In our commercial business, we often work with plumbing companies trying to figure out how to unlock new growth. They usually have a solid book of business, but are looking for ways to increase their commercial customer base and revenue — often for one of a few common reasons:
They’re looking to grow in order to sell. A growing number of trade businesses are targeting acquisition by private equity (PE) firms, which typically require portfolio companies to demonstrate consistent growth.
Growth has plateaued. They’ve hit a point where relying on word of mouth, referrals, and bid boards is holding them back from hitting their commercial revenue goals.
Their sales process isn’t cutting it anymore. Whether they lack a defined commercial sales process or are struggling with a disconnected patchwork of spreadsheets and apps, they recognize that growth won’t come from their current system.
At this stage, the key question becomes: How are we going to do this?
Should we set prospecting targets for our existing account managers?
Should we hire someone new to start knocking on doors?
Should we pay a lead generation service to cold call and get appointments for us?
What about asking the marketing team to find leads and give those to the account managers after they book a meeting?
Should we buy a list of contacts and give that to the team?
Should we invest in CRM software or a sales intelligence platform?
Commercial lead generation in the plumbing industry is a big, complex topic. In this article, we’ll help you think through these questions so that you can make informed decisions about the tools, strategies, and processes involved — based on over a decade of experience working with commercial trade businesses.
Table of Contents
Why third-party lead generation services rarely work (especially in the trades)
Key things to know about running commercial plumbing lead generation in-house
A step-by-step process for building an in-house lead generation program
Why Third-Party Lead Generation Services Rarely Work for Commercial Plumbing Businesses
Plenty of third-party lead generation companies promise to deliver meetings with qualified leads straight to your calendar. Some even claim to specialize in commercial services. But in our experience (and the experience of many contractors we’ve worked with), these solutions often fail to deliver.
Here’s why:
Poor lead quality: Yes, they might book meetings. But because agencies are often paid by the meeting, incentives are not aligned for them to be high-quality leads. Often, meetings involve no-shows or completely irrelevant prospects. Contractors frequently waste time chasing dead ends.
Lack of local knowledge: Outsourced reps can’t speak knowledgeably about your services, geography (service area), or industry. They don’t know the buildings, the prospects, or have credibility as a local business. And their one-size-fits-all scripts fall flat in a relationship-driven market.
No long-term relationship building: Great sales reps build trust and rapport over months (or years). Many service agreements may start with a single plumbing job where you earn the facilities’ trust. Agency reps are temporary, rotating, and are gone after the meeting is booked.
Brand reputation risks: These reps are representing your company. If they’re pushy, poorly trained, or uninformed, your brand is the one that suffers.
These risks of outsourcing lead generation are not worth it. In the end, no one sells your services better than your own people.
Key Things to Understand About Running Commercial Plumbing Lead Generation In-House
1. You Need Dedicated People in Sales Roles
If you want to generate consistent commercial leads, someone needs to own the process. That doesn’t mean assigning it as a side hustle to your marketing manager, ops manager, or even an account manager who already has a book of business. It means having one or more people in clearly defined sales roles whose job is to bring in new business.
Too many commercial contractors try to bolt prospecting onto someone’s existing job description — and it rarely works. Your best service manager might care about growth, but they’re probably not going to block out two hours to cold call property managers on a Tuesday morning (and they don’t have the bandwidth to research buildings and chase down contact info).
Dedicated sales representatives are essential for:
Consistency and accountability: Prospecting only works when it’s done consistently — week after week, month after month. Each week, you need to schedule meetings for the following week. If no one’s responsible for that work, it won’t happen.
Aligned incentive: For established account managers, it's a lot easier to farm out existing relationships than it is to break into new accounts. By putting dedicated sales reps into a position where their entire focus is to bring in new business, incentives are much better aligned with your goals.
2. You Need a Defined Lead Generation and Sales Process
Commercial contractors often try to grow without a real sales process in place — and it shows. We hear it all the time:
“I asked my account managers to start doing some prospecting.”
“I hired someone to make some calls.”
“I asked marketing if they could start booking meetings”
But without a clear, repeatable process, those efforts usually fizzle out. Follow-up is inconsistent. And managers have no visibility into what’s working (or not).
