If anyone in the company can, pick up the call that rings while you’re on a roof. When nobody can, a text should go back inside a minute and a person should call back inside the hour, because a homeowner who reaches a roofer may stop calling around. “If you are first called, and you answer, they may not call a 2nd or 3rd person to check out the leak,” a roofing salesperson wrote on r/RoofingSales in January 2026.
The best numbers on speed come from a 2011 Harvard Business Review study of 1.25 million leads at 42 companies. Firms that tried to reach a lead within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to get a real conversation with a decision maker as firms that tried an hour later, and more than 60 times as likely as firms that waited a day or more. Those were web-form leads in industries like finance and software, and the study never counted signed jobs. One of its authors also ran a company selling lead-response software.
I don’t have a number for how many follow-ups it takes to sign a roof. Whatever your cadence, make sure a person sees every reply. In an email campaign we ran for a DFW roofing client, the one inspection request sat unanswered for at least a day because our automated follow-up made the thread look handled.
Only 37% of companies in a 2011 test answered a web lead within the hour
For the same HBR article, its authors sent a web inquiry to 2,241 US companies. Within an hour 37% had responded, another 16% answered within a day, 24% took longer and 23% never responded, and those that answered within 30 days took 42 hours on average.
A sales rep on r/RoofingSales with a 34% close rate wrote in 2024 that many customers say they contacted ten or more roofers to get three who would call back or come out for an estimate. A Thumbtack moderator told pros in 2022 that customers who see a response within five minutes are 50% more likely to reply, in a forum post that gives no baseline.
An agency owner described a contractor on a deal of about $100 a lead who took three or four days to call the leads back, then called them bad. Before you call a lead source junk, check how fast you called it back (Why Your Roofing Leads Are Junk, and What to Check First).
The “62% of calls go unanswered” line comes from 85 businesses in 2016
411 Locals, a local-SEO agency, tracked calls to 85 businesses in 58 industries for 30 days and published the result in January 2016: 37.8% of calls were answered, and the rest went to voicemail or got no response. The study broke out no trades, and roundups often redate it to 2023 or 2024.
Invoca, which sells AI agents, looked at more than 70 million calls for a July 2026 report and found that 52% of callers to home services businesses speak with a person, rising to 73% on calls longer than 30 seconds. So even a caller who holds on for half a minute misses a person about one time in four. Invoca’s customers skew large, and the report doesn’t break out roofing.
No source I’ve read gives a missed-call rate for roofers, and we haven’t measured one across our clients. Two other figures you’ll hear, that 78% of customers buy from the first company to respond and that 85% of unanswered callers never call back, have no published study behind them that I could find, so ask for the source if a salesman quotes either.
Put a person on the phone before you pay for an AI receptionist
An owner with two or three salespeople wrote on r/RoofingSales in 2024 that nobody else answers the phones, so calls get missed during appointments. Another owner replied that a three-day-a-week admin is well worth what she’s paid, and a commenter suggested a VoIP number that rings every salesperson at once.
In a 2026 thread, an owner who sends missed calls to a Google Chat group, where the project managers claim and return them, says about a quarter turn into leads. Another, whose company keeps a full-time receptionist, warned that most answering services don’t work past 5 p.m. on weekdays or on weekends.
The owner of a roofing company founded in 1981 wrote of an AI answering service, “my customers do not like the robotic nature and most hang up halfway through the call.” We don’t set up AI receptionists for clients. In one live test, an AI receptionist failed on the first ring, and forwarding a call-tracking number into an AI number can drop calls.
When nobody can pick up, a text should go back inside a minute
What we set up for clients fires inside the first minute after a call or form comes in. A missed call gets a text back and a website form gets an email reply, with an instant alert to the owner for each. After hours the caller reaches voicemail, then gets a text asking for photos and saying when you’ll call back, and a reply with an emergency keyword rings the owner’s phone. Once that minute is up, we don’t message the lead again, so the callback is yours.
At a remodeling client of ours, I found in September that missed-call text-back was switched off. The auto-reply only answered texts people sent in, so two calls nobody picked up on September 1 got no message at all. To test yours, call your business line from a cell phone after hours and hang up without leaving a message. A text should arrive within a minute.
In the US, a text sent from a local business number through software also needs A2P 10DLC registration, which the carriers require before they’ll reliably deliver it. Twilio puts the review at 10 to 15 days, so register before the next storm.
