William Mullikin knew speed to lead was going to matter, but he didn’t anticipate just how much.
In the span of two months — January and February, compared with the same period a year ago — Mullikin reports that the Mullikin Group's six Bath Fitter locations were up $1 million in sales. Appointments booked were up 81%. Appointments ran were up 67%. Appointments sold were up 44%. The cost per appointment has dropped from roughly $1,500 to around $1,000.
February was the best month in company history. March was already on pace to top it.
"I thought it was going to make a big difference," Mullikin said. "But never like this."
Bath Fitter is a one-call-close business. A salesperson sits down with a customer, presents the options, and either walks out with a deal or doesn't. Everything depends on getting in front of the right people, fast.
For years, that wasn’t always possible. The Mullikin Group ran on a custom-built solution that couldn't connect to outside tools or pass leads directly to a call center. There were no API connections. Leads arrived, sat in a silo, and waited.
The call center they used didn't have the technology to act on leads quickly. Weekday coverage ended at 7 p.m. Weekend coverage was nearly nonexistent.
The math was brutal. The strategy was to call a new lead within 30 seconds. The reality was leads coming in on evenings and weekends, when no one was working, sitting untouched until the next morning — or Monday. By the time someone called, the trail was cold.
A lot of those uncontacted leads were appointments that never happened.
Remove the latency, change the business
The fix wasn't complicated. But it was immediate.
ServiceTitan eliminated the gap between a lead arriving and a return contact going out, connecting lead sources directly into the platform so nothing sat waiting in a queue. Mullikin paired the elimination of that latency with Scheduling Pro and a new call center partner that operates seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. — with inbound form fills getting a callback within 30 seconds.
The combination of ServiceTitan's connectivity and a call center that could finally act on leads in real time changed everything.
"That's the secret sauce," Mullikin said. "That's it."
His sales reps are now running two, three, sometimes four leads a day instead of one or two every other day. The pipeline the company couldn't build before is now almost too full to manage.
Almost.
Mullikin needs to hire 12 sales reps. The ones he has are running hard — long drives, late nights, back at it the next morning — and the pace is taking a toll. The next challenge isn't finding leads. It's building a team deep enough to handle them.
"We're probably pushing some burnout levels for some guys," he said. "We need to dial things back some, give them time to actually focus."
"Couldn't even imagine having too many appointments a year ago," he said. "Now it's the exact opposite."
He'll take it.
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