Feature · Lead Scoring (Construction)

Lead scoring that reflects how construction jobs really close.

Construction contractors do not lose jobs on the sales floor; they lose them to tire-kickers, bid-shoppers, and projects that never had a budget. A scoring model built for the trade filters those out at intake rather than at the handshake.

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Why generic scoring fails trades

The signals that predict a residential kitchen remodel are not the signals that predict a SaaS deal.

Most CRM lead scoring templates are built on B2B SaaS assumptions: company size, title, buying committee, product usage. Construction leads are different. A homeowner lead for a kitchen remodel has a budget that either exists or does not, a property that either qualifies or does not, and a timeline that is either real or aspirational. A commercial GC bid has an owner, a general contractor relationship, and an insurance posture. The scoring model has to reflect those shapes, not the SaaS defaults.

Property-level fit

The job site is the first qualifier.

A roofing lead that lives in a different county than the service area is not a lead. A plumbing lead on a condo without HOA approval is not a lead. The first scoring layer is a property-level fit check: service area, property type, permitting rules, access.

Budget acknowledged

A number has been said out loud.

In construction, buyers who flinch at a ballpark figure in the first conversation almost never close at that price. Buyers who confirm a range or reveal a competing bid number are serious. The budget signal is heavier in trades than in most B2B categories.

Timeline specificity

A date or an event, not a season.

A homeowner anchoring to a date (before our daughter graduates in June) is more real than one naming a season (sometime this summer). A commercial lead anchoring to a tenant move-in on October 15 is more real than naming a quarter. A anchor correlates with budget authority.

Decision authority

Is the person we are talking to the one who signs?

A homeowner lead where only one spouse engages scores lower than one where both are in the thread. A commercial lead with the property manager but not the owner scores lower than one with both. Authority on the signing side is a leading indicator of close.

Source quality

Where the lead came from matters.

Referrals from past customers close at two to three times the rate of leads from aggregators (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack). Direct website inquiries from a Google My Business click close better than paid-search clicks. The source channel is a reliable prior.

Permit posture

Has the homeowner or GC thought about it?

A kitchen remodel lead that already knows the city permitting process is further along than one who thinks the contractor handles everything invisibly. A commercial lead with an open permit application is closer than one still at concept.

A worked scoring model

Point values that reflect residential contracting reality.

Below is a practical point-based scoring model a residential contractor can turn on in a weekend. The point values are tuned against the pattern we have seen in production tenants running kitchen, bath, roofing, and HVAC businesses. Adjust the numbers to your market and your margin before shipping.

In service area

Thirty points, hard gate.

Lead address inside the defined service area: thirty points. Outside: zero points and the lead gets tagged for a courtesy reply with a referral to a partner contractor. The service area check is the hard gate; everything else scores on top.

Budget mentioned

Twenty points for a number in writing.

If the intake form or the first email mentions a budget number or range, twenty points. If the number is at or above the minimum profitable job size for your business, another ten points. If the number is below the floor, zero points and the lead gets a too-small tag.

Timeline anchor

Fifteen points for a date, five for a season.

A date (event-anchored): fifteen points. A month: ten points. A season like summer: five points. No timeline: zero points and the lead gets a soft-timing tag. Soft-timing leads convert at under ten percent for most residential trades.

Property type match

Ten points for the shape of job you want.

Single-family detached if that is your sweet spot: ten points. Condo or townhouse: five points (HOA friction). Rental property owned by a landlord shopping on price: zero points. The property shape sets expectations for every subsequent conversation.

Both decision makers present

Fifteen points when the signers both engage.

For residential: both spouses responded or attended the intake call. For commercial: both the property owner and the GC are copied on the thread. Fifteen points when both are present; zero points when only one engages. A one-signer lead has a thirty to forty percent higher stall rate.

Source channel

Points scaled to historical close rate.

Past-customer referral: twenty points. Direct website inquiry: fifteen. Google My Business: ten. Paid search: five. Aggregator (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack): three. Set the values from your actual close rates per source in the last twelve months.

Shopping behavior

Minus ten for explicit bid shopping.

A lead that opens by announcing they are collecting three bids and picking the cheapest scores minus ten points. The language signals a buyer whose decision will be price-driven rather than fit-driven. Honor the signal; your margin will thank you.

Response latency

Minus five if they go dark for a week.

