CRM & Automation · Builders
CRM for builders, built for the twelve weeks after the quote goes out
Most trades lose enquiries in the first hour. Builders lose them in the third month. A homeowner gets three prices for an extension, then waits on a planning decision, a mortgage offer or a partner coming round to the idea, and by the time they are ready the builder who followed up is the one who starts in spring.
In short
CRM & Automation for builders in the UK needs a different build from an off-the-shelf CRM, and this is how PipelineOS structures it. The pipeline has to be long enough to hold reality without becoming a form-filling exercise. Nine stages covers it: enquiry received, qualified, survey booked, survey done, quote in preparation, quote issued, in follow-up, won and scheduled, on site. The first automation to switch on is Missed-call text-back: recovers a caller who had two other numbers written down. The most common way this goes wrong: a quote sequence borrowed from a trade with a two-day decision cycle.
How we build it
The pipeline has to be long enough to hold reality without becoming a form-filling exercise. Nine stages covers it: enquiry received, qualified, survey booked, survey done, quote in preparation, quote issued, in follow-up, won and scheduled, on site. Add a tenth column that most builders never build and that quietly carries the most value: not yet. That is where the person waiting on a planning determination sits, or the couple who will move in April, and it exists so that they are followed up on a date rather than remembered by accident.
Two automations cover the front end. A missed call texts back within about a minute, because a builder answering a phone from scaffolding is either unsafe or lying. Then the survey confirmation, which in this trade is worth more than it sounds: a text the evening before with the time, the vehicle, who is coming and roughly how long it takes, plus a reply option to move it. Builders lose evenings to no-shows and to houses where nobody mentioned that the drawings had changed, and a single confirmation message removes most of that.
The follow-up sequence is where the trade differs from every other one on this site. Extension quotes are compared over weeks, not days, so a sequence that stops at day seven has effectively not run. Day two checks the figure arrived and made sense. Day ten offers a walk-through of the schedule of works, because homeowners cannot read a schedule of works and are usually too embarrassed to say so. Day twenty-four sends two completed projects of the same type. Day forty asks whether the plan is still live and offers a start date. Day sixty moves them to the not-yet column with a review date rather than marking them lost, and the seasonal message in January about the spring diary is frequently what wakes them up.
What runs automatically
What fires, when, and what it stops you losing. Every one of these runs without anybody remembering to do it.
| Automation or stage | What triggers it | What it recovers |
|---|---|---|
| Missed-call text-back | Any inbound call that rings out, seven days a week, including the ones that arrive while you are on a ladder or in a merchant | Recovers a caller who had two other numbers written down. For a trade that cannot safely answer a phone for most of the working day, it is the automation with the shortest payback. |
| Survey confirmation and reschedule | Booked survey, twenty-four hours before the appointment, with a reply option to move it | Stops the wasted evening. It also surfaces the jobs that have quietly changed or gone cold before you drive there, which is time you never get back. |
| The sixty-day quote sequence | Quote marked as issued in the pipeline, running at day two, ten, twenty-four, forty and sixty | This is the one that pays for the system. Extension decisions take weeks and the contact at day forty regularly finds a homeowner who assumed you had moved on. |
| The not-yet list with review dates | An enquiry marked as waiting on planning, finance, a house move or a season, each with a date the system will surface it again | Converts the enquiry you would otherwise never think about again. A planning determination takes about eight weeks and almost nobody diarises the week after it. |
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Call 07443 392243WhatsAppWhat the build involves
The build is configuration rather than software. The stages get agreed with whoever actually answers the phone, the messages get written in your voice rather than lifted from a template library, the mobile everybody really rings gets routed so that a ring-out is detectable, and every enquiry route — website form, Google Business Profile, Facebook, the architect who passes work on — lands in one place. A platform subscription is paid directly to the software vendor and is their charge, not ours.
Now price the leak, because that is the only number that matters. Take a builder fielding twenty-five enquiries a month. Working on site, a third of the calls go unanswered and perhaps half of those callers leave no voicemail and never try again: call it four lost conversations a month, or around fifty a year. Separately, of the eight quotes issued each month, most firms chase two and forget the rest. If one quote a quarter is lost purely to silence, and an extension at £40,000–£90,000 carries a gross margin somewhere around fifteen to twenty per cent, that is roughly £24,000–£70,000 of gross profit a year walking off because nobody sent a message at day forty. Run your own version of that sum with the cost per lead calculator and the definitions in the glossary.
Four ways this goes wrong
- A quote sequence borrowed from a trade with a two-day decision cycle. Three messages in a week reads as desperate to somebody who is waiting on a planning officer.
- Marking an enquiry lost because they said not yet. Not yet is the most valuable status a builder has and it needs a review date, not an archive.
- Putting the whole job into the CRM — materials, day rates, variations, invoices — until it duplicates the job management software and nobody updates either.
- Automating the follow-up in a voice that is obviously not yours. A homeowner about to spend sixty thousand pounds notices immediately, and it undoes the trust the quote built.
The two pages behind this one
This page is the intersection. For the wider picture:
CRM & Automation in general
Everything about marketing for builders
Questions
Will chasing a quote for two months annoy people?
It depends entirely on what the messages say. Five contacts that each carry something — a walk-through of the schedule, two similar completed projects, an honest note about the spring diary — read as attentive. Five that say just checking in read as pestering. We write the wording with you, keep it short, and make every message easy to stop.
Does this replace my job management software?
No. The CRM owns enquiries, surveys, quotes and follow-up, which is where builders lose money. Scheduling, materials, variations and invoicing stay wherever they are now, and the two are linked so that a job marked complete triggers the snagging check and the review request rather than being retyped.
I only get twenty enquiries a month. Is it worth it?
Ask a different question: how many quotes did you issue last quarter and how many of them did you chase more than once? If the answer is most of them, you probably do not need this yet and you would do better putting the money into demand. If the answer is the first two and then it got busy, the enquiries are not your problem.
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