To build a lead generation engine that actually produces results, you need to define how leads are found, worked, and moved through your sales funnel — and that starts with establishing structure and expectations.
At a minimum, your process should address:
Lead sourcing: Where do you get your leads? Are they pulled from a sales intelligence platform like Convex, purchased contact lists, construction bid sites, or other sources? Are your reps responsible for identifying target accounts themselves?
Outreach cadence: How often does your team reach out to leads? How many touchpoints do they make before deprioritizing or moving on?
CRM and pipeline management: Where do reps log phone calls, track follow-ups, and manage open opportunities? Do you have a centralized system, or is data scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and apps?
Clear goals and quotas: How much new business do they need to find? How many first meetings per week are expected?
Tracking success: What metrics are you using to measure sales activity and performance? Do you want to track top-of-funnel calls, and if so, how many calls do you expect? How are these metrics tracked — and how are reps held accountable?
Sales meeting approach: Once meetings are booked, what happens next? Do reps follow a consistent structure for qualifying, presenting, and closing?
3. You Need to Set Realistic Expectations
Average Conversion Rates
One of the most common reasons commercial lead generation efforts fail is that business owners or sales leaders approach it with misaligned expectations. For example:
They buy a list. Or a sales tool. Or a lead gen service.
They make 30 calls, send 20 emails, and… nothing happens.
They conclude, “This doesn’t work.”
Unfortunately, this is not how sales work — especially in the commercial world, where the sales cycle is longer and often relationship-based.
You’re not doing anything wrong if most of your outreach doesn’t lead to an immediate win. That’s normal.
To give you some perspective, here’s a rough idea of the average conversion rates you can expect:
Conversion from prospect to first meeting: Around 3% is standard on general contact data — that’s 3 booked meetings for every 100 good-fit leads you actively work.
Higher intent data (like Convex Signals): Around 10% meeting conversion rate is possible — but not guaranteed.
First meeting to proposal: In general, 50% of first meetings will lead to a proposal.
Proposal to close: Once a proposal is delivered, an 80% close rate is common — so the key is getting to that point.
In other words: To close one new service agreement, you might need to work 50–75 leads, make dozens (if not hundreds) of calls, and go on several first meetings. Commercial sales is a volume and persistence game.
Imperfect Lead Data Is Part of the Game
Getting the best data you can is very important for maximizing rep productivity. But setting up your team for success in prospecting also means setting realistic expectations with sales reps about what to expect if they have never used sales intelligence data.
The best data platforms (Convex, ZoomInfo, Apollo) will typically have tiers of data quality. Some contacts will be flagged as high accuracy (from being validated recently), others will be lower accuracy. Contact data companies try to strike a balance, giving as much data as they can even if they’re not positive about some contacts. (Successful teams are even able to use lower accuracy data to still convert meetings, as we’ll discuss.)
Overall, industry estimates of even the top platforms are of around 30% imperfect data across all levels of contacts — whether minor details like an old job title or more important elements like a missing phone number, previous company, or an invalid email. That’s normal.
What separates successful teams is that they treat this as part of the process:
If they hear “oh that person left his role and is no longer here,” they turn that into a way to establish credibility by having known the previous facility manager and asking for an introduction to the new one.
If a phone number doesn’t get answered, but the contact is valid, they use that name with the gatekeeper to establish credibility and ask to be connected to them.
And if the phone call ends up being a dead lead, it's ultimately just a few seconds lost in a day of perhaps fifty calls.
Now that we’ve covered the mindset and structural foundations required for successful in-house lead generation, let’s talk about what it actually looks like in practice. In the next section, we’ll walk through a simple, step-by-step process you can use to build (or refine) your commercial plumbing lead generation engine — from defining roles to setting outreach cadences to closing new deals.
Step-by-Step Process for Managing Commercial Plumbing Lead Generation In-House
There’s no single right way to structure your sales process — every business has different team dynamics, markets, and goals. That said, what follows is a simple, proven framework based on what we've seen work across dozens of commercial contractors.
You can adapt it to fit your business, but the key is to stay consistent, track what’s working, and refine over time. This approach is designed to help you move from “we should be doing more sales” to building a system that produces results.
1. Source Leads
Everything starts with a lead list — but not all lists are created equal.
