The job you didn't get asked to quote
One of our clients, an electrician, got a call a while back from a bloke who wanted a three phase EV charger put in. Decent job, the kind you want. Somewhere in the conversation the customer explained why he'd rung, and it's the most useful sentence anybody has said to me about this work.
"You had a very impressive website, so I thought geez, this bloke must be switched on."
He wasn't admiring the design. He'd recently retired as a chief engineer at a state power authority, so he knew a great deal more about electricity than he did about electricians. He had no way to judge one. He couldn't inspect the work, he couldn't check the reasoning, and he wasn't about to let somebody he wasn't sure about near his switchboard. So he judged the only evidence he could actually get at.
That's the whole thing, and once you see it you can't unsee it.
You are being assessed on the only evidence available
Here's the part that took me too long to work out. Everybody in this industry, me included, talks about websites as though the job is to get more people to ring you. More traffic, more leads, more enquiries, more of everything.
But the customer isn't deciding whether to ring somebody. They're deciding which somebody, and they're doing it with almost no information. They can't tell good work from bad work in your trade. They genuinely can't. That's why they're hiring you.
So they use what's in front of them. How you answer the phone. Whether your van looks after itself. What your reviews say, and whether there are enough of them to mean anything, which is its own piece of work. How to get more Google reviews And your website, which is usually the first thing and quite often the only thing they look at before they decide who to call.
None of that is evidence of your work. All of it is evidence about you. And in the absence of the first kind, people will use the second kind, every single time, without ever thinking of it as a decision.
The number nobody can show you
Now the bit that makes this hard to argue, and it's the reason it stays invisible.
You can measure the jobs you quoted and lost. You get a number, you can be annoyed about it, you can work out your conversion rate and try to improve it. That's a real number and it's on a report somewhere.
You cannot measure the job you were never asked to quote. There's no notification. Nobody rings to tell you they went with somebody else before you'd heard of them. The bigger job, the one with a bit of complexity in it, the one where the customer was nervous and wanted somebody who looked like they had it handled, just quietly went elsewhere, and the first you know about it is never.
So the whole effect sits in a place your reporting can't reach. Which means, in practice, everyone optimises the half they can see. More leads. Cheaper leads. A better conversion rate on the quotes you did send. And the half you can't see keeps doing what it's doing.
I've watched a business pay three different companies at the same time, all of them briefed on lead volume, all of them delivering exactly that, and the owner's honest summary was that the leads were all price shoppers. The brief was wrong, not the companies. They were each asked for a number and they each produced it. That's the same mechanism behind every volume promise in this market, and it has its own article. A lead-count guarantee is a different product, not a worse one
Why I can't put a number on it
This is usually where an article like this puts a big result on the table. I'm not going to, and the reason is the section you just read.
When the right customer picks you, what you see is an enquiry, the same as any other. You don't see the other businesses they looked at and ruled out first, or why. And when it goes the other way you see nothing at all.
So any figure I gave you would be the countable half dressed up as the whole thing, which is the mistake this piece is about. One big enquiry doesn't prove much either. It tells you somebody asked. It doesn't tell you why they picked you, or whether they'll go ahead.
What you can watch is who's asking. If the enquiries getting through are bigger jobs from people who've clearly read the site before they rang, that's this working. If every one of them opens with the price, the site is still telling strangers the decision is about the price, however many of them there are.
None of that comes from getting more enquiries. It comes from being the one who gets asked.
So what do you actually do about it
Not "make the website nicer". That's the advice everyone gives and it's useless, because nice is not a thing you can act on.
Write down what separates a good job from a bad one in your trade. Six things. The preparation people skip. The part that fails in three years if it's done the quick way. The approval that either was or wasn't obtained. The bit that happens underneath, before the visible part goes on, that nobody will ever see and nobody can check afterwards.
Then put them on the website in plain language. Not as a list of features, as the reasoning. Why the number is the number.
Here's the test, and it's the only one that matters. Could a stranger take what you've written and turn it into a question to ask your competitor? "Committed to excellence" can't be. "We auger the footings rather than pouring a pad, and here's what happens in reactive clay if you don't" absolutely can be.
If it can become a question, it's a differentiator. If it can't, it's an adjective, and adjectives are free, which is why nobody believes them.
The second thing: stop leading with a price. I've written about that separately, because it's the most common version of this mistake and it deserves its own argument. You might be advertising for price shoppers If the first thing a stranger meets is a number, you've told them the decision is about the number, and they'll go and get two more numbers. That's not them being cheap. That's them doing the only comparison you gave them the means to do.
The uncomfortable part
This argument costs me money to make, so let me be straight about why I'm making it anyway.
If you take it seriously, you will probably get fewer enquiries. People who were only ever going to ask the price will read a page about drainage and engineering and go somewhere simpler. That's the mechanism working, not failing, but it does not feel like it for the first month, and if you're judging the site on the count you'll conclude it's broken.
I'd rather tell you that now than have you find it out and think I sold you something that didn't work.
And it doesn't fix everything. Some work genuinely is priced work, and no amount of good writing turns a fifteen minute job into a considered purchase. If the good enquiries do arrive and then sit unanswered until the evening, this isn't your problem and a website won't touch it. That's the layer behind the site, and it's most of what The Foundational Marketing Blueprint deals with.
If you'd rather see this across a lot of businesses than one, we checked thirty one of them by hand. What we found auditing 31 Australian trade businesses
But if you've been told your leads are the problem, it's worth asking a different question first. Not how many arrived. Which ones. And which ones never did.
