A CRM for contractors that follows up on every quote and past customer
Trade shops win work from quotes, repeat customers and referrals. We set up HubSpot to follow up on all three. Your crews keep the field app they already use.
Free, 30 minutes, and you'll leave with at least one clear next step.
Who is a contractor CRM for?
This page is for trade and specialty contractors with a few crews or more. Think plumbing, electrical, HVAC, roofing, painting, concrete, flooring, landscaping and solar. Most of your work comes from homeowners, property managers and small businesses. A tech or estimator visits, gives a quote and waits for a yes.
General contractors and construction managers sell differently. They chase RFPs, prequalify with owners and bid long projects. If that's you, read our guide to choosing a CRM for construction instead. The rest of this page is about quotes, crews and repeat customers.
Signs your shop needs a CRM
If three or more of these are true, a CRM is worth a serious look.
- Quotes go out from the truck and never get a follow-up call.
- The office can't say how many quotes are open right now.
- Past customers only hear from you when something breaks.
- Realtors and property managers send you jobs, and no record shows who sent what.
- Web leads wait until someone in the office has a free minute.
- You pay for ads but can't say which ones turned into paid jobs.
Is the CRM in your field software enough?
Sometimes it is. The answer depends on how long a customer takes to say yes.
The CRM inside your field software
- Booking, dispatch, invoicing and payments in one login
- Fine for jobs that sell on the first visit
- Follow-up and email tools are often basic
- Reports stop at what the vendor built
HubSpot next to your field software
- Follow-up on quotes that take weeks to decide
- Email to past customers by job type and season
- A record for each referral partner and the jobs they send
- Reports from ad click to paid invoice
What should a contractor CRM hold?
Keep it to what happens before the job and between jobs. That means leads, quotes and their options, customers, referral partners and follow-up tasks. Add a short job history from your field software, such as last visit date, job type and total spent.
Track the property as well as the person. Homes change owners, and one property manager can control twenty buildings. We tie each quote and job to an address, so a new owner shows up with the house's history. On HubSpot Enterprise the property can be its own record. On lower plans we keep it on the contact and company.
Leave dispatch, schedules, your pricebook, timesheets and invoicing in your field software. Those tools already do that well. The CRM should only receive the few facts it needs to follow up.
Why trade contractors stop using their CRM
Most failed setups break in one of these four places.
Techs were asked to type in it
Crews will not open a second app in a basement. Job details should flow in from the field software, so techs never touch the CRM.
Too many required fields
If logging a quote takes five minutes, the office skips it. We require only the fields a report actually uses.
It has no owner
Someone has to check each week that quotes get closed out. Without that person, the data goes stale within a season.
It doesn't connect
If the office still copies customers from one system to the other, the CRM feels like extra work instead of saved work.
How do you track referral partners?
Give each partner its own company record. That includes realtors, property managers, home warranty firms and the builders who send you punch-list work. Every lead they send gets tagged with their name.
After a few months you can see which partners send jobs that actually get sold, and how much each one is worth. Your owner or office manager gets a short list each quarter of the top senders to thank, and of partners who have gone quiet. That's often the cheapest new work a trade shop can find.
What we can show you
Our longest-running specialty contractor client is Photon Brothers, a Colorado home solar installer. We've delivered six integration projects for them since 2022. Their staff stopped retyping the same job details into separate systems.
We have no published case study for a plumbing, painting or landscaping shop, so we won't claim results there. If you run HVAC or roofing crews, our pages on HVAC companies and roofing companies go deeper on estimates, agreements and storm leads.
How we set up a CRM for a trade contractor
- First call
Count what's open
We pull your open quotes and last year's customers from the field software, and estimate what they're worth.
- A few weeks
Connect the field software
Customers, quotes and a short job history flow into HubSpot, so the office stops retyping them.
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Turn on follow-up
Quote reminders, past-customer emails and referral partner tracking, reviewed by you before anything sends.
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Train the office, not the crews
Short sessions for whoever answers the phone and follows up. Techs keep working in the app they know.
CRM for contractors questions
What's the best CRM for a small trade contractor?
If almost every job sells on the first visit, the CRM inside your field software may be enough. If quotes take weeks to decide, or referrals drive your work, HubSpot connected to your field software usually fits better.
How is a CRM for contractors different from a construction CRM?
Trade contractors sell many smaller jobs to homeowners, property managers and businesses. Construction companies chase fewer, bigger projects through RFPs and owners. The first needs quote follow-up and repeat customers. The second needs bid and pursuit tracking.
Do our technicians have to use the CRM?
No. They stay in the field app. Customers, quotes and job history pass into HubSpot in the background, and the office handles follow-up.
Does HubSpot connect to Jobber, ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro?
Usually with a general connector tool or custom code, depending on your plan with each vendor. We check what your account allows before we scope anything.
Can one CRM handle several trades?
Yes. A shop that does plumbing and HVAC can tag each quote by trade, or run a separate pipeline per trade when the steps differ. Customers stay on one record either way.
What should the office track in the CRM first?
Start with every quote: who it is for, the amount, the date it went out and the next follow-up. Add a lost reason when a quote dies. Once that habit sticks, add referral partners and maintenance renewals.
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More in Construction
Start with your past customers
Tell us roughly how many customers and open quotes you have. We'll show you how many are worth a call this month.