You need to identify the types of buildings and decision-makers your team should be targeting, and then build (or buy) a list of prospects that matches those criteria. That list becomes the foundation for your outbound activity, so quality and relevance matter.
There are a few common approaches to lead sourcing:
A. Use a Sales Intelligence Platform
A look inside Convex sales intelligence software, purpose-built for commercial trades.
Tools like Convex, ZoomInfo, and Apollo allow you to filter buildings and contacts by geography, company size, property type, industry, square footage, permit history, and more. This is the most effective approach for scalable, precisely targeted lead generation.
Convex is purpose-built for commercial trades and offers features like map-based prospecting, building-level data, contact information, and intent signals.
ZoomInfo and Apollo are broader B2B tools with good contact data, but lack the property-specific insights and targeting capabilities of Convex.
If your team is manually using Google Maps, spreadsheets, or job boards to build lists, you’re losing hours that could be spent on outreach.
B. Buy a Contact List (with Caution)
Buying static lists is an option, but be careful who you buy from.
As we discussed above, even the best data sources will often contain 30% bad data — outdated titles, wrong emails, disconnected phone numbers, etc.
Many “lists” being sold online are scraped, stale, or pulled from questionable sources — some are even pirated from old data leaks.
If you go this route, only purchase from reputable vendors that are continuously updated, and go in with realistic expectations. You’re not buying a magic list of ready-to-buy leads — you’re buying a starting point that still requires outreach and qualification.
C. Assign Reps to Build Their Own Lists
In some organizations, sales reps are responsible for sourcing their own leads — especially in early-stage or smaller teams. This can work, but it requires time, training, and a good system to make it sustainable.
Reps should have clarity on ideal customer profiles (ICPs): Building types, sizes, industries, and titles that signal a good fit.
Managers should periodically review target lists to ensure quality and strategic alignment.
Bottom line: Sourcing leads isn’t just about volume — it’s about relevance. A tightly focused list of the right buildings and contacts will always outperform a big, generic database. Start here, and the rest of your process has a much better shot at success.
2. Define Roles and Team Structure
Once you have a solid lead list, the next step is determining who’s responsible for working it — and how your team is structured to support that effort.
In our experience, successful contractors typically use one of the following team structures:
Inside/Outside Split: Inside sales reps are responsible for researching targets, making calls, and booking first meetings. Field reps then handle site walks, proposals, and closing. This is a great structure for growing teams.
Full-Cycle Reps: Each salesperson is responsible for prospecting, meetings, proposals, and closing. This model works best when reps are well-trained and have the tools to manage the entire process effectively.
“Build-Your-Own-Book” Model: Reps are responsible for sourcing their own leads and building their portfolio from the ground up. Over time, as they grow their client base and recurring revenue, they may shift into more of a relationship-management role and hand off prospecting to newer team members. This model is useful for companies trying to bootstrap a sales program from the ground up.
No matter which model you choose, the key is that someone has clear ownership, dedicated time, and defined goals for bringing in new customers — which brings us to step 3.
3. Set Goals
Once you have the right people and structure in place, you need to define what success looks like. Without clear goals, your team is flying blind — and you won’t be able to coach, improve, or forecast results with any accuracy.
In commercial sales, the most effective teams work backward from revenue targets to set realistic prospecting goals.
A. Start with Your Revenue Target
Let’s say your goal is to land $200,000 in new commercial plumbing service agreements this year.
If your average agreement value is $10,000, you’ll need to close ~20 new deals.
Assuming you win 80% of proposals, you’ll need to deliver about 25 proposals.
If you reach the proposal stage with 50% of first meetings, you’ll need to book around 50 meetings, or one first meeting a week on average.
And if you convert 3% of your outreach efforts into meetings, you’ll need to actively work 1,600 quality leads to hit your goal, or about 30 leads per week.
Many pure hunter roles have targets roughly double this.
B. Turn That Into Weekly Activity Goals
Once you know how many meetings you need per quarter or year, break that down into weekly actions. For example:
2–3 days per week of prospecting
50–100 calls per day
A weekly goal of booking 2-3 meetings
Activity KPIs: calls made, emails sent, meetings booked, proposals delivered
C. Set KPIs That Fit Your Team Structure
For inside reps: Track calls, emails, and first meetings booked.
For full-cycle reps: Also track proposals delivered and deals closed.
