Roofing
Customer database and CRM field guide for contractors
The single organized record of every customer, property, job, quote, and conversation, so you can find anything, follow up on nothing-falls-through, market to past customers, and keep the history when a person walks.
Direct answer
A customer database is the single organized record of every customer, property, job, quote, and conversation your business has had. It is the most valuable asset a contractor owns, because past customers are the cheapest leads you will ever work and the history survives when a salesperson leaves. Keep it in one system everyone updates.
Key takeaways
- A customer database is the single organized record of every customer, property, job, quote, and conversation, and the most valuable asset a contractor owns.
- Odds of selling to an existing customer run about 60 to 70 percent versus roughly 5 to 20 percent for a new prospect (Marketing Metrics).
- TCPA generally requires prior express written consent before marketing texts, with statutory damages commonly 500 to 1,500 dollars per message.
- Email marketing under CAN-SPAM is opt-out but must identify the message, include a real physical address, and honor unsubscribe requests.
- Keep one record per customer that everyone updates; tie people to properties and store roof age, install date, and warranty to drive follow-up.
The customer database, and why it is the asset you own
A customer database is the single organized record of everyone you have done work for, every property you have worked on, and everything that happened in between. Names and phone numbers are the smallest part of it. The real value is the history: the roof you replaced in 2019, the quote you lost in 2021 because the price scared them, the gutter call you ran last spring, the fact that this address always pays late and that one always refers a neighbor.
In most trade businesses that record does not exist in one place. It lives in a salesperson's phone, a notebook in a truck, a stack of paper folders, a few spreadsheets, and the owner's head. That is not a database. That is scattered customers, and the difference matters the day someone quits, the day you want to call every roof you installed eight years ago, or the day you try to sell the company and the buyer asks what you actually own.
A real customer record turns those scattered customers into something you can find, follow up on, market to, and sell. The work has to live in one place that outlasts any one person. That is what this guide is about: what to capture, where to keep it, how to keep it clean, and how to turn it into repeat revenue instead of a pile of contacts nobody mines.
Why the database is worth more than any single job
Past customers are the cheapest leads you will ever work. They already trust you, they know your name, and they do not cost a click. The widely cited Marketing Metrics figure puts the odds of selling to an existing customer around 60 to 70 percent, against roughly 5 to 20 percent for a brand-new prospect. Treat those numbers as direction, not gospel, but the direction is right: the list you already own outsells cold every time.
A name in a lead platform is not yours. The platform owns the relationship and rents it back to you per lead. The customer in your own database is yours to call, text, and remarket to for as long as they own the property, with no per-lead charge and no middle man deciding who sees them. Own the relationship, not the lead-gen invoice. See the lead generation and marketing guide for where those leads come from in the first place.
And it is a sellable asset. When a contractor sells the business, the buyer is paying for the customer list and its history as much as for the trucks. A clean database of 4,000 properties with roof ages, install dates, and service history is worth real money on a balance sheet. The same 4,000 customers stuck in three people's phones are worth almost nothing, because they walk out the door when those people do.
Nothing falls through when it is written down. Every quote you meant to follow up on, every roof coming due for replacement, every warranty about to expire is a sale you will miss if it lives in someone's memory instead of a record with a date on it.
What should you store about a customer?
Store enough that anyone in the company can pick up the file cold and know who this is, what you have done, and what to do next. That breaks into a handful of record types, and each one earns its place.
Contact is the obvious layer: name, current phone, email, and how they prefer to be reached. Property is the layer most trade databases skip, and it is the one that pays. The job and quote history tells you what you have done and what you bid and lost. The interaction log is every call, text, and visit. Warranty and lead source close it out, because the warranty drives the follow-up and the source tells you which marketing actually works.
