Most tree service owners are addicted to volume. You want the phone to ring off the hook.

But let me ask you this: Is a lead that wastes two hours of your estimator's time actually a lead?

A guy who drags you an hour across town and never books isn't a "lead." He's a bill you paid.

Three estimates, 90 minutes of driving, zero booked jobs—that's what we're trying to kill.

The problem isn't lead volume. It's lead quality. And the filtering starts before you ever pick up the phone.

It starts with the ad. If your marketing screams "Cheapest Price in Town," don't be surprised when you attract people who haggle over a $500 trim job. Your ad is the first bouncer at the door.

The second filter is your website form. Your form decides who you even talk to. If everybody can slide through it, you're the bouncer working for free.

If you're blindly driving to every address that fills out a contact form, you're setting money on fire.

Let's get tactical about your intake form.

The single most important question you can add is this:

"How soon are you looking to get this taken care of?"

Why does this matter? Because it separates the emergency removals from the "I'm just curious what it costs" crowd.

The answer tells you how much pain they're in. High pain equals high urgency. High urgency usually equals a higher close rate.

Once you have that answer, you know:

A prospect who needs work done "Immediately" gets priority. Someone who says "In the next 6 months" goes to the back of the line—or doesn't get a callback at all when you're busy.

I'd rather have 10 solid leads than 30 clowns who "might do it next spring."

The Advanced Move (If You're Running Paid Ads)

If you're spending real money on Google or Facebook ads, here's where it gets powerful.

Right now, your ad platform probably counts every form fill as a "win." But a tire-kicker and a $4,000 emergency removal look exactly the same to the algorithm.

The fix: Create a separate conversion for qualified leads only—people you'd happily drive to. High urgency, in your service area, work you actually want.

Then feed that back to the platform. You're telling Google or Facebook: "This person was worth my time. Go find me more like him."

If you don't close that loop, the algorithm just sends you random people. You're training it to bring you gold—or you're letting it dump trash on your doorstep.

This Week:

Here's what a simple qualifying form looks like:

That's it. Six fields. The timeline question does the heavy lifting.

When someone picks "Emergency" or "This Week," they go to the top of the pile. When someone picks "Just Budgeting," you call them back when you have time—or you don't.

Don't overthink it. Short form, one killer question, mobile-friendly. That's it.

I hear the same objection every time I tell an owner to add questions to their form:

"But won't that lower my conversion rate?"

Here's the tradeoff: The prospect does a little work upfront so you don't waste a lot of time down the line.

If they can't be bothered to answer two extra questions about their tree problem, do you really think they're going to pay a premium invoice?

Stop chasing volume. Start chasing profit. Let the form do the rejection work so you don't have to do it in their driveway.

Want a Second Set of Eyes?

If you're not sure whether your form is filtering anyone at all—or if your ads are just sending you whoever clicks—we can help.

We'll walk through your ads, your form, and your tracking, and show you where you're bleeding time and money.

We've done this for enough tree companies to know what actually matters.

Written by Jacob Hastings
Head of Growth & Client Strategy at Growth Ring Media