A CRM for tradespeople: quotes, jobs and the follow-up you forgot

Most trades do not need a CRM. They need to stop losing the quote they forgot to chase, the boiler customer whose service was due in March, and the number of the woman who rang about her kitchen while they were under a sink. That is a smaller problem than the CRM industry thinks it is, and it is the problem this guide is about.

If you have ever searched for "CRM for tradesmen" you will have found software built for sales teams: pipelines, lead scoring, dashboards, a price per user per month and a demo with a rep. None of it was written by anyone who has priced a bathroom from a van. Here is what you actually need, what you can ignore, and how to run it in ten minutes a day.

Where the money goes missing

Ask a busy tradesperson where they lose work and they will say "the big firms" or "the cheap lads on Facebook". Watch the business for a month and it is almost always one of these:

• The quote nobody chased. You visited, you measured, you wrote it up that evening, you sent it. Then the week filled up and you never checked in. A third of those customers were waiting for you to.
• The enquiry that never got written down. The call came while you were on a job. You said you would ring back. You did not, because there was nowhere to put it.
• The service that was due. Boilers, gutters, decking oil, alarm batteries, annual electrical checks. Work that comes round every year, from customers who already trust you, and that goes to whoever reminds them first.
• The job you finished and forgot to invoice. More common than anyone admits, and the most expensive of the four.

None of these is a marketing problem. They are all the same problem: nothing tells you what to do today. A CRM, stripped of the sales-team parts, is just the thing that does.

The five things a trade CRM has to do

1. Take an enquiry in ten seconds, one-handed. Name, number, one line about the job, and when you will call back. If it takes longer than that you will not do it on site, and if you do not do it on site the enquiry is gone.
2. Show you a list every morning. Who to ring back, which quotes to chase, which jobs to confirm. Not a dashboard: a list, in order, with a phone button next to each name.
3. Chase quotes without you remembering to. When a quote goes out, the follow-ups should be booked at that moment: a few days later, a week after that, and a "shall I close the file?" a month on. When the customer says yes or no, the chases should disappear.
4. Know every customer's history. The phone rings, the name comes up, and before you say hello you can see what you did for them, what you quoted, and what they said last time.
5. Tell you who has gone quiet. Customers you have not spoken to in six months or a year, with a one-tap way to book a check-in. This is where the repeat work lives, and no diary does it for you.

Everything else is optional. Most of it is noise.

What you can ignore

• Lead scoring and sales sequences. You know which jobs are worth having. You do not need an algorithm to rank twelve enquiries.
• Email marketing. A newsletter from a plumber is a strange thing. The follow-up that works is a text with the customer's name on it.
• Per-user pricing. It is you, and maybe one other person. A price that climbs when you take on an apprentice is a price designed for someone else.
• Integrations with twenty other apps. Your accounts software knows about a job once it is invoiced. The CRM's job is everything before that. One link to where the quote PDF lives is enough.
• Anything that needs a setup day. If it comes with training videos, it is for a company with an office manager.

The quote-to-job routine

Here is the whole system, as it looks on a working week. It assumes a phone in your pocket and nothing else.

Three or four minutes across the life of the job, and the part most trades skip, the eleven-month check-in, is what brought the bathroom in. The follow-up guide has the words to use at each step.

Spreadsheet or app?

An honest answer: for your first thirty or so customers, a spreadsheet does this. Our free client list template has the next-action and next-date columns, turns overdue rows red, and has a Today sheet that lists who to ring. It costs nothing and needs no account.

It stops working at a predictable point: the day you are standing in someone's kitchen and the spreadsheet is on the laptop at home. Trades live on the phone, and a client list that is not in your pocket is a client list you stop using. That is the moment for an app, and the test of a good one is whether you can take an enquiry in it with a tap and a thumb while the other hand holds a torch. For the full comparison, see CRM spreadsheet vs CRM app.

How Sheetsmith CRM does the five things

We built it around exactly this list, so here is how it maps, plainly.

• The enquiry: an orange New enquiry button on every screen takes a name, a number, one line and a call-back date in one save.
• The morning list: the first screen is Today: what is overdue, what is due, and which open quotes have no chase booked. A call, text or WhatsApp button sits beside every name and opens your own phone app.
• Quotes that chase themselves: move a deal to your quote stage and a bar asks "Book the chase?": one tap books follow-ups at 3 days, 10 days and a month, skipping weekends. They are removed by themselves when the deal is won or lost. Save your usual chase text once and send it filled in with the customer's name.
• History: every customer has one page with their details, a timeline of calls and jobs, their quotes and a link to where the quote PDF lives in your Drive or Dropbox. Search by name, number or tag.
• Gone quiet: a list of customers with nothing booked whom you have not spoken to in six months, and repeating follow-ups that come round every year or every eleven months for the service work.

It also lists won work that has not been paid, with a running total, for the fourth leak above. It is free for 30 days with every feature and no card, then free up to 25 contacts, £5 a month plus VAT for unlimited, or £12 for a team of up to five. It is hosted in the UK, has no adverts and no tracking, and exports everything in one click if you leave. Your spreadsheet imports into it in one step.

Getting started in an evening

1. Download the free client list template or sign up for the CRM. Either is fine; the habit is the same.
2. Put in your last twenty customers from your invoices, with one line each about what you did.
3. Put in every open quote, with a chase date.
4. Set a yearly follow-up on anyone whose work comes round: boilers, gutters, decking, alarms, checks.
5. Tomorrow morning, open the Today list before the van starts. Work down it. That is the whole system.

Common questions

Do I really need a CRM as a one-person trade? You need the habit: a list of who to contact today, kept somewhere you will look. A notebook does it until the notebook stays in the van. The software is for when you want the list in your pocket and the chases booked for you.

What about Checkatrade, MyBuilder or the job apps? They bring the enquiry. They do nothing once you have quoted. The CRM starts where they stop.

Can it do my invoicing? No, on purpose. Keep invoicing in your accounts software or the free quote and invoice generator. The CRM tracks that the job is won and not yet paid; the invoice itself lives where your accountant can see it.

Will my customers' details be safe? Under UK GDPR you can keep a customer's contact details to do business with them; keep what you need and nothing more, and delete someone's details if they ask. Sheetsmith's CRM is hosted in London, encrypted and backed up, and never reads or uses what you store. General information, not legal advice.

I have 300 customers in my phone. How do I get them in? Export your phone contacts to a CSV (every phone can), tidy out the family and the takeaway, and import. You see a preview before anything is saved.