Stop Wasting 20 Minutes on Bad Leads
You run a Facebook ad. Someone fills out the form: name, email, phone. Your sales guy calls them. Twenty minutes later, he finds out they want a 10-foot fence, their budget is $500, and they need it done this weekend. Dead lead. But you just paid $35 for it and burned 20 minutes of your closer's time.
Qualifying leads before you ever talk to them is one of the highest-leverage things you can do for your business.
The Generic Lead Form Problem
Most contractors use the default Facebook lead form: name, email, phone number. Maybe a message box. That's it. You know nothing about the lead until someone calls them. And by then you've already invested time and energy.
The result: your sales team spends 60% of their time on leads that were never going to close. They get burned out making 50 calls to book 8 appointments. Morale drops. Close rates drop. You blame the ads, but the ads are fine -- your filtering is broken.
Build a Quiz That Does the Work For You
Replace your lead form with a 5-7 question quiz. Tools like Typeform, ScoreApp, or even Google Forms work fine. The questions should:
Qualify budget. "What's your approximate budget for this project?" with ranges. If someone selects "Under $500" for a service where your minimum is $2,000, you know immediately.
Qualify timeline. "When are you looking to get started?" Options: This month, 1-3 months, just browsing. "Just browsing" goes to a nurture sequence, not your sales team.
Qualify scope. "How large is your property?" or "What type of [service] do you need?" This tells your estimator what to prepare before the call.
Qualify authority. "Are you the homeowner?" Renters can't authorize exterior work. Property managers have different processes. Know this before you call.
Capture how they found you. This data is gold for knowing which marketing channels deliver real leads vs tire-kickers.
Score and Route Automatically
Assign points to each answer. Budget over $5K = 10 points. Timeline this month = 10 points. Homeowner = 5 points. Total score determines what happens next.
High score (25+): These leads get a direct calendar booking link. Let them schedule their own estimate. Your sales team sees their quiz answers before the appointment and walks in prepared.
Medium score (15-24): These go to a follow-up sequence. Text them within an hour, but don't prioritize them over high-scorers.
Low score (under 15): Automated email nurture. Maybe they'll be ready in 6 months. Don't waste phone time on them now.
What This Looks Like in Practice
A roofing company switched from basic lead forms to a 6-question quiz. Results after 90 days:
Before: 120 leads/month, 28% close rate, average 25 minutes per lead phone call. After: 80 leads/month through the quiz, 44% close rate, average 12 minutes per lead.
Fewer leads, but the ones that came through were real. Revenue actually went UP by 22% because the sales team spent all their time on qualified prospects instead of chasing ghosts.
The other 40 leads per month that would have come through? Most of them were the under-budget, just-browsing, renter types that never would have closed anyway. The quiz just filtered them out before they wasted anyone's time.
Bottom Line
Qualify before you call. A 5-minute quiz setup saves your team hundreds of hours per year and dramatically improves close rates on the leads that actually matter.