A Google Business Profile leaks more about a company's health than most people realise. Four public numbers tell you whether they can afford you, whether they need you, and what to open with.
The average cold call to a local business takes six minutes including the dial, the gatekeeper and the note. Two hundred badly-sorted leads is twenty hours. The same twenty hours against a sorted list is a different business.
This is how to sort, using only what is visible on the listing before you pick up the phone.
Roughly one to three percent of happy customers leave a Google review unprompted. It varies by trade — restaurants far higher, trades and B2B services far lower — but within a single category it is stable enough to compare businesses against each other.
That gives you a crude but useful read on scale:
| Review count | Likely reading | What it means for you |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | New, dormant, or never asks | Cheap to reach, may not have budget. Verify they trade. |
| 1–10 | Small, early, or offline-driven | Best fit for starter services. Price-sensitive. |
| 11–50 | Established, steady | Has budget, feels competition. The sweet spot. |
| 51–200 | Successful, likely has help | Can afford you; may already have an agency. |
| 200+ | Dominant or multi-site | Usually already served. Long sales cycle. |
The band that converts best for most local service agencies is 11 to 50. Big enough to have money, small enough to still be the owner answering the phone, and established enough to feel the competitor outranking them.
Rating is not a quality score for your purposes. It is a routing instruction.
The most overlooked segment: high rating, low review count — a 4.9 from eleven reviews. This is a good business that nobody knows about. They deliver, they just do not market. That is the easiest "you deserve to be found" conversation in local sales, and almost nobody targets it because it does not look impressive in a list.
An unclaimed listing is one nobody has ever logged into. Google created it from other data, and the owner has never verified it.
That is a strong signal in two directions at once. It means nobody is managing their online presence — no agency, no marketing person, nobody. And it means they may not know the listing exists, which makes for a memorable opening: "Did you know you have a Google listing you cannot edit, and it shows the wrong opening hours?"
The catch is that unclaimed listings often have no phone number and no website, so reaching them can mean turning up in person or writing. Weigh the effort against the low competition.
Review velocity — how recently the reviews arrived — is the most telling signal and the only one not in any export, because Maps does not expose review dates in the results list.
Forty reviews with the most recent eighteen months ago is a business that has declined, or one that stopped asking. Forty reviews with six from this month is one actively growing. Same number in your spreadsheet, completely different conversation.
It costs about fifteen seconds to check on the listing itself. Do it for your shortlist, not your whole list — which is the point of having a shortlist.
Put this in a column next to your export. It is deliberately crude; a model nobody runs is worth nothing.
| Condition | Points |
|---|---|
| No website | +3 |
| Unclaimed listing | +2 |
| Review count 11–50 | +2 |
| Rating 3.5–4.2 | +2 |
| Rating under 3.5 | +1 |
| Rating 4.8+ with fewer than 20 reviews | +2 |
| Has a phone number | +1 |
| Review count over 200 | −2 |
| Name matches a known chain | −5 |
Sort descending. Call from the top. Anything at 5 or above is worth a considered approach; below 2, do not spend a dial on it.
In a spreadsheet that is one formula:
=IF(D2="",3,0) + IF(H2="NO",2,0)
+ IF(AND(F2>=11,F2<=50),2,0)
+ IF(AND(E2>=3.5,E2<=4.2),2,0)
+ IF(E2<3.5,1,0)
+ IF(AND(E2>=4.8,F2<20),2,0)
+ IF(C2<>"",1,0)
+ IF(F2>200,-2,0)Be honest about the limits, or you will over-trust the score.
The score is for deciding who to call first, not for deciding what is true.
Rating, review count, claimed status, website presence and phone all come through in the export from Maps Business Extractor, so the scoring column above works directly against a fresh CSV. You can also filter on most of them before collection, which means the low-scoring rows never reach your spreadsheet at all.