The truth about buying air source heat pump leads: quality vs. conversion.

Search "air source heat pump leads" and you'll find a marketplace of brokers, aggregators, and pay-per-lead platforms all promising qualified homeowners ready to install. Prices range from £40 for a shared lead to £300+ for an "exclusive" one. Installers spend thousands a month feeding this machine.

And most of them still complain the leads are rubbish.

The uncomfortable truth is that the lead isn't the problem. The problem is what happens — or more often, doesn't happen — in the 72 hours after that enquiry hits your inbox.

Why installers think they have a lead problem

When install numbers dip, the reflex is to buy more leads. It feels productive. There's a bill, a spreadsheet, a supplier to blame. But the actual funnel usually looks like this:

• 100 enquiries come in across the month, from a mix of paid leads, referrals, and your own site.
• 30 get a same-day response. The other 70 hear back two, three, five days later — if at all.
• 15 get a survey booked. The rest go cold, ghost, or find a competitor who called them back within an hour.
• 6 get a quote out within a week.
• 2 install.

A 2% enquiry-to-install rate isn't a lead quality problem. It's a follow-up, CRM, and workflow problem. Buying more leads at this conversion rate is just paying more per install.

What "quality" actually means in a heat pump lead

When a lead provider says "qualified," they usually mean the homeowner filled in a form, owns their property, and lives somewhere the grant applies. That's not qualification — that's a warm body with a postcode.

Real quality signals are things you can only measure yourself, after the fact:

• Contactability — what % of leads from this source pick up a call or reply to a text within 24 hours?
• Survey rate — what % of contacted leads agree to a home survey?
• Quote-to-close — what % of quotes issued from this source turn into signed contracts?
• Cost per install, not cost per lead — a £50 lead that closes 1 in 40 is more expensive than a £200 lead that closes 1 in 5.

If you can't answer these questions for each of your lead sources today, that's the first thing to fix — not the lead volume.

The speed-to-lead evidence

The Harvard Business Review study on lead response is old but still true: contact a lead within 5 minutes and you're 21x more likely to qualify them than at 30 minutes. Wait a day and you're statistically irrelevant.

Heat pump enquiries are worse than average here. The homeowner has usually filled in three or four forms in the same sitting — yours, plus every other MCS installer within 30 miles. Whoever calls back first almost always books the survey. Whoever books the survey almost always wins the job.

Ask yourself honestly: when an enquiry comes in at 8pm on a Wednesday, or 11am on a Saturday, or during a survey on Tuesday morning, how quickly does that homeowner hear from you?

What conversion infrastructure looks like for MCS installers

"Conversion infrastructure" isn't a fancy phrase for a chatbot. It's four boring, un-sexy pieces that most installers still don't have:

• Instant-response. Every enquiry — from any source — gets an automated text and email within 60 seconds, confirming receipt and offering a survey slot.
• One pipeline. Every enquiry lands in one CRM with a standard stage flow (Enquiry → Contacted → Survey Booked → Survey Done → Quote Sent → Won/Lost). No spreadsheets, no lost WhatsApp threads.
• MCS-shaped workflow. The stages, forms and reminders reflect how MCS jobs actually run — EPC checks, grant paperwork, DNO applications, commissioning. Not a generic sales pipeline retrofitted from a SaaS demo.
• Weekly visibility. One report every Monday: how many enquiries came in, response times, survey rate, quote rate, and where leads got stuck. Without this, you can't tell a lead-quality problem from a follow-up problem.

How to evaluate a lead provider

If you're going to keep buying leads — and most installers should, as one channel among several — evaluate providers on evidence, not sales calls:

• Ask for cost-per-install data from installers already using them in your region. Not cost-per-lead.
• Test with a small batch — 20 to 30 leads — before committing to a monthly volume.
• Track every lead in the same CRM stages as your other sources, so you can compare like-for-like.
• Check exclusivity honestly: a "shared" lead sold to four installers behaves very differently from a genuinely exclusive one.
• Kill any source whose cost-per-install is more than 2x your best channel, unless it's giving you volume you can't get elsewhere.

Why the Pipeline Fix beats buying more leads

Take a typical installer spending £2,000/month on leads at a 2% enquiry-to-install rate. That's £100,000 of contract value at the average heat pump install price, and roughly £2,000 of lead spend per install.

Now lift the conversion rate from 2% to 4% — which is what most installers see within 60 days of getting instant-response and a proper pipeline in place. Same £2,000 of lead spend now produces twice the installs. Cost per install halves. Revenue doubles. Nothing else changed.

That's the maths behind our Pipeline Fix. £900 to install the infrastructure, £400/month to keep it running and optimised. For a business doing even a handful of installs a month, it pays for itself before the second invoice.

Buying more leads is only worth it once your funnel actually converts what you already have.