Essential Features Your Contractor CRM Must Have

If you’re running a contracting business, like roofing, painting, or general contracting, then you need to have a CRM to help you manage the business.

However, a lot of contractors don’t even realize that they may be leaving money on the table by using an outdated or generic CRM. Investing in software to manage your operations is essential for your success.

In this article, we’ll break down why you need a specialized CRM for your contracting business and the features it must have for you to make a lot more money.

What is a CRM?

A CRM, or Customer Relationship Management tool, is a special software for home service contractors. It helps you keep track of your customers, their needs, and all your work with them. With a CRM, you can remember who needs a repair, when to follow up, and how to keep your customers happy. 

It can also help manage jobs with your subcontractors, if it’s set up correctly.

It makes your job easier by organizing information so you can focus on doing great work and growing your business. 

If you invest in a CRM for your contracting business that has all the features you need, you can save a ton of time and make a lot more money. A CRM like Real Grow will help you systemize your business so that you can work on the business, instead of in the business.

Why Should You Invest in Contractor Software?

You and your team have worked hard to start and grow your contracting business. You’ve done some amazing work and have built a team that you’re proud of. But as your business gets bigger, it can be tough to keep track of everything.

Relying on spreadsheets, memorization and your phone’s contact app isn’t going to cut it anymore. 

CRM software can make things easier for you and your team. It helps organize your tasks so you can focus on making your business even better.

When you choose the right CRM software, it can help your team work better, boost sales, make customers happier, and help your business succeed.

A proper CRM can make or break your company. But when you choose the right one, it can help you dominate over your competition. 

Here Are The Essential Features Your Contractor CRM Software Must Have

1. Contact Management

Contact management is the foundation of any CRM platform.

It helps businesses collect and organize important information about their customers and new leads. This makes it easier to build strong relationships and keep your customers happy.

Customer profiles include details about their property, including their address, and the services that they’ve requested for you. It also gives you an overview of all the communications you’ve had with them. This gives you a complete view of your sales process, helping you manage relationships and gather useful feedback to improve your marketing, sales, and customer service.

Having good contact management is very important in a CRM. Make sure to choose a simple and easy-to-use tool that has all the features you need. Some of the best CRM software, like Real Grow CRM, even offer templates for customer profiles, making it easy to collect all the information about your contacts.

2. Contractor Automations

Automated CRM workflows makes your work easier. Workflows are systems and communications that happen automatically, without you needing to do anything. It’s like magic. 

With workflow automations, your CRM software can do certain actions on its own based on events that happen on your team or with customers. Here are some examples:

• When a lead fills out a form on your website, the CRM software sends a notification to your team letting them know they have a new lead. 
• Then, CRM software automatically sends a text message and/or email to the lead to let them know their message was received. It can even ask them questions about the job. 
• If a lead or customer doesn’t reply to your message, the CRM software can send  follow-up messages to get them scheduled for an estimate. 
• After you’ve sent an estimate to the lead to do a job, a series of follow up emails can be sent to the lead to keep you top-of-mind with them. 
• After you’ve completed a job, you can have texts automatically sent to the customer to ask them for a Google review. 

These are just a few examples, but there are literally hundreds of ways that you can set up automations to help you save a lot of time and make your customers’ experiences better.

3. Marketing Automations

Look for CRM software that can also help with marketing tasks, not just sales.

Marketing automation makes it easier to reach your customers while spending less time. For example, with Real Grow, there are 2 primary ways that you can automate marketing tasks: you can use the Social Media Planner or the Direct Mail tool.

Social Media Planning

A social media planner is a simple yet powerful tool that helps you organize and schedule all your social media posts in advance, saving you tons of time and hassle. Instead of logging in every day to post updates, you can plan out your content for the week or month in one sitting. This makes it easier to stay consistent and reach your audience without worrying about missing any posts. It’s a must-have for busy contractors and business owners who want to focus on their work without spending extra time on social media.

Direct Mail Publishing

Real Grow’s CRM allows business to drive more leads with direct mail campaigns.

A direct mail campaign is a marketing strategy where a business sends advertisements, like postcards or flyers, straight to a homeowner’s door. This approach allows businesses to reach potential customers in a personal way, right in their mailbox.

For home service contractors, this can be a great way to promote your services, offer special deals, or remind homeowners about seasonal maintenance. Direct mail stands out because it gives people something tangible to hold, making your business more memorable.

Plus, it’s hyper-targeted, so you can focus on specific neighborhoods or homes, making sure your message reaches the right audience.

4. Complete Customization

No two businesses are the same, so the best CRM software will fit your business’s special needs with customization options. Some CRMs let you pick which features to include in your plan. Others let you add custom contact fields, choose what to show on your dashboard, and make special reports. Many CRMs also offer extra options, like plugins and add-ons, to give your software more abilities.

For example, at Real Grow, every subscription includes a done-for-you setup. Our team will sit down with you to deeply understand your businesses needs and then build out the entire software around the way you run your business. It takes just a week or two to build an entire CRM, customized to how your business operates.

5. Estimates, Proposals, Quotes

The best CRM’s for contractors allow you to send beautifully designed estimates and proposals, straight from your phone.

As you’ve probably experienced, the contractors who get the best quote out to customers the fastest usually end up winning the job.

Real Grow has a custom Proposal engine, completely customized to your buisness, setup for you by our team. We’ll take all the factors about the work you do: square footage, inputs, costs, time, teams, etc. And we’ll make an easy-to-use proposal template that you can send out to customers in minutes.

Even further, you can collect deposits and signatures right there on the job site.

The problem is that many contractors use completely different tools for estimating, so they have tools all over the place. That’s why it’s great to have an all-in-one software to manage your contracting business.

6. AI Capabilities

Contractors can use AI in their CRM systems to land more jobs and save time by automating key tasks like responding to customer inquiries, scheduling appointments, and following up on leads.

For example, an AI-powered chatbot can be set up on their website to instantly answer common questions, such as pricing or availability, even after hours. This chatbot can gather information from potential customers, like the type of project they need, and add it directly into the CRM system.

It can then schedule follow-up calls or send quotes, allowing the contractor to focus on the actual work while still capturing leads. This kind of automation can keep the business running smoothly 24/7, increase conversions, and ensure no leads are missed.

7. Scheduling

Scheduling jobs, quotes, follow ups, and sub-contractors is a huge time waster for owners of contracting businesses. It takes up a lot of time.

The best CRM’s have scheduling tools built in. These schedulers can automatically book in leads for new quotes, they can plan out entire jobs, and even bring in your various sub contractors to get the job done.

When setup correctly, you can save at least 10 hours per week (or more) on scheduling, so you can focus on more important things.

8. Bring In The Whole Team

A lot of CRM’s for contractors will bring you in at a low monthly price. Sounds great right?

But then they turn around and charge you even more money for every employee on your team.

Next thing you know, you’re spending hundreds, maybe even thousands every month just because you need to have the whole team integrated in your operations.

With Real Grow, you can have unlimited users with no additional charge.

That means you can bring in:

• Yourself
• Your sub contractors
• Your account managers
• Your technicians
• Your assistants
• Virtually anyone on your team

That way, everyone’s on the same page, and you don’t have to worry about a rising monthly bill eating away at your profits.

These are just a few of the features that your contractor CRM must have, if you’d like a full demo of the Real Grow system, click this link to schedule a no-obligation demo call. We’ll show you all of the capabilities and see if it would make sense to integrate into your company.