Category
Speed to Lead & AI
Publish Date
1 November 2026
Your setter calls a fresh homeowner lead, it rings out, and the lead slides down the list until tomorrow. Voicemail didn't lose that lead. The process did.
The double dial
Picture what happens when a homeowner doesn't pick up and there's no rule for it: the setter moves on to the next name and means to come back later. And later is where solar leads go cold, right? So here's what we do instead. Call. No answer? Put the phone down and call straight back. No answer again? Then the voicemail, the text and the email go out, in that order.
Now, why call straight back? Think about it from the homeowner's side. A missed call from a number they don't know is easy to ignore. They're like, "Unknown number, probably spam." Then it rings again straight away, and now it's, "Hang on, maybe this is the solar thing I filled in." The second call tells them somebody actually wants to talk to them.
It's like knocking on a door. Knock once and walk off, and they figure it was the wind. Knock twice, and they come and look.
The double dial goes out within 5 minutes of the application, inside the homeowner's calling hours. And it goes out from their record in your CRM, not from a setter's personal cell. That way it comes from your business number, and every call and text logs on the record, so whoever picks the lead up next can see exactly what's been tried.
And the double dial isn't only for fresh applications. Use it anywhere a homeowner should be on the phone with you and isn't: a reply that landed while your setter was on another call, or a homeowner who booked and didn't show. Double dial first. Then the messages.
A voicemail under 15 seconds, then a text and an email
The voicemail isn't the pitch. It's who you are, why you're calling and what happens next, and it's under 15 seconds. Say you're ABC Solar and your setter's Tom. Something like: "Hey Sally, it's Tom from ABC Solar. Your application about solar for your home just came through, so I'm giving you a quick call. I'll send you a text as well. Speak soon." That's it. No pitch, no list of everything you do, no reason for them to skip to the end.
Then the text, from the same person, giving the homeowner an easy reason to reply: "Hey Sally, Tom here from ABC Solar. Just tried you about your solar application. Did you find what you were looking for, or are you still looking?" Send it as a couple of short messages, the way a person types, not one block that reads like a template. And end that first text with a plain way out, in its own message: if they'd rather you didn't text, they reply STOP and you won't.
Then the email, from the setter's own address, not a no-reply. A short subject line, like "Your solar application, Sally." The same question, plus the booking link: "If you're still looking, will you grab a time here?" Will you, not can you. It asks for a small commitment, and you get a straight answer either way.
Every one of those reads like it came from one person, because it did. And when the homeowner replies to any of them, that reply outranks everything else on your list. Call straight back. Double dial. That's what the text was for.
Days 1 to 5, then stop
One round of that isn't follow-up. It's day 1. Here's the cadence. Day 1 gets 3 calls at most: the double dial straight away, which is 2 of them, and 1 more at the homeowner's peak hours. Days 2 to 5 get 2 dials a day at peak. On day 5, the dialing stops.
Log every dial on the homeowner's record with what happened: no answer, voicemail left, spoke to them, wrong number. That log is how whoever's on the phones tomorrow knows where each lead is in its 5 days, without asking anyone and without guessing.
Peak hours means their local time, the hours they actually pick up, not the hours that suit your team. Your own answer rates will tell you when those are, better than any rule of thumb can, so look at your calls by hour once you've got a month of them.
Now, why stop at day 5? Because a cadence isn't a chase. By then, more dials don't make them pick up. They teach the homeowner to ignore your number, and they burn the number for every other homeowner you call from it. Chasing every day for 2 weeks feels like hustle. Mostly, it's how a warm lead turns into a blocked number.
Stopping the dials isn't giving up on them. On day 5 they move to your general list, where the follow-up keeps going at a slower rhythm, by text and email, with something useful in every message. That's a different job with its own rules, and it doesn't involve your setters dialing the same number every morning.
So you can get this wrong in either direction: one dial and done, or a chase with no end. The cadence sits between them. And because it's the same for every lead, nobody on your team has to decide how hard to chase. The task list decides.
Inside their hours, not yours (US)
You sell remotely, so your homeowners are spread across time zones, and the clock that counts is theirs. A dial that's fine mid-morning in your office can land before breakfast on their side. Every dial and every text sits inside the homeowner's local calling hours, hot lead or not.
Those hours aren't only good manners. In the US they're also set by state law, and the rules differ from state to state. Texas is a good example. As its Business and Commerce Code reads in November 2026, section 301.051 limits unsolicited sales calls to a home to after 9am and before 9pm on weekdays and Saturdays, and after noon and before 9pm on Sundays. The same section says the caller identifies themselves by name, the business they're calling for and the purpose of the call straight after making contact. It's the same habit as the voicemail above: who you are, who you're with and why you're calling, in the first breath.
Don't leave any of that to a setter's memory or a sticky note of time zones. Build the hours into your dialer and your automations by the homeowner's state, so a call can't be placed and a text can't go out outside them. Florida shows why. As its statutes read in 2026, section 501.616 bars commercial telephone solicitation calls before 8am or after 8pm in the homeowner's time zone, and more than 3 of them to the same person in 24 hours on the same subject. That's one reason the cadence never puts more than 3 calls on a single day. The federal rule sets a floor everywhere in the US: under 47 CFR 64.1200, a telephone solicitation can't start before 8am or after 9pm, the homeowner's local time. Every dial in the cadence counts against whatever limit their state sets. And stop the moment anyone asks you to, by any channel.
This is education, not legal advice. Which rules reach your calls and texts, and how, is a question for your counsel, so have them set the hours and limits you build in, state by state, along with the consent your texts rely on.
Build the cadence once
You can run all of this yourself. Write the voicemail, the text and the email once, in your setters' own voices. Make the double dial the rule for every fresh lead. Put the day 1 to 5 dials into your CRM as tasks, gate them by the homeowner's state hours, and move everyone who's still quiet on day 5 to the general list.
Or we can build it for you. Empire OS builds the follow-up and no-show reactivation sequences into your own CRM, written to read like one person, with consent capture built into the funnel and your counsel ruling on the rules. And because our booking flow puts homeowners on a closer's calendar inside the funnel, at any hour, fewer of them need chasing in the first place.
The point of all of it is qualified homeowner appointments sitting on your closers' calendars, market after market, from a flow you own.
If you want that built in your own accounts, book a call below, and we'll see how we can help.
