The home services snapshot

A contractor buying a CRM gets an empty database and a help centre. The gap between that and a working setup is a fortnight of decisions most owners do not have time for, so those decisions are written down here.

Nothing here replaces the field service software. Dispatch, routing, the price book and invoicing stay where they are. This is the sales layer that sits beside them.

1. Two pipelines

• Service: Call received (20%), Scheduled (60%), Completed, Invoiced. Short and mostly administrative.
• Replacement or project: Lead (10%), Estimate scheduled (25%), Estimate sent (40%), Follow-up 1 (45%), Follow-up 2 (50%), Financing (65%), Sold, Lost.
• The three follow-up stages exist so an unanswered estimate is visibly stuck rather than quietly forgotten.

2. Dispositions

• Call outcomes: booked, quoted, voicemail, wrong number, price shopper, emergency transferred.
• Loss reasons: price, went with a competitor, repaired instead, postponed, could not finance, no answer.
• Job types: service call, repair, replacement, maintenance agreement, warranty.

3. Segments

• Estimates sent more than three days ago with no reply.
• Maintenance agreements expiring within sixty days.
• Customers with no visit in twenty-four months.
• Customers who declined recommended work, by job type.
• Commercial property managers, if the business sells to them, kept separate from residential.

4. Cadences

• Unsold estimate, four steps over twenty-one days. Day 1 offer to walk through it, day 5 address the unspoken objection, day 12 offer a smaller scope, day 21 close the file.
• Agreement renewal, three steps at sixty, thirty and seven days before expiry.
• Reactivation, three steps over fourteen days for customers past two years.
• Declined work, two steps timed to the season the work belongs to rather than to the date it was declined.
• Post-job review request, one message, once per customer.

5. Channels

• The office mailbox connected over IMAP and SMTP.
• The website form pointed at the inbound endpoint, tested with a real submission.
• Calendly or your booking link connected so bookings become meetings with the source recorded.
• Lead source recorded on every lead, including the ones from Google Local Services.

6. Knowledge base

• Brands installed and serviced, service area by postcode or radius, financing partner and terms.
• Maintenance agreement terms and what they include.
• Emergency policy: what counts as one, and what the office does about it out of hours.

7. Agent policy and guardrails

• Inbox agent in review, drafting replies to homeowner enquiries.
• Three days minimum between touches per contact.
• Business-hours send window, so a step whose timer expires at 2am waits.
• Suppression on unsubscribe and bounce, in auto.
• Kill switch owner named, usually the office manager rather than the owner.

Homeowner mobile numbers are consumer numbers, so the TCPA applies to marketing texts and calls to them. Consent has to be recorded before the first message rather than assumed because somebody once bought a furnace. SalesCrew enforces suppression and opt-out; the consent is yours to collect, and this is not legal advice.

The SMS steps in the cadences above are email steps today. Two-way SMS, missed-call text-back and reminders that send are on the roadmap, so build the sequences on email now and add the text channel when it ships.