Operating Record

A Demo Is Not a Demo

Ask a contractor their close rate and they’ll give you one number. Ours, in 2025, was 55.1%. That number is real, and it is also a fiction — because in the same year, with the same sales team running the same presentation, demos closed at 95.7% from one source and 33.3% from another. The “company close rate” is just the weather created by which sources happened to feed the calendar that month.

Three things this table fixes

First: sales “slumps” are usually mix shifts. If aggregator leads fill the calendar one month and inspection-program members the next, the blended close rate swings twenty points without a single rep getting better or worse. Grade your team within a source, never across the blend — otherwise you’ll coach a mix problem with a sales meeting, and it will not work.

Second: cost per demo without close-by-source buys the wrong demos. Run one example through, straight off our 2025 ledger: an aggregator demo cost $1,287 and closed at 50.6% — roughly $2,544 per job won. A Local Services demo cost $524 and closed at 58.8% — roughly $891 per job won. Both look like “a demo” on the schedule. One costs nearly three times the other at the only line that matters. The number your budget should steer by is cost per closed job by source, and it takes one division to compute.

Third: the honest ceiling note. Don’t read the top of the table as a strategy. Self-generated leads close at 95.7% because the rep already sold them before the demo existed — that’s a definition, not a channel you can scale. The real lesson lives in the middle: pre-warmed sources (program members, referrals, pre-priced web leads) reliably out-close cold ones by 15–25 points, which means every dollar that moves a future customer from the cold column to the warm one is quietly raising your close rate two years from now.

Your sales team doesn’t have one close rate. It has a dozen, and the budget decides which ones they get to use.

Build the table for your own book

Pull a year of demos from your CRM, group by lead source, divide sales by demos in each row. Twenty minutes if your source tracking is honest — and if it isn’t, that’s the finding. Then divide each source’s cost per demo by its close rate and re-rank your channels by cost per closed job. Expect at least one channel you’ve been praising to fall hard, and one you’ve been ignoring to climb. The grading framework around it is here: COM%, the number that governs a contractor marketing budget.

A demo is not a demo. It’s a lead source wearing a calendar slot — and the source decided most of the outcome before the rep rang the bell.