The contractor whose quotes disappear
A general contractor with four crews. Enquiries arrive by phone, text, Facebook message, the website form and word of mouth. Quotes go out. Some turn into jobs. Nobody could tell you what happened to the rest.
This is an illustrative walkthrough, not a customer. Nobody named, nothing measured, no outcome claimed — it is here so you can follow a situation like your own and see how we would think about it.
What it looks like from inside
- Enquiries live in five different places, none of them shared
- Quotes are sent and then followed up if somebody remembers
- Two people occasionally quote the same job
- The owner is the only one who knows the full picture
- Nobody can answer how many quotes were sent last month, or how many landed
The actual problem
This is not disorganisation. It is a business that grew past the point where one person's memory is sufficient infrastructure, without anyone noticing the moment it happened. The cost is invisible because a quote that was never followed up does not complain.
How we would approach it
- Make every enquiry land in one placeWhichever channel it arrives on, it becomes one record with one owner and one next action. This is the whole of it — everything else is detail.
- Make follow-up a property of the systemA quote that has been out for five days without a reply prompts somebody. Not because people are careless, but because remembering is not a process.
- Make intake structuredA form that asks the questions needed to quote, so the first call is about the job rather than about gathering facts that could have been collected in advance.
- Make the numbers visibleHow many enquiries came in, how many were quoted, how many closed. Not a dashboard — three numbers the owner actually looks at.
What changes
- Every enquiry has one record and one person responsible
- Follow-up happens whether or not anybody remembered
- The same job stops being quoted twice
- The owner can answer how the month went without reconstructing it from memory
A CRM does not win work. It stops work being lost, which is a different and smaller claim — but it is one that can actually be measured, and it usually turns out to be the larger number.
- CRM & Lead Management
- Booking, Forms & Intake
- Workflow Automation
- Professional Email
Questions people actually ask
Do we need a CRM, or would a spreadsheet do?
For a handful of quotes a month, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine and we will say so. The point at which it stops working is usually when more than one person needs to see it at once, or when follow-up starts depending on memory.
Will the crews actually use it?
Only if it is less work than what they do now. Anything that adds steps for the people on site gets abandoned within a month. The intake and the follow-up are where the automation belongs, not the field.
What happens to the enquiries already scattered everywhere?
Historic ones usually stay where they are. What matters is that everything from a given date forward arrives in one place — trying to migrate five years of Facebook messages first is how these projects stall.
Other worked examples