AI Sales Reps
A 14-Point Close-Rate Move: What a Logistics Company's Numbers Tell Restoration Owners
Most restoration companies can account for every air mover on the truck but have never measured what share of inbound calls becomes signed work. Here is a 30-day close-rate audit, plus what a real 14-point close-rate move looked like at a logistics company.
by Jerrod Anthraper
Your production manager can tell you exactly how many air movers are on the truck right now. He can tell you the drying time on the Whitaker job, what the adjuster approved last Thursday, and which tech left a dehu in a crawlspace in March. Ask him what percentage of last month's inbound calls turned into signed work authorizations, and the room goes quiet. Most restoration companies track equipment down to the serial number and track their close rate not at all.
The number you don't have
Here is the leak: you cannot improve a close rate you have never measured, and in restoration the losses are invisible by design. The homeowner who called you at 11 p.m., got voicemail, and called the next company on the list does not phone back to tell you what happened. That job simply never existed as far as your records are concerned.
This matters because restoration is a race more than it is a pitch. Roughly 78% of sales go to whoever responds first, and a flooded basement compresses that race into minutes. Every company in your market is technically capable of doing the mitigation. The one that got a human on the phone and a truck committed is the one holding the work authorization.
If you do not know your close rate, you are not running a sales operation. You are running a dispatch board and hoping.
Why restoration owners stop counting
The root cause is not laziness. It is that restoration work arrives disguised as an emergency, and emergencies feel binary. A call either turns into a job or it "wasn't a real job." There is no natural moment where someone writes down that a lead was lost, because losing it looks identical to it never having been there.
Then there is the staffing overlap. In most shops under $10M, the person answering the phone at 2 a.m. is also the estimator, the on-call tech, or the owner. That person's job is to get a truck rolling, not to populate a CRM field. Data entry loses to a wet basement every single time, and it should.
Add a third factor: the pipeline has two completely different shapes bolted together. Emergency mitigation closes in minutes. Reconstruction closes in weeks, sometimes after the adjuster fight. Blend them into one number and the number tells you nothing, so people stop looking at it.
A 30-day close-rate audit for restoration companies
You do not need software to do this. You need a shared spreadsheet, five fields, and thirty days of discipline. Here is the sequence.
1. Define the denominator before you count anything
Decide, in writing, what counts as an inbound opportunity. My suggested line: any first-time contact from a party who has a loss, or represents someone who does, where they are asking whether you can help. That includes the homeowner, the property manager, the plumber who found the leak, and the adjuster making a first notice of loss assignment.
It excludes vendors, job applicants, and existing customers calling about an open file. Write the definition on a card and tape it to the wall by the phone. Ninety percent of bad close-rate data comes from people quietly disagreeing about what counts.
2. Log five fields, not fifteen
For every opportunity: date and time received, channel, loss type, first-response timestamp, and outcome. That is it. Outcome has exactly four values — signed, lost, no-decision-yet, or not-a-fit.
The temptation is to build a real CRM pipeline with twelve stages. Resist it for thirty days. A five-field log that everyone actually fills out beats a beautiful pipeline that three people ignore. You can migrate later once the habit exists.
3. Split the board into emergency and scheduled
Run two separate counts. Emergency mitigation — water, fire, storm, anything where the caller wants a truck today. Scheduled work — mold remediation, reconstruction, contents, anything with a bidding window.
These are different sales motions with different failure modes. Emergency loses to speed. Scheduled loses to follow-up. If you only ever see the blended number, you will spend money fixing the wrong one. I have watched owners buy an answering service to fix a close-rate problem that lived entirely in their unreturned reconstruction estimates.
4. Time-stamp the first human conversation, not the first ring
Log two clocks: when the contact arrived, and when a person from your company actually spoke with them. Not when the voicemail was left. Not when someone texted "we'll call you back." When a real conversation happened.
The gap between those two timestamps is the single most actionable number in your business, and it is almost always worse than the owner believes. Pull your after-hours calls specifically and look at that gap on nights and weekends. Most restoration owners discover their weekday performance is fine and their Friday-night-through-Sunday performance is a different company entirely.
5. At day 30, read only the losses
Sort the log to show lost and no-decision-yet. Ignore the wins for one afternoon — wins teach you very little because you already know how you got them.
For each loss, answer one question in plain language: did we lose this because of speed, price, scope, or because we never followed up? Four buckets, no essays. Then count the buckets.
That count is your roadmap. If speed is the biggest bucket, your problem is coverage, not salesmanship. If never-followed-up is the biggest bucket, hiring a better estimator will not help you. If price dominates, you have a positioning conversation, not an operations one.
What a 14-point move actually looks like
Here is a real, measured example from a different industry — and I want to be precise about the difference, because restoration owners are rightly allergic to borrowed numbers.
AMG Transport Co., a transportation and logistics company, went from a 32% close rate to a 46% close rate in two months using Tykon. Their review volume moved from five or six a month to five or six a day.
AMG Transport Co. (Transportation & Logistics): 32% to 46% close rate in two months — a 14-point move on the same lead volume.
AMG is not a restoration company. Their jobs are not emergencies and their buyers are not standing in three inches of water. What transfers is the mechanic of the gain: they did not buy more leads. They converted more of the ones already arriving, by responding faster and more consistently than a human rotation could sustain.
Where this goes next
Everything above is measurement. Measurement tells you the size of the hole; it does not patch it. Once you have thirty days of data, most restoration owners are looking at the same two buckets — nights and weekends where first-conversation time stretches into hours, and scheduled work that quietly aged out without a second touch.
That is the specific gap James was built for. He answers inbound in under 60 to 90 seconds around the clock, qualifies the loss type, and books the assessment while the homeowner is still deciding who to call. After the job, he asks for the review and prompts the referral, which is how a close-rate fix turns into a lead-volume fix a quarter later.
Do not start there, though. Start with the log. Run the thirty days, count your four buckets, and if speed or follow-up is your biggest one, that is the point to have a real conversation about automating it. If it turns out your problem is pricing, no software on earth will help, and I would rather you know that first.