A lead that stops responding for seven days after the first conversation loses five points. Two weeks: minus ten. The latency growth is the single most common leading indicator of a project that will not happen.

Commercial GC-specific signals

What changes when the buyer is a general contractor.

Commercial lead scoring runs on a different signal set than residential. The buyer is sophisticated, the project is larger, and the qualification burden sits on different criteria. Below are the signals that matter for a sub bidding on commercial work.

GC relationship

Have you worked with this GC before?

An invite from a GC you have delivered three jobs on time with is a different lead than a cold invite from a GC you have never worked with. Prior relationship compresses the trust-build and accelerates award. Score prior relationships heavily; cold invites get the standard screen.

Project funding status

Has the owner closed the construction loan?

A project with closed financing is closer than one still in the loan approval process. GCs will often tell you if asked directly. A project without closed funding carries a slip risk; the bid still goes out but the forecast weight stays low.

Insurance posture

Do your limits match the project requirements?

Commercial projects carry insurance limit requirements (general liability, excess, workers comp). If your current limits do not meet the requirement, the lead scores zero until the policy is upgraded. The pre-qualification is a hard gate.

Bonding capacity

The project value against your remaining bonding.

A project that would use eighty percent of your remaining bonding capacity is a risky lead. Score down accordingly. A project that uses twenty percent of capacity is comfortable. The bonding math is a quiet qualifier that most CRM scoring systems miss entirely.

Schedule overlap

Does the schedule fit the crew calendar?

A project with a mobilization date that overlaps your biggest existing job is a decline, not a bid. Score the schedule check against the current project calendar; conflicting leads get a notification to the ops lead and a polite decline draft.

Bid list size

How many subs are on the invite?

A three-sub invite is a different bid than a twelve-sub invite. GCs who narrow the bid list treat the sub as a partner; GCs who shotgun-invite twelve subs are shopping price. The invite shape sets the bid strategy; score accordingly.

How Strkr implements it

Native lead scoring on the CRM with trade-aware fields.

Strkr ships lead scoring natively with custom fields the trades need: service area, budget acknowledged, timeline anchor, property type, decision authority, source channel. The scoring model runs in Flows; the AI step reads the thread and surfaces a second opinion.

Trade-aware fields

The fields a contractor needs, in the lead schema.

Strkr ships a residential-contractor custom-field pack: service area ZIP, property type, project type (kitchen, bath, roofing, HVAC, electrical, plumbing), budget range, timeline anchor type and date, decision maker count, source channel. Add vertical fields through the custom-field admin without engineering.

Flow-driven scoring

Point values live in a visual rule.

The scoring rule runs as a Flow with trigger on lead-created or lead-updated. The visual canvas shows each criterion, each point value, and the running total. The scoring breakpoints (hot, warm, cold) are configurable in the Flow condition builder.

Strkr AI second opinion

The model reads the thread.

A Strkr AI step reads the first email and intake conversation and emits a confidence rating. The rating sits next to the rule-based score. When the two agree, the lead is clear. When they disagree, the rep or ops lead investigates the signal that is in dispute.

Routing on score

Hot leads to the owner, cold leads to the templated reply.

Flows routes hot leads directly to the owner or the lead rep with a Slack ping. Warm leads enter a drip cadence with a nurture track. Cold leads get a templated polite decline with a referral to a partner contractor; the time saved is the real ROI.

Audit trail

Every score change is logged.

Each score change writes to the audit log: the criterion that changed, the old score, the new score, the actor (rule or human). Reviewing a quarter later why a lead was dismissed is a scroll through the log, not a reconstruction from memory.

Period review

Close rates per source and per score band.

The reports tab shows close rate by source and by score band over configurable windows. Managers see which source improved, which degraded, and which score threshold is predicting badly. The threshold gets tuned quarterly against the data, not against the gut.

Common mistakes

The scoring errors that cost real jobs.

Lead scoring is helpful when the model matches reality and harmful when it hides a bad assumption. Below are the mistakes we have watched contractors make with scoring, and the recovery patterns that work.

Scoring on activity only

Email opens are not budget.

A lead who opens every email ten times still may not have the budget. Scoring on activity signals (opens, clicks, page views) without weighing the budget and timeline signals produces a lead list full of engaged tire-kickers. Weight the money and timing signals heavier.

Static thresholds

The hot score threshold set once and forgotten.

The threshold that separated hot from warm two years ago may not fit today. Review threshold against actual close rates quarterly. If more than thirty percent of hot leads are closing, the threshold is too low. If under ten percent, too high.

