The three questions that decide whether a Mid-City lot can take a pool at all
Qualify on access, water and ownership before anyone talks about shapes or budget.
First, how does equipment reach the backyard. Gate width, side yard clearance, rear alley, overhead lines, whether a fence or a section of deck has to come out. On a narrow lot behind a raised house, access decides feasibility and price before design does.
Second, what does the yard do with water. Where it drains, whether it holds after rain, whether there has been movement in existing decking or slab. You are not diagnosing anything on a phone call, you are deciding whether the site walk is worth booking and what to bring.
Third, who signs. Pool projects are household decisions almost without exception, and a proposal presented to one person is a proposal that goes to a second conversation you are not in the room for.
Put those three in the intake script and the form. An inquiry that answers them is worth several that do not, and your close rate on booked walks will move before you have touched the website.
End the first call with a date and three photos of the side yard
An inquiry that ends without a calendar entry is not a lead, it is a note.
The goal of the first conversation is a scheduled site walk, not a quote. Quoting a pool over the phone in a market where access and ground conditions swing the price is a way to be wrong out loud.
Ask for photos before you hang up, while the person is still standing outside. Side yard, gate, rear of the house, the existing pool if there is one. Text them a number to send to and they usually do it within the minute.
Photos let you prepare the walk properly and occasionally let you decline politely without spending half a day driving. Both outcomes are worth the ten seconds it takes to ask.
Send a confirmation immediately with the date, who is coming and what happens on the visit. Then send a reminder the day before. No shows on unconfirmed site walks are the most preventable loss in the whole pipeline.
A Northshore walk booked on an Uptown day gets rescheduled twice
Routing site visits by parish protects the calendar more effectively than any scheduling software.
Set days. Jefferson Parish on certain days, Orleans on others, St. Tammany on a day when the drive across the lake is worth making because there is more than one stop.
Offer the caller the next available slot for their area rather than the next available slot overall. It sounds like less flexibility and it produces more completed visits, because the appointment you offer is one you will genuinely keep.
When a Covington or Slidell inquiry lands on the wrong day, the honest answer is a date later that week, not a promise you will rearrange around. Rescheduled walks lose deals more often than a slightly later first visit does.
Track completed walks against booked walks by parish. If one parish shows a persistent gap, the problem is routing, not motivation.
Historic district review runs on its own clock, so follow up on theirs
Proposals in protected blocks do not go cold, they go quiet, and most follow up sequences give up first.
On a visible exterior in certain neighborhoods, a project can sit while a submittal works its way through. Requirements and timing vary and are worth confirming with the relevant commission or the city, but the practical effect is the same: your proposal waits.
Most systems mark that customer dead somewhere around thirty days. The owner has not gone anywhere. They are waiting, and whoever checks in during the wait tends to still be there at the end of it.
Build a slower sequence for those jobs. A light check in every few weeks, useful information rather than pressure, and a note in the record of what is being waited on and roughly when to ask again.
Do the same for any job waiting on a survey, a drainage plan or a lender. Naming the blocker in the record is what turns follow up from nagging into helpfulness.
Put the dewatering conversation in the sales process, not in week two
Every expectation you set before the deposit is one you do not have to defend after it.
Water is a normal part of building here, and owners know enough to worry about it without knowing enough to be reassured. Handle it during the sale, in plain language, with photographs of your own crew doing the work.
Explain in general terms what your process involves, what it can add to a schedule, and what circumstances tend to change it. Do not promise an outcome for a specific yard and do not offer opinions about a structure, which belongs to a licensed engineer.
Cancellations and payment disputes cluster around surprises. A homeowner who was told about a possible delay in the first meeting reads the same delay later as competence. One who was not reads it as a problem.
Louisiana operates under a civil law system unlike any other state, so contract terms, cancellation language and deposit handling should be reviewed by a Louisiana attorney rather than adapted from a national template found online.
When the math will never reach significance, change the biggest thing
One builder in one metro does not generate enough inquiries for a valid split test, so stop pretending otherwise and change what actually moves.
Button colors and headline variants need volume you do not have. Running them anyway produces confident conclusions drawn from noise, which is worse than running nothing.
Make one substantial change at a time and read it over a full season. Replace the intake script. Add the photo request. Reroute the calls that arrive while crews are in the ground. Rebuild the follow up sequence for review delays. Each of those is large enough to see without a statistics package.
Instrument the path so you can see it. Calls answered against calls received, walks booked against walks completed, design agreements against walks, digs scheduled against agreements. Four ratios, tracked by parish.
Then add the number nobody tracks: the reason each lost job was lost, written in your own words at the time. A quarter of those notes will tell you more about where your money goes than any heat map ever will.
Questions we actually get
- How much lift can we expect from conversion work?
- No honest answer exists before we have looked at your call handling, intake and follow up. What can be said is where the gains usually sit in this trade: answered calls, completed site walks and proposals that get a second conversation. We will show you the current ratios first, then agree on which one to work on. Nobody can promise a percentage.
- We already answer every call. Is there still something here?
- Usually the next gap is the site walk. Booked walks that never happen, walks that happen without the information needed to quote well, and proposals with no scheduled second conversation. Those three account for a great deal of lost revenue at firms with genuinely good phone habits.
- Should we use a chatbot or a call answering service?
- An answering service that can book a real site walk in your calendar and ask your three qualifying questions is usually worth it, particularly when crews are in the ground all morning. A generic chatbot that collects a name and an email tends to add a step rather than remove one. The test is whether the tool produces a confirmed appointment.
- What should we track that we probably are not?
- Completed site walks by parish, the reason each lost job was lost in your own words, and the time between the first call and the site walk. Most builders track leads and revenue and nothing in between, which is exactly where the money is going.
- Can you help with the proposal itself?
- With how it is presented, delivered and followed up, yes. With the terms inside it, no. Contract language, cancellation provisions and deposit handling should be drafted or reviewed by a Louisiana attorney, since a national contract template is a genuinely poor fit for this state.
