Lead quality and the easy button

DippyDawg

I know Thumbtack is concerned with the quality of the leads, and rightfully so. If people are not actually hiring pros on the platform then there's no reason for us to throw our good money away.

I've been thinking about this since I watched the Thumbtack Numbers Q&A. I am not thrilled with this new numbers system, so I try to move to real phone numbers because that's how my workflow functions. But I get the concept of it.

Still, during that conversation, I heard much talk about lead quality and something dawned on me.

I've been thinking about this for a while and believe the biggest hindrance for good quality leads is the easy button they see when they do their searches. That "Get 3 quotes" button is the filter for bad leads.

Why? Because it's too easy. They never have to visit any of the profiles to find anything out about pros they're contacting. They are not invested. They haven't even made a single micro-decision about a pro. They probably just assume Thumbtack has done all the work and they don't actually need to do anything.

At least I don't think they need to visit the profiles or even have the option to after they answer their questions and enter their email. I haven't explored beyond the entering my email question to actually contact the pros, because I don't want anyone to get charged for the experiment.

If my suspicion is correct, then the leads that hit this button have very little skin in the game. They haven't done their research or due diligence to figure out who may be a good fit.

This to me seems like a problem, maybe a the "big" problem for lead quality. I wonder if Thumbtack tracks how many people contact pros on the platform, but don't actually hire a TT pro. And if so, how many of these actually used the easy button, or if they noticed a difference since implementing this "feature". I'd be interested to know.

So that's my 2 cents.