A window company got on a discovery call with me this month. They were already doing real volume. Canvassing was their main source, they were running some ads of their own, and they had been paying two different shared-lead vendors for a while. The shared leads were the problem. Plenty of volume, but the credit was bad, the homeowners had already been called by three other companies, and very little of it turned into a sit that was worth the drive.
They did not sit there and let me pitch. They asked me seventeen questions, one after another, and most of them were good ones. I answered all seventeen on the call, and they signed.
I am not going to name the company, because the questions are the point. They are close to the same seventeen questions every window company asks me, and if you are thinking about putting a lead generation system into your business, they are the questions you should be asking whoever you are considering, including us.
One rule before I start. Every number in here that I call typical is typical. It is what we normally see across our clients. It is not a guarantee, I do not give guarantees on numbers, and I would not believe anybody who did.
Are the leads exclusive, and do you ever resell the data?
Yes, they are exclusive, and no, we do not resell the data.
Every lead the system generates belongs to one company, and that company is you. It does not go out to three other window companies fifteen minutes later so that everybody can race the same homeowner to the phone. That model is the thing we were built against. When a homeowner has been called by four companies in an hour, the first impression she has of your business is that she is being hunted, and your salesperson has to climb out of that hole before he can sell anything. The full argument on that is in exclusive versus shared leads.
The other half of the answer is branding, and it matters more than people expect. The ads run as your company. Your name, your page, your logo on the landing page and on the report the homeowner gets back. We do not run a generic window shell, meaning some invented "window savings program" brand that exists only to collect names. When your salesperson finally gets her on the phone, she already knows who you are, because she raised her hand for you specifically. That is worth something in the first ten seconds of the call, and it is worth something a year later when your name shows up again in her town. The window version of how we set that up is on our window leads page.
Who pays Meta, and who pays Minyona?
Two different bills, going to two different places.
You pay Meta. The campaigns run inside your Meta ad account, on your Facebook page, with your pixel. Your card is on that account and Meta charges you directly for ad spend. We never touch that money and we never fund your ads. If your daily budget is $200 a day, Meta bills you $200 a day.
You pay Minyona for the result, either per lead or per booked appointment, whichever we agree on before you sign. That comes from us, on our own invoice, and only when the system actually delivers.
I explain it that way on every call because of where the asset ends up. You keep the ad account, the page, the pixel, the audience data, and everything the campaigns learned while they were running. If we stop working together, none of that goes dark on you. You are not purchasing a list from us. We install the system into your business and we get paid when the system produces.
Do we get to approve the ads before they run?
Yes. Nothing goes live until you have looked at it and said yes.
You see the video, the copy, the landing page, and the report before a dollar of your money moves. If your name is on the ad, you get to read it first. I will have opinions and I will argue for the version I think is going to work, because that is what you are paying me for, but it is your brand and it is your call.
This is not a formality either. It is the fastest way to catch the thing only you would know, like a product you do not actually install or a claim your state will not let you make.
Is your call center live people or AI, and how long do they work a lead?
Live people. Real employees on the phone, not an AI voice.
We have looked hard at AI voice, and it has gotten better than it was. We do not sell it. I am not going to put a robot on the phone with a homeowner who just raised her hand about replacing every window in her house and tell you that is the same thing as a person.
They work seven days a week, inside the legal calling and texting hours for that homeowner's state, which is a real constraint and not a suggestion. And they work every lead the system produces until one of two things happens: the homeowner books, or she tells us to stop. Not three calls and then the lead sits there. We are relentless about it, and we are respectful about it, and I mean both of those.
Speed matters most on the first attempt, which is the whole point of speed to lead. But persistence is what gets you the second half of your appointments. A homeowner who does not answer on day one is not a dead lead. She is a busy person who filled out a form between two other things.
If you already have a call center of your own that is fast and good, I will usually tell you to pay us per lead and let your own people book, because they will book to your criteria better than anybody else can. If you do not have that, we do it, and that is what our appointment setting side is for.
Can you get both decision makers at the appointment?