For managers: Track closed deals and conversion rates across each stage (call → meeting, meeting → proposal, proposal → close).
You don’t have to overcomplicate it — but you do need to define the numbers that matter, share them with your team, and measure progress consistently.
4. Build a Weekly Workflow
Even with the right people, tools, and goals in place, lead generation efforts can still stall without a clear weekly rhythm. You need a consistent, repeatable schedule that guides how your sales team spends their time — especially when balancing prospecting with meetings, proposals, and field work.
Successful plumbing contractors treat lead gen like a discipline: It gets scheduled, prioritized, and tracked just like any other part of the business.
Here’s an example workflow that we’ve seen work well:
A. Split the Week into Two Modes: Prospecting & Field Work
Most commercial sales reps alternate between “hunting” mode (generating new meetings) and “closing” mode (handling meetings, proposals, and follow-ups).
A typical structure might look like:
Monday & Wednesday: Prospecting-heavy days
50–100 calls
Outreach emails
Updating lead lists and CRM
Tuesday, Thursday & Friday: Field and meeting-heavy days
Job walks
Proposal meetings
Site visits and follow-ups
This kind of rhythm helps reps stay focused instead of constantly switching contexts — and ensures that pipeline-building doesn’t fall by the wayside during busy weeks.
B. Use Friday to Fill Next Week’s Calendar
A simple rule of thumb that we've seen works well: “My goal this week is to fill next Tuesday.”
Reps should approach each week with a forward-looking mindset:
What meetings do I have scheduled next week?
Where are the gaps?
Who am I trying to get in front of?
This keeps momentum going, builds habit, and prevents weeks where your team is scrambling with no appointments lined up.
C. Managers: Create Visibility Without Micromanaging
Depending on your team size and style, you might:
Review call and meeting logs weekly
Do a pipeline check-in every Monday
Track first meetings booked as your primary KPI
Use a shared dashboard to track progress toward goals
The goal isn’t to count every call. It’s to give reps structure and accountability — and to keep momentum steady across the team.
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5. Follow a Consistent Outreach Process
Your team has leads. They have time blocked to prospect. Now what?
This is where the rubber meets the road — the actual calls, emails, and follow-ups that get you in front of decision-makers. A clear outreach cadence gives your team structure and helps avoid the “one-and-done” trap that kills most sales efforts.
Here are some approaches and tactics to consider:
A. Use a Multi-Touch, Multi-Channel Cadence
Commercial decision-makers are busy. They’re hard to reach, and often slow to respond — especially if they don’t know your company. That’s why a strong outbound cadence uses a mix of channels and multiple touchpoints over time.
A typical first-touch cadence might look like:
Day 1: Cold call + email
Day 3: Follow-up email
Day 5: Second call attempt + LinkedIn connection (if applicable)
Day 8: Final voicemail + breakup email
If there’s no response after 4-5 quality touchpoints, the lead can be deprioritized (but not forgotten — some teams cycle through again in a few months).
B. Call Scripts and Talk Tracks Help — But Keep Them Flexible
Give your team structured messaging:
A short value prop
Common questions to ask
Ways to handle objections (e.g., “We already have someone” or “Not interested”)
But encourage reps to adapt to the conversation. The goal is to start a relationship — not follow a script word for word.
C. Track Everything
Every call, email, and outcome should be logged in to your CRM or sales platform. This allows you to:
Track outreach attempts and response rates
Avoid duplicate outreach across reps
Measure and improve performance over time
If your team is using a CRM, you can make calls, log activity, and track results in the same platform — which helps eliminate manual admin work.
6. Use a Proven Sales Meeting Framework
Once meetings are booked, your team needs a clear, repeatable sales process that guides prospects from first conversation to closed deal.
Consider the following:
A. Use a Three-Meeting Framework
Most successful commercial contractors we’ve worked with use a simple three-step structure to move prospects through the funnel:
Discovery Meeting
Understand the prospect’s needs, current vendors, pain points, and budget.
Establish credibility and explain your approach.
Identify decision-makers and buying timeline.
Site Walk / Needs Assessment
Visit the property (or multiple) to evaluate scope and gather the technical information needed to build a proposal.
This step often includes field team input and builds trust with the prospect.
Proposal Meeting
Present your scope, pricing, and value.