The table below is the working set. You do not need every field on day one, but the structure should be there from the start, because retrofitting fields onto 3,000 records later is the kind of cleanup nobody ever finishes.
| Record type | What to capture | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|---|
| Contact | Name, current phone, email, preferred channel, consent status | You cannot reach a customer through a dead number or text one who never opted in |
| Property | Address, roof type and age, slope, access notes, who else lives there | Lets the crew show up knowing the site instead of guessing on arrival |
| Equipment or roof history | Material, install date, last service, warranty terms and expiration | Drives the re-roof and maintenance follow-up that becomes repeat work |
| Jobs and quotes | Every job done and every quote, with won or lost and the price | Tells you what you have sold, what you lost, and why |
| Interactions | Every call, text, email, and visit, dated, with a one-line note | Anyone can pick up the thread without re-asking the customer |
| Lead source | How this customer found you the first time | Tells you which channel pays and which to cut |
One system everyone works from
The single most important rule is that there is one record per customer and everyone sees the same one. Not a phone here, a spreadsheet there, and a notebook in the truck. When the office, the sales rep, and the crew each keep their own version, none of them is right, and the customer gets asked their address three times by three people who all work for the same company.
A single source of truth means the on-the-way text the office sent, the photos the crew shot, the quote the rep wrote, and the invoice all hang off the same customer and the same property. The owner can look at one screen and see the whole relationship. The new hire can open a file and be as informed as the person who sold the job. Nothing has to be reconciled later, because it was never split in the first place.
This is the case for a real field service platform over a pile of disconnected tools. FieldOS is built so the office and the field write to the same customer and property record from their phones, in real time, without re-keying anything. The rep quotes against the property, the crew shoots before-and-after photos that attach to that property, and the office sends the follow-up from the same file. One record, one truth, visible to everyone who needs it.
If your customers are currently spread across a personal cell, a shared spreadsheet, and a filing cabinet, consolidating into one system is the highest-return thing you can do this year. Everything else in this guide depends on it.
The property record: show up knowing the site
Trades sell to properties, not just to people. The customer might move, but the roof stays, and the next owner is a customer too. So the property gets its own record, with the roof type, the age, the slope and access notes, the last time you were there, and what you did. Tie the people to the property, not the other way around.
When a crew rolls up already knowing the roof is a 22-year-old three-tab on a steep north slope with no good ladder access on the back, they bring the right equipment and quote the right number. When they show up blind, they waste a trip measuring what you already measured, or worse, they bid it wrong because the file held that information and nobody pulled it. The site knowledge you paid for on the first visit is an asset only if it is written down where the next person finds it.
Property history is also what makes the follow-up specific instead of generic. A roof you installed has a known age and a known warranty. That is a calendar entry waiting to happen, not a guess. The property record is what turns your install list into a re-roof pipeline a decade out.
Job and quote history, won and lost
Log every job you complete and every quote you write, and mark each quote won or lost with the reason. The won jobs are your service history. The lost quotes are a list of people who wanted your work and did not buy this time, which is one of the best follow-up lists you have.
Most contractors track won jobs and throw away the losses. That is money left on the table. A quote lost on price in a slow season is worth a call when the season turns or when you can sharpen the number. A quote lost because the customer was not ready is worth a check-in six months later. If the reason for the loss is in the record, you know exactly who to call and what to say. If it is not, the lost quote is just a forgotten email.
The win-loss data also tells you the truth about your sales. Close rate by lead source, by rep, by job type, and by season only exists if every quote has an outcome attached. That feeds straight into the lead generation and marketing decisions, because the channel that brings quotes you actually close is worth more than the one that brings cheap leads you never land.
The interaction log so anyone can pick up the thread
Every call, text, email, and site visit gets a dated line in the customer's file. It does not need to be a paragraph. One line is enough: what happened, what was promised, what is next. The point is that the next person who touches this customer can read the thread and pick up exactly where it was left, without making the customer repeat themselves.
This is what separates a company that feels organized from one that feels chaotic to the person paying the bill. The customer called Tuesday about a leak, the office logged it, the crew that goes out Thursday reads the note before they knock, and nobody asks the customer to explain the leak again. When the log is missing, every handoff drops the ball, and the customer hears five different versions of where their job stands.
It also protects you. When a customer claims they were never told about the change order or the extra cost, a dated note from the day it was discussed is the record that settles it. The interaction log is half customer service and half evidence. See the customer communication and follow-up guide for the specific touchpoints worth logging from first call to final review.
Tags and segments that let you target the right offer
A flat list of all your customers is hard to sell to, because the right message for a roof you installed last year is not the right message for a 25-year-old roof you have never touched. Tagging and segmenting fixes that. Tag customers by service type, equipment age, neighborhood, membership or service-plan status, and anything else you would ever want to filter on later.
