As a home service business owner, you’ve almost always got your hands full. Thankfully, there’s plenty of technology available to make running your business a little bit easier.
Just as you use home service software for handling your day-to-day business needs, you should consider using a customer relationship management (CRM) platform to manage your sales and customer data.
A CRM platform is a tool that makes it easy to keep track of sales opportunities, including new leads, open estimates, and repeat business. It stores information about your customers and handles all the data, so you can just focus on your growing business.
Why should you use a CRM for your home service business?
Among its many benefits, a CRM platform helps streamline your sales process, which can mean increased productivity, better customer service, and higher profit margins. Let’s take a look at some of the specific reasons to use a CRM for contractors and home service businesses.
1. Easily visualize your sales pipeline
A home service CRM puts all of this information into an easy-to-digest visual format that you can understand at a glance. From leads to prospects to repeat customers, you can see who’s at which stage of your sales pipeline, which potential customers are closest to booking appointments, and whether you have enough leads coming through to hit your revenue targets.
2. Forecast revenue more accurately
When all of your customers and opportunities are tracked in a CRM, you can visualize the likelihood of each deal closing, which means you can predict future revenue much more easily and accurately. Since forecasting is crucial for budgeting and keeping your business running smoothly, this is one of the most powerful arguments for using a CRM for contractors.
3. Spend less time managing customer data
As your business grows, it gets harder and harder to keep track of everything that’s happening with your sales process. The bigger your pool of leads and potential customers gets, the more reasons you have to consider switching to a CRM platform. One of the biggest benefits of a CRM for contractors is the ability to automatically keep sales data organized.
4. Deliver better customer service
Since a CRM allows you to track all customer communication in one place, it provides value to your team as well as your customers. A CRM gives you a better understanding of your customers, which improves the customer relationship and creates a better service experience.
Since CRM allows you to track customer requests from sales call to house call, you’ll have an easy time making note of those requests in the CRM. That way, your technicians will be aware of them when completing the job.
5. Never forget to follow-up with leads
In many ways, sales is a numbers game – and it pays to be persistent. So, always remembering to follow-up with potential prospects means you can land more new customers. If you make the effort to put together an estimate for a potential client, but then forget to follow up to ask if they’re ready to book could mean leaving money on the table.
On average, it takes 80% of sales take five follow-ups to close (and only 8% of salespeople bother to follow up that many times!), so a CRM can help you win new business by simply reminding you to follow up consistently.
6. Use data-powered insights to perfect your sales process
A home service CRM can help you uncover insights about your sales process. You can see where each sales opportunity is in your pipeline – from new contacts and leads to open estimates and prospects you need to follow-up with to long-term customers.
Here are some sales metrics you can measure:
- Average close time
- Average job value
- Percentage of closed estimates
- Customer data
- Service people data
- Sales rep data
Tracking these metrics allows you to finetune your sales tactics to close even more deals in less time.
7. Find ways to maximize your revenue
Because a CRM provides you with a bird’s-eye view of your sales pipeline, you can see where there might be any untapped opportunities.
For instance, you can use the information you have about prospects to upsell or cross-sell complementary services related to their original estimate. This might include something like offering a preventative maintenance plan after an HVAC installation.
8. Better ROI on your marketing efforts
Even when you figure out how to maximize your sales revenue, it’s important to ensure your marketing budget is being put to the best use possible.
Since your CRM stores so much customer data, you can identify details like the best times to reach out to make a sale and your most profitable customer types. This gives you a better idea of who to spend your marketing budget on and when to target them with ads for the best return on your investment.
9. Your information is secure yet accessible on-the-go
A modern CRM for contractors allows your team to securely store and access your data from anywhere. All of your data is stored safely in the cloud, so your service technicians can find the information they need on their smartphone wherever they happen to be working that day. Employees with access can make notes on a client’s file, adjust estimates, request specific materials, and move opportunities from one pipeline stage to the next.
