What’s the preferred CRM for construction companies

What’s the best CRM for construction companies

If you’ve done the work to search “Best CRM for construction companies” then you are ahead of most others in the industry. We find that most residential construction companies rarely use a CRM let alone know what CRM stands for. Customer relation management is one your most valuable assets and important tasks as a construction company. Yet, most contractors manage this most important element of their business merely off of memory.

Before we get too far into this, let’s start with a few questions. 

Have you ever gotten a call from a potential client, scheduled a time to visit the site with the owner, taken notes and measurements and then never followed through with an estimate or recommendation to the homeowner? CRMs help to ensure that doesn’t happen. 

How many of your clients that you’ve done work for in the past 12-18 months have received some form of communication from you since you’ve completed their project? We believe that you should be able to extract five referrals from every client. However, if you don’t continue to build a relationship with them once the project is completed then they forget about you and never refer you to friends and neighbors. CRMs help with that. 

Hopefully you have a CRM system you use currently and the following information will help you determine if you’re using the right one for your business. If you don’t have one, this will be a great resource to get you started. 

Where to start

It is merely impossible for us to give you an in depth, fair review of the many CRM platforms available. Unfortunately, most CRM websites do not list their pricing and their descriptions of services are vague. To get a better understanding of their platforms you have to schedule a demo with one of their remembers and for those of us in construction…that ain’t gonna happen. 

More times than not you will either continue to use the system you’ve been using or you will opt out of implementing a system at all. Our hope is that we can help you get started and that as we learn more and get more feedback, the information we are able to give you will be more substantial and helpful. 

At CLINK we use HubSpot (currently)

Here at CLINK we use mostly HubSpot and spreadsheets. We chose HubSpot originally because they have a free version that fits within our usage. They allow for 1,000 emails a month without moving up to the paid version. As our business has grown we have had to create a few accounts and manage certain email campaigns from each. We will eventually outgrow this system altogether and have to move to a paid version–which one? We aren’t sure. 

We also use spreadsheets for certain elements of our CRM. These may be smaller, easier to manage customer groupings that receive different forms or regularity of communication from us. If you’re looking to send frequent emails to a batch of clients, then HubSpot would be a great resource. If you’re looking to have a list of individuals you need to call/text, a spreadsheet will suffice. 

Fill out this survey to give us your preferred CRM

Since we aren’t able to analyze the landscape of CRMs out there with this first edition of this blog post we are going to ask you, our readers, who you prefer. You can click on this survey link and give us your vote. Be sure to send this to others in the industry to ask their opinions. As the results pour in we will make them public to our readers and followers.

Stay tuned for further updates.