Tags are what let you send the right offer to the right slice instead of blasting everyone the same thing. Pull every roof over 20 years old in one zip code and you have a re-roof campaign. Pull every gutter customer who has never bought a maintenance plan and you have an upsell list. Pull everyone in the path of last week's hailstorm and you have a reason to call today. None of that is possible if the database has no structure to filter on.
Keep the tag set small and meaningful. Twelve tags everyone uses beats sixty nobody understands. The test for a tag is simple: would you ever build a list from it? If not, it is clutter.
How do you get more repeat business?
You mine the database you already have. Repeat business is not luck. It is the systematic work of going back to past customers with a reason to buy again, on a schedule, before they call someone else. This is the cheapest revenue available to a trade business, and most leave it sitting untouched.
Three veins run deep. Aging equipment: every roof has a life, so the list of installs reaching 18 to 25 years old is a re-roof list with names and addresses already attached. Expiring warranties: a warranty about to lapse is a natural moment for an inspection or a renewal call. Seasonal: gutters before the leaves, inspections before storm season, maintenance plans in the slow months. Each is a filtered pull from a database that holds the dates.
The math is hard to argue with. A reactivation campaign to past customers costs a fraction of what cold leads cost, and it closes far better because the trust already exists. The contractor who calls every roof they installed when it turns 20 has a pipeline built into the customer list. The one who waits for the phone to ring is buying that same customer back as a fresh lead from an ad. The lead generation and marketing guide covers the cold side, but the warm side starts here, in the database you have already paid to build.
Automatic follow-up and reminders
The reason follow-up does not happen is not that contractors do not care. It is that the reminder lives in a head that is busy running jobs, and the date slides past unnoticed. The fix is to make the follow-up automatic, triggered off the dates already in the customer record instead of off someone remembering.
Maintenance due, re-roof age, warranty expiring, and a simple post-job check-in are all calculable from data you already store. When the system knows the roof was installed on a date and carries a known warranty, it can surface the follow-up at the right time without anyone watching a calendar. The work shifts from remembering to reviewing a list the system built for you.
A good system drives this off the customer and property record. Because the install date, warranty, and service history live on the property, the system can flag the customers due for a call this month and the crew or office works the list. That turns the database from a passive archive into an active pipeline. The detail on what to actually say at each touchpoint lives in the customer communication and follow-up guide; the trigger that makes sure the touch happens at all lives in the data.
Data hygiene: garbage in, garbage out
A database is only as good as the data in it, and dirty data quietly destroys the value. Duplicate records mean you call the same customer twice and miss them entirely under the other spelling. A dead phone number means the warm lead never gets reached. Inconsistent fields, half the addresses with a zip and half without, mean the zip-code pull for a storm campaign misses a third of the affected customers.
Hygiene is mostly about discipline at entry, not heroic cleanups later. Decide the standard fields and the format up front: one way to write an address, a required current phone, a forced choice for lead source instead of a free-text box that fills with junk. Merge duplicates as you find them. Mark dead numbers and bad emails so they stop polluting the lists. A monthly pass to catch what slipped is cheaper than an annual disaster.
The discipline that matters most is that data goes in once, at the source, by the person who has it. The crew that captured the new gate code enters it on the property right then. The office that learns a number changed updates it on the call. When entry is everyone's job at the moment they have the information, the database stays clean. When it waits for someone to retype a stack of job tickets at the end of the week, it never gets done.
When the salesperson leaves, the customers stay
Here is the test of whether you have a database or just employees with phones: your top salesperson quits tomorrow. Do their customers stay with the company, or do they walk out the door in a contact list on a personal cell? In too many trade businesses the answer is the second one, and the owner finds out the hard way when the rep shows up across town with the same customers.
The customers belong in the company record, not in any individual's phone. When the relationship history lives in a shared system, a departure is an inconvenience instead of a loss. The new rep opens the file and sees every job, every quote, and every conversation, and the customer barely notices the handoff. When the history lived in the head that left, the company starts over with people it already served and paid to acquire.
This is also a control issue worth being blunt about. A salesperson who keeps the only copy of their customers has a hold on you, and they know it. A company that owns its data owns its relationships. Make entry into the shared system a non-negotiable condition of the job, not a favor, because the alternative is renting your own customer base from your own employees.
