What a good lead actually looks like

Talk to any artisan about lead-gen platforms and you'll hear the same complaint. Most leads don't convert. The homeowner was price-shopping, or not actually ready to start, or discovered the real budget was a third of what they'd imagined, or simply disappeared after a site visit. The professional spent an evening replying, a morning driving, and got nothing for it.

The unit problem

A lead isn't binary, it's a distribution. A good one is a project with a defined scope, a realistic budget, a homeowner who's already reconciled with the gross number, and a timeline that matches the artisan's availability. A bad one is everything else. Most platforms sell volume, which means they sell a distribution skewed heavily toward the bad end.

The economics of the artisan don't work when the distribution is bad. A plumber who spends three hours qualifying a lead that never books is paying for the platform twice, once in the fee, once in the lost billable time. Multiply across a month and you're looking at real money.

What we do differently

The PlanVue pipeline is structured so that by the time an artisan sees a project, it's already been filtered. Specifically:

The homeowner has a detailed estimate. Before a lead reaches you, the homeowner has seen an itemised breakdown of their project, labor hours, materials, VAT, applicable subsidies, and a realistic total. If the number was out of their reach, they've usually self-selected away. If it wasn't, they're in a different headspace than the "how much does a kitchen cost?" caller, they know within ten percent.

The scope is already documented. Photos, measurements where applicable, description text, preferred start window. The artisan reads one document and knows what the project is. No "I'll send you photos later" follow-up.

The match is scored, not broadcast. We don't send the same lead to everyone on the platform. We look at your declared trades, your service area, your current capacity, and the project's profile, and route accordingly. If a kitchen renovation lands and you do bathrooms in a different department, you don't see it.

What scoring actually means

We're careful about this word. Scoring doesn't mean a neural network picks artisans. It means a set of explicit rules runs: does the trade match, is the postal code inside your declared service radius, have you capped your monthly lead count, is the project type one you've flagged as ready to quote. Those rules compose into a shortlist. Sometimes that shortlist is one person. Sometimes it's three. It's never "everyone on the platform."

The result is a lower lead volume per artisan than a broadcast platform, with a materially higher conversion rate. We think that trade is the right one for most trades most of the time. If you need raw volume because your conversion rate is high regardless, we're probably not the platform for you, and we'd rather tell you that.

What the homeowner gets from the same setup

The mirror image of a qualified lead is a responsive artisan. When your project reaches a shortlist of professionals who actually match, you hear back faster, and the counter-quotes you receive are grounded in the same scope everyone agreed to. You're not comparing an artisan who thought you wanted IKEA cabinetry against one who thought you wanted custom, because the brief in front of both was the same.

This is where the estimate and the marketplace connect. The estimate aligns expectations before any human gets involved. The marketplace carries that aligned expectation to the artisan. The counter-quote comes back calibrated to reality. Nobody's time is wasted on the three-ways-to-interpret-the-brief problem that eats most renovation starts.

The quiet part

Not every artisan is a fit for this model. If your business depends on being the cheapest option the homeowner considers, we route away from price-only shoppers. If your business depends on referrals and repeat work within a tight geography, we might be a good match. The platform is designed for artisans who compete on quality and scope clarity, not on hourly undercut. We say that up front because it saves everybody time.