In part 2 of this series, I told you about building the other half of the picture for that $5 million dealer on the East Coast. Following every lead from spend all the way to the sale, not stopping where the vendor’s dashboard stopped. Once he had that picture, one channel jumped off the page: Angi.
Angi was eating the largest single slice of his marketing spend, month after month. The reports he was getting from Angi showed that it was working. Steady lead volume—and lots of revenue hitting his bank account every month. The kind of channel a busy floor dealer just leaves running in the background. After all, it’s working, right?
Here’s what most dealers never stop to think about with Angi: When a homeowner fills out a request, that request doesn’t come only to you. Angi sells that same lead to several other contractors at the same time, often three or four of them.
Here’s what the numbers showed: The close rate on Angi leads sat below 30%. Not 30% of walk-ins or phone calls, but 30% of quotes. Margins were the thinnest of any channel he ran. Average ticket size trailed every other source.
His salespeople were stuck on a “cheap price” treadmill of doom. Burning hours every week driving out, running full presentations and walking away with nothing but gas money spent and an afternoon gone, on jobs that were never going to close at a fair price to begin with. Every one of those hours was an hour not spent with a homeowner who was ready to buy on value instead of price.
Angi wasn’t a broken channel, exactly. It was the biggest source of his revenue. But it was very expensive revenue.
Why we didn’t just rip it out
If a wheel is broken and it isn’t turning at all, you replace it fast. No debate needed. But if the wheel is turning, even turning badly, walking away from it takes real thought first. Angi was still generating real revenue every month. If we had cut that entire spend the day we saw the numbers, with nothing lined up to replace it, we would have instantly created a hole in his pipeline.
So we did it responsibly, with full KPI attribution the whole way. Each month we pulled a fixed, defined amount of budget out of Angi—never more than that—and moved it into channels we could test and measure with that same rigor. Google’s Map Pack. Google’s search autocomplete. Targeted Google Ads. Meta. Small, deliberate moves, watched closely every week against the same KPI scorecard from Part 2, not one dramatic cut that leaves you praying the phone still rings.
That’s the discipline most dealers skip. They either leave a bleeding channel running because they’re afraid to touch the revenue, or they panic and cut it all at once and starve their own pipeline. Titration is neither. It’s leading the business instead of just reacting to it.
The new channels started to improve. But a huge part of the shift wasn’t in the channel mix at all. It was in how his own salespeople were taught to handle walk-ins, phone calls and in-home appointments. (I’ll show you that in the next installment.)
Marketing leadership. Jim Augustus Armstrong is the founder of Armstrong Marketing Systems, providing fractional CMO leadership to flooring and home service companies. He takes ownership of his clients’ marketing — building the strategy, installing the systems and managing the KPIs that drive predictable, profitable growth. Reach him at connect@ armstrongmarketingsystems.com or visit ArmstrongMarketingSystems.com.
