How do I keep track of leads from calls, forms, texts, and marketplace sites in one place?
Put every inquiry in one list with a name on it, however it arrived, so nothing depends on which inbox someone checked. In many home service businesses a call goes to the owner's cell phone, a web form goes to an email inbox, and a marketplace lead sits in an app. When each one lives somewhere different, nobody can see the whole picture, and the inquiries nobody saw are the ones that end up with another company.
Why do leads get lost when they come in from different places?
Each way a customer reaches you tends to have its own inbox and its own person watching it. The owner answers the calls on his cell phone. The office manager checks the email where the website forms go. A text lands on whichever phone number the customer happened to have, and the marketplace app sends a notification that gets swiped away in the middle of a job. Everyone is doing their part, and still nobody can see every inquiry at once.
These losses happen quietly, without anyone deciding to ignore a customer. A form goes to an old email address that nobody reads anymore, or a text arrives on a Friday afternoon and is forgotten by Monday. The customer who sent it does not wait around to find out what happened, and a week later they are someone else's job.
What does one list with a name on it look like?
Every inquiry lands in the same list the moment it arrives, whether it came from a call, a form, a text, or a marketplace site. Each one shows who the customer is, what they asked for, and where they found you. Each one also has a named person responsible for it, so nobody has to guess whose job the callback is.
The owner can look at that list from the truck and see what is new and what has been answered. He gets an alert when a new inquiry comes in and a list each morning of the calls still waiting for a reply. After a hailstorm, when a roofing company may hear from more people in a day than in a normal week, that list shows exactly who is still waiting for a call.
What happened when an accessibility company brought its inquiries into one list?
LiveWell Mobility is an accessibility and mobility company in Texas that is expanding from one city to three. Its inquiries were spread across six inboxes. Home Service Guild brought them into one list and integrated that list with the company's Housecall Pro account.
With everything in one list, the company could see the inquiries that had slipped through and go back and work them. It owns every account that was set up.
Where should the one list live?
The best place is usually the software you already use to run jobs, so an inquiry can become a quote and then a job without anyone typing the customer's details again. For many businesses that is field service software like Jobber or Housecall Pro. Whether a small business needs field service software is its own question, and the answer depends on how many jobs and people you are keeping track of.
With every inquiry in one list, following up gets easier too. Once the quotes you send live in that same list, you can see which ones are still open and follow up until the customer gives you an answer.
What a fix looks like
In a business that has fixed this, the owner and the office work from the same list, so the question of whether anyone called a customer back is answered by looking at it instead of asking around. When the office manager takes a day off, whoever covers the phone can open the list and see every inquiry that still needs a reply. At the end of the month the owner can count how many inquiries came from calls, forms, texts, and each marketplace site, and how many of each became jobs.
The Home Service Guild Marketing Operations System keeps that list with spam filtered out and connects it to Housecall Pro, as part of following up on every inquiry and quote.
Questions owners also ask
Do I have to stop using lead marketplace sites?
No. If a marketplace brings you good work, keep it. The change is that its leads land in the same list as your calls and forms, so they get the same follow-up and you can see how many of them turn into jobs.
Can a spreadsheet work as the one list?
For a very small business, a shared spreadsheet is better than nothing. The trouble is that someone has to copy every inquiry into it by hand, and that is the step that gets skipped in a busy week, which is exactly when the most inquiries come in.
How do I keep spam and junk out of the list?
Filter it before anyone has to read it, so the list holds only real people who want work done. How to stop spam and junk leads from wasting your time covers the difference between spam and a real lead that is simply slow.
Who should be responsible for new inquiries when the owner is on a job?
Whoever is named on the inquiry, and every inquiry should have a name. In a small business that may be the office manager or a family member who answers the phone. What matters is that the list shows who owns each one, so no inquiry sits waiting for someone who assumed another person had it.
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