Yes, and if you require it, we require it.
We ask for it when we book. It becomes part of the qualifying conversation rather than something your rep discovers standing on the porch. In practice this is rare to fight over. A homeowner who is serious about a project this size expects to sit down with her husband or her wife and hear the number together. The ones who refuse were usually not signing that night anyway, and you would rather find that out on the phone than after a forty-minute drive.
How do you keep my reps from driving across the map all day?
We book hours per location instead of letting the calendar fill in whatever order the leads happen to come in.
Here is the difference. If you take appointments first come first served, you end up with a nine o'clock on one side of the territory, an eleven thirty forty minutes away, and a two o'clock back where you started. That is a rep spending his day in a truck instead of in living rooms. So we set hours by area, and when the homeowner is choosing her time, the times we are offering her are the ones that keep your rep in one part of the map for that block.
She still picks a real time that works for her. We are not telling a homeowner when to be home. But the calendar clusters, and your rep stops zigzagging.
That is a scheduling problem, and I would much rather solve it inside the booking software than solve it by shrinking your service area, which is what most companies do and which costs them leads for no good reason.
What is the difference between your two window systems?
We run two, and they are genuinely different offers, not two versions of the same ad.
The first is the fair-price ad. No fake sale, no countdown timer, no invented discount. The ad says plainly that you install good windows at a fair price. The homeowner who responds to that is a homeowner who is willing to pay a real price for real work, and your salesperson walks into a true conversation instead of walking into a lie that somebody else wrote for him.
The second is the Window Report. The homeowner answers a short set of questions, like how many windows, what she is actually trying to fix, and whether she owns the house. Then we text her a report. It is a real slide deck with your company in it, and inside it she gets a starting-at number or a range for a project like hers, before anyone has been to her house.
Then she books off the report.
That last part is why those appointments close the way they do. She saw a real number and she booked anyway. Nobody is sitting on your couch at eight at night getting sticker shock, and your closer is not spending the first half of the appointment finding out he is talking to somebody who thought whole-house windows cost about what a used car costs. She already priced herself in before he got there.
Typical Meta cost per lead on a Window Report campaign is often around $50 to $75. On a traditional window campaign it is often around $100 to $150. About 20 percent of report leads book an appointment. All of those are typical, and none of them are guarantees.
Twenty percent sounds low until you look at what those appointments do when your rep gets there.
Will you run a buy-two-get-two-free offer for us?
They asked, and my answer was no. Not at the normal per-lead price.
A fake cheap offer trains the wrong buyer. You will get volume, and the volume will feel good for about ten days. Then you notice that the homeowner who answered "buy two get two free" came for the discount and only the discount, and your closer has to spend the first twenty minutes of the appointment unselling the ad that got him in the door. That is a terrible job to hand a good salesperson, and you paid for that first impression on purpose.
An offer like that can exist. It just has to exist as a different, more expensive product, because it takes more work on our end and it hands you a lead that is worth less. I am not going to invent a price for it in a blog post. That is a conversation, and it starts with what you are actually trying to fix.
Should we pay you per lead or per appointment, and what do we keep?
This is the question I want decided on the call, and I want it decided on who follows up, not on which one sounds cheaper.
If you pay per lead, you get every single lead the system generates, and you keep the pipeline. That matters more than people think. The homeowner who does not book this month is still your name, your contact record, your follow-up next spring. Our window lead fee is typically $50 per lead, which is typical and not a guarantee. I recommend this option whenever a company has a call center, or even one dedicated person who calls back fast, seven days a week.
If you pay per appointment, you only pay for the sit. You do not get the leads that did not book, because we are still working those, and we only get paid when one of them books. Per appointment runs $200 to $400. If you do not have real follow-up in-house, this is the honest recommendation, because a lead nobody calls back does not turn into anything.
What we do not do is stack both fees on the same lead. You pay one or the other.
What about the old leads sitting in our CRM?
They asked about that too, because every window company has a database of a few thousand people who asked about windows two years ago and never bought.
