning something. Still, because there were so many leads, and because the company had a solid sales process, they closed a ton of those leads profitably.
So when you think about “bad quality leads,” remember: true bad quality means the person simply cannot buy from you financially. But just because someone doesn’t pick up the phone or seems uninterested at first doesn’t mean they’re bad quality—it means their urgency and trust aren’t built yet. If you can optimize your speed to call, your call flow, your sales process, and your financing, you’ll unlock far more value from the leads you’re already getting.
So I hope this was helpful, guys. We’re dropping one new video every week. Smash that subscribe button, hit the notification bell, and I’ll see you in the next video.