Lead to quote to job to invoice to follow-up, one thread
A customer database is most useful when it is not a standalone address book but the spine that the whole job runs along. The lead comes in and creates a record. The quote attaches to it. The won quote becomes a job on the same record. The job produces an invoice. The closed job triggers the follow-up. One thread, one customer, start to finish.
When those stages live in separate tools, the seams leak. The lead in one app never becomes a quote because someone forgot to copy it over. The completed job in the scheduling tool never triggers a follow-up because the marketing list is a different system that never heard the job closed. Every handoff between disconnected tools is a place where work falls through, and the customer feels each gap as a company that does not have its act together.
FieldOS is built as that single thread. The lead, the quote, the job, the photos, the invoice, and the follow-up all hang off one customer and one property, so the data flows forward without re-entry and nothing has to be reconciled between systems. That integration is the difference between a database that records what happened and one that drives what happens next.
Consent and privacy: texting and marketing the list
The moment you market to your database by text or email, consent and privacy rules apply, and they are not optional. This is a place to know the basics and then confirm the specifics with your own counsel, because the rules change and the penalties are real. Treat what follows as orientation, not legal advice.
For text messaging in the United States, the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, the TCPA, generally requires prior express written consent before you send a marketing text, and statutory damages commonly run in the range of 500 to 1,500 dollars per message. The FCC's proposed one-to-one consent rule, which would have required each business to get its own direct consent instead of relying on a shared lead-generator opt-in, was vacated by a federal court in early 2025 and never took effect, so confirm the current state of the rules rather than assuming it is law. The prior-express-written-consent requirement still governs, and you must honor opt-out requests made by any reasonable method, not just a STOP reply. Carrier-side CTIA messaging principles add their own requirements on top of the law, and this is an area to verify with counsel because it moves.
Email marketing runs under CAN-SPAM, which is an opt-out regime rather than opt-in: you generally may email commercial messages without prior consent, but you must identify the message, include a real physical address, and honor unsubscribe requests promptly. So store consent status as a field on the customer record, separate for calls, texts, and email, and respect it. A clean record of who agreed to what, and when, is both the compliant way to market and your defense if anyone claims they never opted in. Confirm the current requirements and your specific obligations with a qualified attorney before you run a campaign.
Reporting from the data
A populated database answers business questions that are guesses without it. Revenue by customer tells you who your best accounts are and which deserve a personal call. Revenue by lead source tells you which marketing pays for itself and which to cut. Revenue by service line tells you what to push. None of these reports exist unless the underlying records are complete and consistent.
The reports are only as honest as the data hygiene behind them. If half the jobs have no lead source attached, the source report is fiction, and you will cut the channel that was actually working because it looked empty in a report that was missing its inputs. Garbage in, garbage out applies to every number you pull. The discipline of clean entry is what makes the reporting trustworthy enough to bet money on.
Start with three reports and actually use them: revenue by source, close rate by source, and repeat or reactivation revenue as a share of the total. Those three tell you where your jobs come from, which channels close, and how much of your business is the database working for you versus net-new acquisition you paid full price for.
Choosing and migrating a CRM
Pick the tool for the trade, not the generic sales CRM built for software reps. A field service business needs property records, photos from the job, scheduling, quotes, and invoicing tied to the customer. A pipeline-only CRM designed to track deals through a sales funnel will fight you, because it has no concept of a property with a roof and a service history. The fit you want is field service management with real CRM underneath, not a contact list with a sales tracker bolted on.
A field-service platform built for exactly this audience, a roofer or home-service business that needs the customer, the property, the job, the photos, and the follow-up in one place, on a phone, in the field, is worth weighing against the general-purpose options precisely because it starts from how trade work actually runs instead of how a software sales team runs. FieldOS is built for this case.
Migrating the old data is where the project lives or dies. Clean before you import, not after. Deduplicate, standardize the addresses and phone formats, and decide your fields before the data lands, because importing a mess just gives you a faster mess. Map the old spreadsheet columns to the new fields deliberately, import a small batch first to check it landed right, then bring the rest. Budget real time for this. A rushed migration that imports dirty data poisons the new system on day one and undoes the reason you switched.