That is a separate job and it prices separately. We work that list on a per booked appointment basis, typically $400 per booked appointment, which is typical and not a guarantee. It is a different kind of work than running new traffic, and it deserves its own agreement rather than being quietly folded into the campaign.
Here is the whole picture in one place. Every one of these is typical, and every one of these can move.
| The number | Typical figure | What it actually is |
|---|---|---|
| The numberMeta cost per lead, Window Report campaign | Typical figureAbout $50 to $75 | What it actually isAd spend, paid by you directly to Meta |
| The numberMeta cost per lead, traditional window campaign | Typical figureAbout $100 to $150 | What it actually isAd spend, paid by you directly to Meta |
| The numberReport leads that book an appointment | Typical figureAbout 20 percent | What it actually isBooking rate on report leads |
| The numberAll-in cost of a booked appointment | Typical figureOften about $400 to $500 | What it actually isAd spend plus our fee, combined |
| The numberOur window lead fee | Typical figureTypically $50 per lead | What it actually isPaid to Minyona, only on delivered leads |
| The numberOur per-appointment fee | Typical figure$200 to $400 | What it actually isPaid to Minyona, only on booked appointments |
| The numberOld CRM database | Typical figureTypically $400 per booked appointment | What it actually isSeparate job, separate agreement |
| The numberDispute rate across our clients | Typical figureTypically under 12 percent | What it actually isLeads you clicked dispute on |
If you want to see what those numbers look like against your own close rate and your own average ticket, book a call and we will walk your actual math instead of mine.
What happens when we get a bad lead?
You click dispute. That is it. One click in the platform, and we approve it. There is no investigation, no form, and nobody from my team calling you to ask whether you really tried.
You do not pay Minyona for that lead. You do still pay Meta for it, because Meta already delivered the click and that money left your ad account, not ours. I say that out loud on every call, because it is the part people miss and it is not a fun surprise later.
Across our clients the dispute rate is typically under 12 percent. That is typical, and it is not a guarantee.
What I will not write down is that every dispute is approved forever no matter how many you file, because that is not true, and I am not going to put a promise in writing that I would eventually have to break. If disputes start running far above what is normal, we look at it, and the first thing we look at is which ads are producing them, because usually the problem is an ad and not the client.
Does a new company book worse than a fifteen-year-old brand?
No. Not on the booking.
The homeowner scrolling past the ad is not comparing your founding date to anybody's. She is deciding whether she wants to know what new windows cost. A company that opened last year and a company that opened in 2011 book at the same rate on this, and I have watched it happen enough times to say it plainly.
Where your age shows up is a step later. After she books, she is going to look you up. That is where reviews matter, and that is where a fifteen-year-old brand with four hundred reviews has an advantage over a new one with eleven. So the answer is that being new does not cost you appointments, but it is a good reason to be serious about reviews, because the appointment is not the sale.
Why do contractors leave you?
Almost always because they quit too soon. It is usually around week four.
I want to be honest about what week four looks like, because pretending it is always smooth is how people get talked into things. Some accounts start clean and stay clean. Some take extra innings. The creative needs to be reworked, or the offer needs to be sharpened, or the follow-up on your end is slower than we thought. That is normal, and it is fixable, and the companies that leave usually leave right at the point where we were about to fix it.
What I would rather they do is talk to me. If it is hard, tell me before week four, not after you have already decided. There is almost always something to change, and I would much rather change it than lose you over something neither of us said out loud.
For what it is worth, appointments happen in week one. Jobs often close the day of the appointment. What actually improves with time is not whether the thing works. It is your cost and your consistency.
How fast does this start after the ads turn on?
We are usually live in under a week from the day you sign and connect your Meta assets. First leads often come in inside 12 hours of the ads turning on. Appointments happen in week one.
Those are typical, not guarantees, and the biggest variable is you. The week gets long when the page access has not been granted or the ad approvals are sitting in somebody's inbox. When the assets are connected and the creative is approved, this moves fast.
How much market research do you do before we launch?
