Painting contractor · January 1 – May 29, year over year
277 more leads, and the budget never went up.
A regional residential and commercial painting contractor running a seven-figure book of work. The brief was narrow: raise qualified inbound volume without raising the marketing budget, and make every lead traceable to a source.
SAME FIVE MONTHS, PRIOR YEAR
610 leads
640 total inbound requests across the window.
SAME FIVE MONTHS, THIS YEAR
887 leads
951 requests, on $29,979 of total marketing spend.
Volume, both ways of counting it
Two figures are tracked here because they answer different questions. A request is any inbound job inquiry. A lead is a new named contact. The gap between them is repeat contact from the same prospects.
LEAD AND REQUEST VOLUME, YEAR OVER YEAR
January 1 – May 29, both years. Leads up 45%, requests up 49% — 277 and 311 more respectively. Source: client CRM.
Alongside the volume, quote conversion moved from 44% to 53%. More inquiries arrived and a larger share of the ones that reached a quote turned into work.
Where the leads came from
LEAD SOURCE BREAKDOWN · 887 LEADS
January 1 – May 29. Source: client CRM.
Paid search and social carried the program. Angi contributed 31% of volume as a marketplace channel. And 39% of leads arrived through Google with no campaign parameter attached — organic, direct, and untagged paid traffic all landing in the same bucket.
That 39% is the single biggest open item in this account.
Closing it is a tracking build, not a media spend. It is also the difference between reporting lead volume and being able to price a performance agreement against it — because a partner paid on outcome and a client paying on outcome both have to agree on what came from where.
What drove it
The CRM shows the channel infrastructure that was live during the period. It does not show strategy, sequencing, or what changed and when. Visible in the data: campaign-level Google Ads lead forms segmented by service line, with cabinet painting appearing as its own named form; website inquiry forms feeding the CRM directly; an Angi marketplace integration running in parallel; at least one outbound email campaign against the existing list; and former-customer reactivation tagged as its own source, worth 34 leads.
The numbers are defensible on their own. The story of how they happened is what makes this persuasive, and only you can write it. Remove this block before the page goes live.
Why this matters for a performance partnership
Under a conventional retainer this engagement reports as a clear win. Volume up 45%, cost per lead under $34, cost per acquisition under $92. The invoice goes out either way.
The Upside is built differently. Compensation sits on top of gross profit measured against a trailing baseline, which means lead volume alone does not get anybody paid. Those leads have to convert, at a job size that holds up, and traceably enough that both sides can agree on what came from where.
That is the reason the arrangement includes the books and the estimating rather than just the ad account. Lead generation at this cost per lead is the easy half. The half that decides whether a partnership earns anything is what happens to those leads after they land — quote pricing, job mix, close discipline, and attribution clean enough to settle on. A partner paid on results has to be able to see all of it.
Scope of this case study. Figures cover January 1 – May 29 year over year and are drawn from the client's CRM and marketing budget records. This page reports lead generation and cost efficiency only. It does not report revenue, margin, or closed-job outcomes. Client identity, customer records, and location details have been withheld.
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Dallas–Fort Worth · 214.466.8332