Do You 'Do' CRM?

So, we have been wondering lately what you (our clients) 'do' with the leads that find you through our website marketing service. What I mean is this: after a lead comes through to you, either through a phone call inquiry or an email form submission inquiry, where does it 'go'?

Or, if you're not already a client of ours, you still get leads...so I'm wondering what, on average, happens to your new customer inquiries. I could imagine that a lot of times, the potential customer's contact info gets typed into a spreadsheet somewhere, or maybe it's sent via email to the dispatcher. I could even imagine, in some cases, the caller's information gets jotted down on a post-it note, and stuck to someone's computer monitor. In the worst cases, the information might not be written down at all - if you're busy with something else or just hoping to call the person back after checking their Caller ID.

These are the things we have started really thinking about...now that our network of contractor marketing sites delivers 4-digit lead volumes per month. We are working hard to identify tools that we could develop and provide to you for free, as part of our pay-for-performance service, that would help you to more conveniently track your leads, follow up on them, deliver the information to your service team, or calculate your ROI on those leads.

We've got a lot of ideas for things we can do, but it would be most helpful if you could give us some information about what systems you currently use, and what you might like from us. As you may already know, we're working day and night, literally, to build a platform that gives you easy access to lead reports and many other tools to manage your online account with us. For example, we are going to set up your lead tracking interface in our platform so that you can input your own information about the leads that we've delivered to you, such as 'Notes about the caller' or 'Callback number and time of day', and even 'appointment time', if relevant. In addition, a simple 'Email This Lead' button might help you - so that you could forward the customer's information, along with their address and appointment information, directly to the dispatcher...without copying and pasting the information into a spreadsheet or an email. What would you think about that?

So as we build out different functions for this platform, we have a lot of decent ideas, but we really wanted to stop and ask you...what sort of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools do you use? Perhaps you've tried SalesForce.com or some other CRM tool that works especially well for home service providers? Or do you have some other method of tracking customer lead status and following up with them? Another one of the things we have thought about working to develop is an easy method of exporting your lead data from our system and importing those leads into a service like SalesForce.com. What would you think of that? We're thinking of that in the same way as 'Quickbooks and TurboTax' - those two services are so useful because of the interoperability of the data - once you've finished putting your your financial records in Quickbooks, the data can easily be imported into TurboTax for calculating your taxes. It's this 'network effect' that makes both services infinitely more useful.

In the same way, we would like to make the lead data we provide to you equally useful and transport-able to your CRM...or just deploy the most important CRM-type features into the platform we're building. So if you're up for it, leave us a comment to let us know what you do...what systems do you use, if any, for managing customer lead data. If you currently use some in-house method, then what would be the most useful tools for us to provide you with? If the person answering your phones could type the lead information directly into the lead tracking platform we provide for you, could that possibly make it easier to record information on the lead, and ultimately close more jobs? Give us some feedback and tell us what we can do to help you keep track of leads and make the most of them. After all, these leads are exclusive and service-ready, so the better our system helps you to close more business, then the happier we will all be!