Google says missed calls may hurt your Local Services Ads ranking
Google ranks Local Services Ads partly on how likely you are to produce a lead, which depends on responsiveness among other things, and on profile quality, which includes “average response time.” It says “Missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness,” without giving a threshold. The ad also shows homeowners how fast you usually answer messages, from “a few minutes” to “one day.”
Google charges for an answered call and for a voicemail. Since October 1, 2026, it also charges for a call you miss during your business hours once the caller has stayed on the line for more than 20 seconds, whether or not you call back. Business hours here are the ones on your Google Business Profile, and the missed call also has to come inside your ad schedule. Voicemail or a recorded greeting counts as connected, so a call that reaches either is charged after 20 seconds even if the caller leaves no message. A phone menu costs nothing unless the caller presses a key, and the 20 seconds start from that first press. So schedule the ads for the hours someone can pick up.
Once a missed call is charged, calling back costs nothing more, because Google doesn’t charge again for calls or messages with the same number or email within 15 days. A missed call nobody returns is a lead you’ve paid for and lost. For a DFW roofing client in September 2026, Google set a floor of $327 a week, with a monthly maximum of $1,421, and projected three leads a week at that budget, about $109 each.
Google began moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads in August 2026, as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, and roofing was among the first categories. The charging rules above are from Google’s help page as of October 17, 2026 (Google Local Services Ads for Roofers: Budget, Cost per Lead and Disputes).
Our one inspection request came on a follow-up, then sat a day or more unanswered
In the hail-report email campaign we ran for a DFW roofing client, 342 listing agents had our email by late September and 12 wrote back. The one agent who asked for an inspection did it three minutes after one of our 84 follow-ups went out. That follow-up sat in the same thread, sent from the client’s office address, and its time stamp made it look as if it came after the reply, so the thread looked answered and nobody wrote back for at least a day. The roofer’s crew found no damage, so the campaign has produced one inspection and no job. Cold email to realtors also says little about homeowners who call in.
A thread can’t tell you whether a person answered, so every reply to an automated message needs an alert that reaches a person. On how long to keep at it, a commenter on r/RoofingSales follows up twice and stops, while a poster on r/Roofing keeps trying for at least a month before marking a lead dead. For the message itself, an owner on r/RoofingSales suggests checking whether the homeowner had questions after comparing the other bids. Why Homeowners Ghost After the Roof Inspection, and How to Keep the Job covers the homeowner who goes quiet after the estimate.
After three months, an old inquiry no longer clears the Do Not Call list
When we started with one roofing client, the owner estimated that about a thousand leads in their system had gone no further than an inspection, with no text follow-up, and said many of their customers sign months later. A list like that is worth working, and in the US these rules come first:
- Do Not Call. No sales call may go to a number on the national registry, or to a home before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. local time. An established business relationship exempts you from the registry for 18 months after a purchase and only three months after an inquiry, so a homeowner on the registry who asked for an inspection last spring is past it.
- Autodialers and AI voices. Calls to a cell phone from an autodialer or in a prerecorded or artificial voice need the person’s prior consent, written if you’re selling, and since February 2024 the FCC has counted AI-generated voices as artificial.
- Opt-outs. A reply of “stop,” “quit,” “end,” “revoke,” “opt out,” “cancel” or “unsubscribe” revokes consent, and you have at most ten business days to honor it.
- Texas. Since September 1, 2025, Texas has counted a text as a telephone solicitation, though its Secretary of State says a business texting people with their prior consent doesn’t need to register.
I’m not a lawyer, and your state may have rules of its own, so have one read the list and the message before the first text goes out.
Count last week’s missed calls before you buy anything
Google stopped keeping call history in Business Profiles on July 31, 2024, and the profile’s Calls figure only counts taps on the call button, so count from your carrier’s call log or a call-tracking number. In Google Ads, the call details report marks each call to a Google forwarding number missed or received.
One agency told a client it had sent 75 leads in a month and the client had answered 3 of the calls. Before you pay for another lead, count last week’s calls that nobody picked up and nobody returned within the hour, then give one person the job of returning every missed call and reading every reply to an automated message.
Calls from your Google profile only come from the searches it shows up in. To see where it shows up, run the free Google Maps heatmap: pick your Google profile and a search, and in a few minutes you’ll see your rank at 49 points around your office.