No cold decline

Cold leads get the same cadence as warm.

Running every lead through the full nurture cadence burns rep time and inflates the active-pipeline metric with leads that will not close. Cold leads should get a polite templated reply with a referral; the rep queue stays focused on real work.

Ignoring source quality

Treating every channel the same.

A referral from a past customer and a lead from a bid aggregator should not score identically. Set source-channel values from your historical close rate by channel; a channel that closes at eight percent should not score as highly as one that closes at twenty-eight percent.

No manager override

The owner knows the lead is hot; the system says cold.

A lead where the owner has personal context (friend of a past client, referred by the building inspector) might score cold on paper but be commit on reality. The scoring surface needs a manager override with a note; the override is logged and the score history shows the human call.

No post-mortem

A lost deal, no scoring review.

When a lead that scored hot ends up losing, review the score. Which signal was wrong? Which signal was missing? The quarterly scoring review on lost deals produces the biggest improvements to the model, more than any algorithm tweak.

Lead scoring for construction ships on Pro with trade-aware custom fields included.

Enable the residential-contractor field pack this week. Build the point-based scoring Flow in an afternoon. Watch the first batch of leads route to the right destination within forty-eight hours.

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Common questions

What buyers ask about this feature.

What are the most important scoring criteria for a residential contractor?

The six criteria that do most of the work: service area match (hard gate, thirty points), budget acknowledged in writing (twenty points, with a bonus if above the minimum profitable job size), timeline specificity (fifteen for a dated event, five for a season), property type match (ten for the sweet-spot job shape), both decision makers engaged (fifteen when both spouses or the owner and property manager are both responding), and source channel scaled to your historical close rate. The combination gives a workable 0 to 100 score where hot sits above sixty, warm sits forty to sixty, and anything under forty gets a templated decline with a referral.

How is commercial GC lead scoring different from residential?

Commercial scoring emphasizes different signals: prior relationship with the GC (heavily weighted; a repeat invite is a different lead than a cold one), project funding status (closed construction loan versus pending approval), your current insurance limits against the project requirements (hard gate if limits are low), your remaining bonding capacity against the project value, your crew schedule overlap with the project mobilization date, and the bid list size on the invite. Residential signals around spousal co-decision and property type do not apply; the signals are about project viability and your capacity rather than homeowner psychology.

What do I do with cold leads?

The time-saving move is a polite templated reply with a referral to a partner contractor who serves the segment you are declining. Reps stop writing custom declines for every out-of-area or too-small lead; the templated reply goes out automatically through Flows. The sender gets a courteous response, the referral partner gets occasional business they would not otherwise receive, and your rep queue stays focused on scoring-hot leads. Cold leads should not enter the main nurture cadence; running them through the full drip burns email reputation and inflates the pipeline metric with work that will not close.

How does Strkr AI contribute to lead scoring in trades?

A Strkr AI step reads the first email thread or intake form and emits a confidence rating that sits next to the rule-based point score. The AI reads for the signals humans read for: budget realism, timeline specificity, decision-maker language, bid-shopping phrases, and tone. When the AI and the rule-based score agree, the lead routes cleanly. When they disagree, the rep investigates the signal in dispute. The AI does not override the rule-based score; it offers a second opinion the human interprets. The arrangement captures nuance that a point-based rule cannot while keeping the explicit transparency of a scored model.

How often should the scoring model get tuned?

Quarterly. The reports surface close rate by score band and by source channel over the last ninety days. Review the hot threshold: if more than thirty percent of hot leads are closing, the threshold is probably too low; if fewer than ten percent are closing, probably too high. Review the source values against actual close rates by channel; a channel that drifted in quality (aggregators often do seasonally) needs its point value adjusted. Review which criteria predicted the top-closed deals and which criteria predicted the biggest wasted-bid losses. The quarterly tuning is a thirty-minute conversation, not a quarter-long project.

Can Strkr handle multi-location contractor businesses?

Yes. Each location can have its own service area polygon, its own scoring thresholds, and its own routing rules. Leads route to the location that owns the ZIP code, with fallback rules for leads that fall between service areas. The scoring model can be shared across locations or forked per location. Reports roll up at the location, division, and company level. Multi-location contractors running three to twelve branches are a common Strkr shape; the configuration is in the admin UI and does not require engineering work.

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