Contents
01The six things that matter
A service business sells capacity: an appointment, a visit, an installation, an hour. The CRM is there to make sure no request for that capacity goes unanswered and that you can see where the paid-for requests came from. Everything else is secondary.
In the implementations we do, these six requirements decide whether the system gets used after month two.
- Every enquiry lands automatically, from the site, the phone, the chat, the marketplace, with no copying by hand.
- Source, campaign and landing page are captured at the moment of the enquiry, not reconstructed afterwards.
- One named owner per enquiry, assigned by a rule rather than by whoever notices first.
- A next step with a date on every open record, so nothing sits in a stage with no action attached.
- A written definition of a qualified lead, used by the same field that reporting counts.
- Closed revenue sent back to the ad platforms, so bidding optimises on deals instead of form fills.
If the system cannot do the first two without a person, nothing built on top of it will be trustworthy.
02What looks important and usually is not
Pipeline stages get most of the attention in demos and cause most of the abandoned implementations. Seven stages with required fields at each one is a process for a team of twelve with a sales manager. For a four person service business it is a tax on every enquiry, and people route around it by keeping a private spreadsheet.
Lead scoring has the same problem. It needs history to be worth anything, and a business doing forty enquiries a month does not have enough of it. Start with a rule you can explain in one sentence and revisit it when you have a year of outcomes.
- Elaborate pipelines: start with three stages and add one only when you can say what decision it informs.
- Scoring models before you have data: a rule written by your best closer beats a model trained on nothing.
- Dashboards for everyone: one weekly report the owner reads beats twelve nobody opens.
- Email sequences, until the first reply goes out inside the hour. Automation after the basics, not instead of them.
03The phone is the part people forget
At most service businesses the larger enquiries arrive by phone, and the phone is exactly what a standard CRM setup does not see. Calls go to a mobile, get answered or missed, and leave no record. Then the monthly report shows web form conversions and everyone draws conclusions from the cheaper half of the demand.
Call tracking with a number per campaign, recordings attached to the record, and missed calls created as records rather than silently dropped: that is the single change that most often reframes how a business sees its own marketing. It is also the change that makes the paid traffic reporting worth reading.
04How to test a CRM before you commit
Run four checks with your own data instead of watching a demo with theirs. Submit an enquiry from your phone with a tracking blocker turned on and see what arrives. Call your main number outside business hours and look for the record. Export last month and count how many enquiries have no source. Then ask one person on the team to find the oldest open record without an owner.
A system that passes those four is worth configuring. One that fails them will fail them the same way in production, and no amount of training fixes an enquiry that was never captured.
Ask the vendor or the implementer to run these four checks in front of you. The answer to a demo request is quick; the answer to this one is informative.
05What we do and what it costs
Our CRM and integration work starts at $7,500: capture from every channel, call tracking, assignment rules, the qualified lead definition agreed in writing, and closed revenue sent back to the ad platforms. We work inside the system you already pay for where it can do the job, and say so when it cannot.
If you are not sure which system fits, discovery is fixed price at $2,400 and takes three working days. It produces the requirements, the integrations and the honest answer about whether your current tool needs replacing or configuring. The document is yours whether or not we do the work.
Questions
Which CRM do you recommend?
It depends on where your enquiries come from and what the team already uses daily. We have implemented on several and have no reseller arrangement with any of them, which is the only position from which the recommendation is worth anything. The requirements above are the same whichever one you pick.
Can we keep using spreadsheets?
For a handful of enquiries a week, honestly yes, and we will say so rather than sell you a system. The point where it stops working is when two people touch the same enquiry, or when you start buying traffic and need to know which spend produced which deal.
How long does an implementation take?
Capture, call tracking and assignment are usually live within two to three weeks. Reporting on closed revenue takes a cycle longer, because it needs real deals flowing through the new definitions before the numbers mean anything.
Where we can help