So I won’t like, like many businesses, we are flying by the seat of our pants. Where does that saying even come from? Oh well… We are making stuff up as we go and finding out what doesn’t work well as things fail. Today was another one of those days. Wasn’t a horrible failure but definitely a super weak link in our process.
So with the huge amount of calls that have been going out, we are getting “leads” of people that said they were interested. We need to follow up and nurture those leads though being on our site offering availability. While we have had more providers registering accounts, we are still in that stuck phase with some. We are using a simple Google sheet but thinking about it now, its a horrible process. My sister has an admin access so she can log into provider accounts. She logs in and updates the spreadsheet. Then Neil goes back and follows up with the companies. One of the two is copying the “interested” people from the main DFW contractors list over to follow up sheet. Im sure you can see how this is following apart.
I spoke to a provider today who got all signed up just needed a bit of help with the calendar. Very nice guy who was excited about what we were doing and thankful we are trying to do something good and help the providers out. Well, I didn’t update the sheet to say his profile was complete and Neil gave him a call. The good news is, whatever Neil said to him, he is expanding his zipc odes and adding more area. I also haven’t been updating the leads to show they have registered accounts. I’m the only one that gets the emails. Too many cooks in a broken kitchen.
So we need a CRM. We have used an old Amazon CRM that was simple and great called Vendrive. In fact, like an idiot we have been paying for Vendrive and not using for probably over a year..maybe two. Well, hopefully that will payoff. I want to clone their CRM and make the tweaks for our business. We can simply add some database fields to bring in info thats not in our database, then use it for a CRM. The Vendrive “Pipeline” is a simple screen of columns in the step the lead is in. Little boxes with the business name. You drag it from each column to the next. Being integrated in our database we can move stuff along automatically as the step go on. Simple but useful. Here is my picture I’m going to show the developers on Monday and let them build it. Hopefully they can build it fast. Its mostly a friend end on mostly information we already have a database setup for. Time will tell.
