How to Get More Commercial Agent Leads in 2025

James Dooley: If you are a commercial agent and you are looking for a consistent flow of inquiries being built for your business, then this video is for you. Myself and Kasra, we have dealt with a lot of different commercial agents throughout the UK. So we know exactly what works and also what doesn't work when it comes to a correct marketing strategy. And in this video, we're going to give it all away. So Kasra, take it away.

Kasra Dash: So step number one, what I'd be looking to do to grow is a Google Business Profile. If you already have one, I'd be making certain that I would be reaching out to all my existing clients to try to get me as many five star reviews as possible. It's a great way for a Google Business Profile to generate more leads. There's obviously getting citations and doing Google Business Profile posts and uploading photos on there. So that's definitely step one that I would be doing to try to generate more local leads.

James Dooley: So step number two, this is kind of to bolster onto your actual Google Business Profile, is I would be creating dedicated service pages for each of your individual services as SEO optimised pages on your website. The good thing is when you start doing that, it's going to help rank your SEO optimised pages. There's also more likelihood of your Google Business Profile ranking and showing up for those keywords as well. So you're indirectly going to get more phone calls as well.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, for sure. And if you are looking for more local leads, another option that you could be doing is PPC lead generation. That's pay per click within Google or within Bing, where you're trying to target the bottom of the funnel keywords that can generate you some more inquiries. The difficult part is you need to make certain you team up with a good pay per click agency because there is click fraud and there's also needing to build up a negative keyword list, so it's not people applying for jobs. PPC can work well, but in the wrong hands you can waste a lot of money. But it's another way of generating local leads.

James Dooley: Yeah. And then after that you've also got meta ads as well. So like Facebook, Instagram, where the next time when somebody goes on Facebook they might be scrolling and see your ad. There are a few different ways to set up Facebook ads. You've obviously got option A which is lead forms, which is really easy to do. They don't even leave the Facebook platform. They never click on your actual website. The issue with lead forms is that the quality might not be great but you can add more questions to try and up that quality. Then you've also got conversion ads where they get sent through to your website and then they fill out the contact form on your website. So you've got a couple of different options there.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, for sure. And then another way to grow more local leads could be organic social media. Posting regularly on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram. There are lots of different platforms out there. Reddit is quite big nowadays. Quora is quite big if people have questions and you can answer them. So organic social media is another great way to generate more local leads for your business.

James Dooley: With organic social media, I would say it's more of a volume game. You want to make certain that you're constantly uploading whether it's a daily schedule or a weekly schedule. You might say, okay, I want to try and upload five videos a week. And you should try and stick to that, especially when it comes to algorithms like YouTube and Twitter and stuff.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, for sure. What's your thoughts on using any sort of AI agents? If they can team up with someone to use something like N8N to automate and schedule posts on social media. What's your thoughts on leveraging artificial intelligence? It's all the rage nowadays for trying to generate more leads. Would you team up with an AI consultant to set that up?

James Dooley: Yeah. So you can definitely go down that route where you're setting up AI agents to crop videos and autopublish to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and stuff. But another thing that I would also be focusing on is AI search. A lot of people have started to move away from Google. Not everyone because there are billions of people still using it every single day. But there are slowly people starting to search in engines such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok. And if your brand isn't showing up in any of those, you will have an issue showing up and generating leads on those search engines. So that's another thing that I would be focusing on as a company.

Kasra Dash: Yeah. And if you're looking for more business leads in the local area, something else I would definitely be doing is teaming up with some of the tradespeople websites. You've got Checkatrade, Bark, Builder Builder, TrustATrader, Rated People. All these different platforms can generate you more local leads. What I would say is make certain you're tracking your KPIs to see what return on investment you're getting. You should be tracking the cost per lead, the cost per acquisition and how much that's getting you on a return on investment. But tradespeople websites can work very well. Make certain you check out the links in the description because we do quite a lot of different videos comparing Checkatrade with FatRank, Bark with FatRank, Rated People with FatRank, Builder Builder with FatRank. So now I've mentioned FatRank a few times, James, what's your thoughts on lead generation companies as opposed to tradespeople companies?

James Dooley: Yeah. So with lead generation companies, I would say every single one requires due diligence. Make certain that if you're in a specific niche, that lead generation company has generated leads in that industry before. I would also have a strategy call with them. Say this is my budget, this is how many leads I ideally want. Make certain your KPIs align with that lead generation company. You also want to make certain what type of leads they provide. Are they exclusive leads that only go to you or are they shared leads? Shared leads is what a lot of other lead generation companies do like Bark and Checkatrade. Whenever we have spoken to company owners who have used those services, one of their biggest pain points is shared leads. It's a rat race to the bottom of who is cheapest. So that's a couple of things I'd be asking lead generation companies before partnering up with them.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, for sure. If anyone is interested in generating more local leads, I strongly recommend heading over to FatRank.com where we have a commission based lead generation service. That means you only pay a finder's fee on converted jobs. You've nothing to pay on the pay per lead. You've nothing to pay until you get paid. Until you convert that job on a pay per sale basis and you've completed the job and been paid. That's when you only have to pay FatRank.com. So head on over to FatRank.com to see whether you qualify. But I want to expand a little bit further. What is your thoughts on inbound lead generation versus outbound lead generation?

James Dooley: So I always prefer inbound. The conversion rate of not just getting the lead but the lead actually converting into a paying customer is a lot higher. The last stat that I saw was something like 16.1 percent end up converting into a paying customer as opposed to 1.4 percent when it's an outbound lead.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, that's pretty crazy. That's like 12 times more conversion.

James Dooley: Yeah. It's crazy how much more conversion that is. You need to do a lot of volume for outbound, whether it's cold calling or cold email or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. And sometimes you need a lot more staff to do it as well. People sometimes think they're generating free leads but there's still the cost of email sending and the sales team trying to convert them. So I completely agree inbound leads are so much better than outbound leads. But what's your thoughts then on people who ask whether leads are real time? Is real time very important? So as soon as they inquire it comes through to you straight away.

Kasra Dash: Yeah, it's very important. The last stat that we saw internally was if you are able to get a real time lead it converts 60 percent higher. I think it was 63 percent higher. When we got the KPIs down it was about responding in under a minute. We used to think five minutes was good. But when people respond in under a minute, the inquiry comes in and you ring them or email them back saying thanks for the inquiry and get more information.

James Dooley: I'm not saying every company needs to respond in under a minute. There are certain things we look at at FatRank when partnering with businesses. A lot of businesses fall short when they might be away for five days on holiday and they don't have someone to pick up the leads while we're still providing the leads. There are all these little nuances that we look at. But the best thing I would recommend to anyone looking to scale their business and get a consistent flow of high quality leads is to fill out the form at FatRank. The team will tell you if you're the right fit or not and give you feedback on why you're not the right fit and what your next steps should be. I hope you like all the different lead generation strategies we've been through for a commercial agent. If you own or are a commercial agent and you're looking for more leads, make sure you head on over to FatRank.com, fill in the form and hopefully our team will be able to start generating you more leads for a commercial agent business.