Address objections.
Align on next steps and decision timeline.
Not every deal follows this exact sequence — but having a standard path keeps deals from stalling and gives your team something to anchor around.
B. Prep, Follow-Up, and Handoff Matter
Even with a solid framework, the details make the difference:
Before the meeting: Reps should prep notes, review call history, and clarify goals for the conversation.
After the meeting: Send a follow-up email summarizing the discussion, action items, and next steps.
Handoff to operations: Once a deal closes, ensure a clean handoff to project managers or techs — with all notes and context included.
C. Pipeline Reviews Keep Everything Moving
Block time weekly to review deals in progress:
What stage is each deal in?
Who owes the next step — us or the prospect?
Are there any deals that need help, escalation, or a nudge?
This keeps deals from getting stuck and gives sales managers visibility into the funnel.
Follow these six steps to building a real, functioning, in-house commercial sales engine within your plumbing company.
Software to Support Your Sales Process and Drive Better Results
The process we’ve laid out above can work with spreadsheets or a patchwork of disconnected apps — at least for a while. But as your business grows (or if you want to set yourself up for success from the start), investing in sales intelligence and/or CRM software can transform your commercial sales efforts.
A sales intelligence platform like Convex (now a part of ServiceTitan) can help you:
See properties in your target geography
Focus on businesses that are shopping for your service
Call and email key decision makers
Schedule a free demo to see how it works.
Once meetings are booked, ServiceTitan’s CRM — built specifically for commercial trades — can help you manage your opportunities and drive more closed deals — easily paying for itself over time.
Below is a breakdown of ServiceTitan’s purpose-built CRM for the trades.
All-in-One Sales Pipeline Visibility
Easily track every commercial opportunity in one place. Whether it’s a lead from your sales team or an estimate waiting to close, everything is centralized and linked to the underlying work in ServiceTitan.
Users can:
See all open opportunities by customer or rep
Review linked jobs, contacts, and activity
Generate quotes for jobs, service agreements, and projects
Monitor progress from first contact to closed deal
Out-of-the-Box Reporting & Dashboards
Sales managers can finally skip building custom reporting solutions with Power BI or Excel. Our CRM offers built-in dashboards designed to support:
Weekly or monthly team meetings
Win/loss tracking
Individual rep performance
Pipeline health monitoring
No configuration required—just open the dashboard and start managing.
Simple, Stage-Based Task Assignment
Instead of using a separate system to track follow-ups, ServiceTitan’s CRM lets you attach task assignments to each sales stage. When a deal moves forward, the next steps are automatically generated—keeping reps on track and deals moving.
A CRM That Updates Itself
Because our CRM functionality is built into our broader commercial service software, it connects directly with your:
Jobs, service agreements, and projects
Locations
Customers
Contacts
This means your sales pipeline reflects what’s happening with each plumbing customer in real-time—automatically. If a job or estimate is updated, your CRM view is updated, too.
Get a Free Walk-Through of ServiceTitan’s CRM for the Trades
ServiceTitan’s CRM isn’t just another sales tool—it’s a money machine for commercial contractors who want better visibility, tighter workflows, and smarter automation without the patchwork of disconnected software.
Schedule a demo to get a free, one-on-one walk-through of ServiceTitan’s CRM and commercial service software.
Additional Resources
This article has focused on outbound lead generation strategies, which we find are the primary methods used in commercial plumbing.
For smaller commercial shops, especially those targeting light commercial ( restaurants, retail, religious, etc.), inbound digital marketing strategies can also be effective. The following resources can help:
Plumber Pay-Per-Click (PPC): The Definitive Guide— Learn how to create, manage, and optimize successful social media and Google Ads campaigns.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Plumbers: The Definitive Guide — Get an overview of how successful plumbing businesses approach showing up in organic search when potential customers are looking for service providers.
Plumbing Email Marketing: 9 Pro Tips to Nail Your Campaigns — Learn how to create effective email campaigns with personalized, relevant emails for carefully segmented groups of potential customers.
Plumbing Marketing Guide: 16 Tips to Build Your Business— Our comprehensive guide covering everything from direct mail, creating Google business profiles, generating more Yelp testimonials and Google reviews, leveraging local SEO and Local Services Ads, and more.
