THE SHORT ANSWER
Plan six to eight contact attempts across roughly fourteen days, mixing phone, text and email. Modelled cumulative contact reaches around half of a batch by the second attempt, three quarters by the fourth and the high eighties by the eighth. Because most businesses stop after one or two tries, attempts three to eight are where the cheapest incremental jobs sit. Stop cleanly at the end of the sequence and say so, rather than trailing off.
Persistence is unfashionable advice because it sounds like nagging. It is not nagging when the person actively asked you to contact them about a job they intend to have done. The homeowner who submitted a form on Tuesday evening and missed your call on Wednesday morning has not rejected you; they were in a meeting, or driving, or looking at an unknown number and deciding not to answer it.
The gap between what a lead is worth and what a business extracts from it is largely a persistence gap. It is also the cheapest gap to close, because attempts three through eight cost nothing but a rule and a reminder, while the alternative is buying more enquiries to replace the ones being abandoned half-worked.
The numbers, at a glance
Recommended attempt count: six to eight across roughly fourteen days, then a clean stop
Typical actual attempt count: modelled at 1.5 to 2.5 attempts per enquiry for small contracting businesses
Cumulative contact by attempt four: modelled at 70 to 80 percent of a batch reached at least once
Incremental value of attempts five to eight: modelled at 8 to 15 percent of total contacts, on effort most competitors never spend
Where the contacts actually accumulate
The curve rises fast and then crawls. Roughly half a batch answers on the first or second attempt. The fourth attempt takes you into the high seventies. Everything from the fifth onward adds single-digit percentages, which sounds negligible until you price it: those are jobs already paid for, requiring no new marketing spend, in a business where a signed kitchen or heat pump is worth thousands.
The economics are asymmetric in a way people find counterintuitive. Attempt one has the highest hit rate and the lowest marginal value, because you would have made it anyway. Attempt six has a low hit rate and very high marginal value, because almost nobody else in your market is making it.
Why two attempts became the informal standard
It feels like enough. Two unanswered calls reads emotionally as a refusal, even though it is statistically just two unanswered calls.
Nothing prompts a third. Without a task list carrying a date, the lead falls out of working memory by the following morning.
Fear of pestering. Contractors imagine irritating someone who has, in fact, forgotten they enquired at all.
Replacement is easier than recovery. Buying ten more enquiries feels like progress; ringing last week's non-answers feels like admin.
Only the second of these is a real constraint, and it is solved by a list with dates on it. The rest are stories, and they are expensive ones.
Varying the attempt count by trade and job value
Urgent work justifies compression rather than extension. A roof leak or a failed boiler is decided within days, so eight attempts spread over a fortnight is the wrong shape entirely; you want five attempts inside seventy-two hours and then a clean exit, because after that the homeowner has already hired somebody.
Planned high-value work runs the other way. A kitchen at fifteen thousand or a heat pump at twelve thousand routinely sits in consideration for six to twelve weeks, which means the sequence should end at day fourteen and then hand over to a genuinely low-frequency reminder, perhaps one message at week six and another at week twelve. The instinct to keep ringing weekly for two months is the one form of persistence that does read as pestering.
Stopping properly, which most people never do
Sequences should terminate on a decision rather than fade out. Send a short final message that says you are closing the file, gives a one-line summary of what you would have quoted for, and invites a reply if circumstances change. It is polite, it costs one message, and it reliably retrieves a small number of enquiries that had simply drifted.
The other reason to stop cleanly is measurement. A sequence with a defined end lets you count outcomes: contacted, quoted, lost, unreachable. A sequence that trails off leaves every unworked enquiry sitting in a permanent maybe, which makes your conversion rate unknowable and your lead-buying decisions guesswork.
Installing a persistence rule this week
Set the standard at six attempts over fourteen days and write it where the team can see it.
Give every enquiry a next-action date the moment it arrives, with no exceptions.
Alternate channels between attempts so the same unanswered call is not repeated five times.
Compress to five attempts in seventy-two hours for emergency trades, and say so in the rule.
Write one closing message and use it on every enquiry that reaches the end of the sequence.
How these figures were built
These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote.
How Flock Leads prices this
Working every enquiry six to eight times changes how many you need to buy, which is why packages are sized in fixed monthly volume rather than sold on demand.
Starter - 10 leads for EUR 750, which is EUR 75 per lead
Growth - 25 leads for EUR 1,750, which is EUR 70 per lead
Scale - 45 leads for EUR 2,925, which is EUR 65 per lead
Pro - 70 leads for EUR 4,340, which is EUR 62 per lead
Max - 90 leads for EUR 5,400, which is EUR 60 per lead
No retainer, no contract term, and no lead sent to a second business. Unused volume rolls over under the Flock Lead Promise.
Want leads like this in your pipeline?
Flock runs the campaigns, screens the enquiries and hands you only the ones that match your service area, job size and capacity. You pay per lead, not per month.
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Related answers
Frequently asked questions
Will six attempts annoy people?
Rarely, provided the channels vary and each message adds something. Complaints come from repetition, not frequency: five identical voicemails irritate, whereas a call, a text with two appointment slots, an email with a relevant example and another call read as a business doing its job.
What if they answer and say they are not ready?
That is not the end of the sequence, it is a date. Ask when the decision window opens, agree a specific month, and move them to a single reminder at that point. Leads parked properly convert at respectable rates because almost nobody else came back.
Does the rule change for exclusive leads?
The count stays the same but the value of finishing rises, because no competitor is working the same enquiry in parallel. When a lead is shared, late attempts often reach someone who already signed elsewhere; when it is exclusive, attempt six can still be the first proper conversation they have had.
How do I keep track without buying software?
A shared sheet with columns for name, job, source, attempt number and next-action date is sufficient up to roughly a hundred live enquiries. The discipline that matters is the date column, not the tool, and no tool supplies the discipline for you.
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