Getting the crew to actually use it
A CRM nobody updates is worthless, and that is how most of them end up. The software is rarely the reason. Adoption is. If entering data is slow, requires a laptop, or feels like extra work that benefits the office and not the person doing it, the crew will quietly route around it and the database will rot while you keep paying for it.
Three things drive adoption. It has to be easy, so entering a note or a photo takes seconds, not a form with twenty fields. It has to be mobile, because the people with the freshest information are standing on a roof, not sitting at a desk. And it has to be required, with the expectation set from the top that the job is not done until it is in the system. Easy and mobile earn the buy-in; required closes the gap for the days nobody feels like it.
This is a real strength of a phone-first tool. When the crew can shoot the before-and-after photos, drop a one-line note, and close the job from the same phone they already carry, entry stops being a chore done later and becomes part of doing the work. The best database is the one that gets updated, and the only one that gets updated is the one that is faster to use than to skip. Pick for adoption, then enforce it, because a perfect system at 30 percent compliance loses to a simple one everybody uses.
Customer lifetime value, not the first job
The first job is the down payment on the relationship, not the whole of it. A roofing customer who buys a roof, comes back for gutters, signs a maintenance plan, and refers two neighbors over fifteen years is worth many times the ticket on that first roof. Customer lifetime value is the full revenue a customer generates across every job and every referral, and it is the number that should drive how much you are willing to spend to win them and keep them.
Thinking in lifetime value changes the math on everything else. A reactivation call that books a 400 dollar gutter cleaning looks small until you count that it keeps the relationship warm for the 12,000 dollar re-roof in four years and the referral in between. Spending on follow-up and service that loses money on the single transaction can be the best investment you make once you count the lifetime, not the ticket.
Referrals are the multiplier that does not show up on the invoice. A happy past customer who sends three neighbors is worth far more than their own jobs, and the database is where you track who refers so you can take care of them. The lead generation and marketing guide treats referrals as a channel; the database is what makes them a measurable, repeatable one instead of a happy accident.
Metrics that tell you the database is working
A few numbers tell you whether the customer database is an asset or just storage. Watch them over time, because the trend matters more than any single reading.
Repeat rate is the share of revenue or jobs that comes from existing customers rather than new ones. A healthy, well-mined database pushes that number up year over year. Database size and growth tells you whether you are actually capturing every customer or letting jobs leave without a record. Reactivation revenue, the dollars you booked from going back to past customers, is the direct payoff of mining the list, and if it is near zero you are sitting on the asset without working it. Some vendors cite retention improvements on the order of 27 percent after adopting a real CRM; treat that as a marketing figure, but the direction is sound.
If you track only one thing, track the share of this year's revenue that came from customers already in the database. That single ratio tells you whether you are building a business that compounds on its own customer base or one that has to buy every job fresh, forever.
| Metric | What it tells you | What good looks like |
|---|---|---|
| Repeat rate | Share of jobs or revenue from existing customers | Rising year over year as the database grows and gets mined |
| Database size and growth | Whether every job becomes a record | Grows with every completed job, with few one-off strangers |
| Reactivation revenue | Dollars from going back to past customers | A meaningful and growing slice of total revenue |
| Lost-quote recovery | Sales won from following up on old losses | Any number above zero beats throwing the losses away |
Commercial and B2B accounts: many sites, many contacts
Commercial accounts break the one-customer-one-property model, and the database has to handle it. A property management company is one account with dozens of buildings, each its own property with its own roof and service history, and several contacts who each play a different role: the one who approves the work, the one who pays, and the one who calls when it leaks.
Structure the record so the account sits above multiple properties, and each contact carries a role. Get that wrong and you send the invoice to the person who only reports leaks, or you call the building manager about a contract only the regional owner can sign. On the commercial side the relationship is with an organization, not a person, and people in those organizations turn over often, so the history living in the account rather than in any one contact is what keeps you from starting over every time a facilities manager changes jobs.
What to document
The rule is that the record should let a stranger run the next interaction. If a new hire can open a customer file and know who they are, what you have done, what is outstanding, and what to do next, the record is complete. If they have to call someone or guess, it is not.