Running the ads is the research.
I could spend three weeks building you a deck about your market, and it would look impressive, and Meta would tell us more in four days of live spend than that deck would tell us ever. Real homeowners clicking real ads is the only data that counts, and it is the only data that updates.
The part people have backwards is zip codes. Your daily spend sets your volume, not your zip count. $200 a day is $200 a day in 30 zips or 300. Adding zip codes does not add leads, it just gives the same money a bigger room to find them in. That is worth understanding before you spend a week arguing about a map, which I have watched companies do.
Should we run a bigger service area or a smaller one?
Bigger, usually.
The reason is the homeowners nobody is talking to. Every market has neighborhoods that the canvassers skip and the other window companies have quietly stopped advertising in, and those homeowners still have failing windows. A wider area finds them. A tight area puts you in a bidding war with everybody else over the same handful of zip codes.
Shrinking the map is almost always somebody trying to fix a booking problem with a spend lever. If the real complaint is windshield time, do not cut your service area, cut the drive with clustered hours. You get the same tight days without giving up the leads.
What do the ads actually look like?
Ads that look like ads lose.
The sterile brand ad, the stock photo of a bay window with a logo in the corner and a line about quality and service, gets scrolled past by everyone including your own customers. It is safe and it does nothing. What works is a big swing, something with a real idea in it that makes a homeowner stop and think about her own house.
It is still your company on it. That is not a contradiction. Branded does not mean boring, and a big swing does not mean pretending to be a generic window shell brand. What I am after is an ad that only your company could have run, and that a homeowner watches all the way through because she wants to. There is more on what makes window creative work in our window replacement leads guide.
Can the leads go into the CRM we already use?
Yes. We send them over with Zapier, into whatever you are already running.
Nobody should have to change CRMs to work with a marketing company, and nobody should have to run their business out of two systems because their vendor picked one. Your team keeps working where they already work. You will also see every lead, every appointment, every invoice, and the dispute button inside our platform, but that is for the relationship with us, not a second place your salespeople have to live.
What I would ask if I were sitting on your side of that call
Looking back at their seventeen, the ones that actually predicted whether this was going to work were not the price questions. They were these: is it exclusive, whose ad account is it, who works the lead and for how long, and what happens when a lead is bad. Those four tell you what kind of company you are dealing with, because they are the four where a vendor either gives you a straight answer or starts talking around it.
Everything else is math you can run yourself once you trust the answers.
If you install and sell windows and you want to see what this looks like against your numbers, book a discovery call and bring the real ones. Your close rate, your average ticket, how many appointments your reps can actually run in a week, and what your last vendor cost you. I will tell you which of our two window systems I would run and why, and if I do not think we are a fit, I will tell you that too.
Frequently asked questions
Are Minyona's window leads exclusive?
Yes. Every lead the system generates belongs to one company, and we do not resell the data to anyone else. The ads also run branded as that contractor, on their own Facebook page and ad account, rather than under a generic window-shell brand that exists to collect names.
Who pays for the Facebook ad spend, the contractor or Minyona?
The contractor pays Meta directly. Campaigns run in the contractor's own Meta ad account with their own card on file, so Meta bills them for ad spend. Minyona is paid separately, per lead or per booked appointment. We never fund a client's ads.
Should a window company pay per lead or per appointment?
It depends on who follows up. If you have a call center or a person calling leads back fast, seven days a week, pay per lead, because you keep every lead and the whole pipeline. If you do not, pay per appointment and only pay for the sit. Do not pay both fees on the same lead.
What happens when a window lead is bad?
You click dispute in the platform and we approve it. You do not pay us for that lead. You still pay Meta for the ad spend, because Meta already delivered the click and that money left your account, not ours. Across our clients the dispute rate is typically under 12 percent, which is typical and not a guarantee.
How fast do window leads start after the ads turn on?
We are usually live in under a week from the day you sign and connect your Meta assets. First leads often come in inside 12 hours of the ads turning on, and appointments happen in week one. Those are typical outcomes, not guarantees.