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Salesforce Can’t Save You From Not Answering the Phone

Lee McCabe

20 Jan 2026 — 1 min read

Every portfolio has someone proudly fixing the CRM.

Clean fields. Perfect notes. Mandatory dropdowns. A new stage called “Attempted contact”.

Meanwhile the actual business is happening in the call queue. And the call queue is losing.

Invoca found 27% of calls to home services businesses go unanswered. That’s not a training issue. That’s a revenue model.

Speed-to-lead is the other quiet killer. The classic lead response research shows the odds of contacting a lead when you respond in 5 minutes vs 30 minutes drop by 100x.

But sure, let’s spend Q1 debating whether “No Answer” should be a disposition or a sub disposition.

CRM hygiene is fine. It’s just not where you start.

You start with call centre discipline. Because discipline is the only thing that turns marketing spend into booked jobs.

Answer rate by source.
Time to first dial.
Appointments set per agent.
QA on call handling.
Everything else is admin cosplay.

Also, Salesforce itself will happily remind you that poor data is expensive. Brilliant. Still doesn’t pick up the phone.

News (w/e 2/27/26)

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BlackRock GIP and EQT Target Clean Energy Assets from AES BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT are circling clean energy assets tied to AES at a moment when renewable valuations have reset hard. After the 2025 drop off, private equity is not retreating. It is re underwriting. The math

Operating partners need a badge and a gun, not another steering committee invite.

Private equity keeps hiring “value creation” people, then sends them into portfolio companies with zero mandate, zero budget, and the authority level of a polite email. And then everyone acts confused when the plan doesn’t happen. Obvious value creation: We underwrote 300 bps of margin expansion from “procurement synergies.

The easiest way for an agency to look good is to pick a KPI that can’t be audited.

That’s the whole game. You ask for growth. They pick the metric that moves fastest and connects to cash slowest. Suddenly the weekly update is a victory lap because CTR is up. Or CPM is down. Or “engagement” is strong. Or leads are “cheaper”. None of which tells you

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News (w/e 2/27/26)

Deals (w/e 2/27/26)

Operating partners need a badge and a gun, not another steering committee invite.

The easiest way for an agency to look good is to pick a KPI that can’t be audited.