Capture it at the source, when you have it, not at the end of the week from memory. The table is the working set of what a trade customer record should hold.
| Field to record | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Current contact and preferred channel | You reach the customer the way they actually answer |
| Consent status per channel | Marketing by text or email is legal only with the right consent on file |
| Property details and access notes | The crew shows up knowing the site instead of relearning it |
| Roof or equipment age, install date, warranty | Drives the re-roof, maintenance, and warranty follow-up |
| Every job and every quote, won or lost with reason | Your service history and your best follow-up list |
| Dated interaction log | Anyone can pick up the thread and it settles disputes |
| Lead source | Tells you which marketing to keep paying for |
Common mistakes
- Customers scattered across a personal phone, a spreadsheet, and a notebook instead of one shared system.
- No property or job history, so the crew shows up blind and re-measures what you already knew.
- No interaction log, so every handoff drops the ball and the customer repeats themselves.
- Never marketing to past customers, leaving the cheapest revenue you have untouched.
- Dirty data: duplicate records, dead phone numbers, and fields entered five different ways.
- Letting customers live in a salesperson's phone, so they walk out the door when the person does.
- Texting or emailing the list without consent on file, exposing the company to TCPA and CAN-SPAM claims.
- Buying a CRM nobody updates, then blaming the software when the real problem is adoption.
Field checklist
Want this checklist to run itself on every job — with photo proof and a signed record crews can hand the customer? That's FieldOS.
Standards and references
There is no building code for a customer database, but the practice and the law around it are well established. The discipline itself is customer relationship management and client management, and the fit for a trade business is the field service management category, software built for companies that send crews to properties rather than for inside sales teams. The stores-customer-profiles, equipment-details, communication-history, and past-service-records model is the standard a field service CRM is measured against.
The principles that matter most are the ones this guide keeps returning to: a single source of truth so everyone works from one record, mining the database so past customers become repeat revenue, and adoption so the system actually gets updated. A CRM that fails any one of those three fails as an asset no matter how many features it lists.
On the legal side, marketing to the database is governed by real rules. Text messaging falls under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and FCC rules, which generally require prior express written consent for marketing texts and carry per-message statutory damages, alongside carrier-level CTIA messaging principles. Email marketing falls under the CAN-SPAM Act, an opt-out regime requiring identification, a physical address, and a working unsubscribe. These rules change, enforcement is active, and the specifics depend on your situation, so verify the current requirements and your obligations with a qualified attorney before running any campaign. Nothing here is legal advice.
Terms and definitions
The customer database goes by several names across vendors and articles, and the same idea shows up under different labels in a sales pitch versus a field crew's day. The terms below are the ones worth knowing so the same concept reads the same across a contract, a software demo, and a marketing plan.
A CRM (customer relationship management) system and a customer database overlap heavily; in the trades the useful version is a field service CRM that also handles properties, scheduling, and jobs. Reactivation, remarketing, and mining the database all describe going back to past customers. Consent, opt-in, and opt-out are the language of the marketing rules and belong on every record.
- CRM
- Customer relationship management; the system and practice of keeping the single organized record of every customer and interaction
- Field service management (FSM)
- Software built for businesses that dispatch crews to properties, combining CRM with scheduling, jobs, and invoicing
- Single source of truth
- One record per customer that everyone works from, so no conflicting copies exist in phones and spreadsheets
- Segmentation
- Tagging customers so you can pull a targeted list, such as every roof over 20 years old in one area
- Reactivation
- Marketing back to past customers to win repeat work; the cheapest revenue most trade businesses have
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- The full revenue a customer generates across every job and referral, not just the first ticket
- Lead source
- How a customer first found you; tracked on every record so you know which marketing pays
FAQ
What is a CRM for contractors?
A CRM for contractors is software that holds the single organized record of every customer, property, job, quote, and conversation. In the trades the useful version is a field service CRM that also handles properties, scheduling, photos, and invoicing, so the office and the crew work from one record instead of scattered phones and spreadsheets.
Why is a customer database important for a trade business?
Because past customers are the cheapest leads you have, nothing falls through when it is written down, and the database is a sellable asset. Customers in a shared system stay with the company when a salesperson leaves. Customers in someone's phone walk out the door with them, taking the history you paid to build.
What should you store about a customer?
Store contact details and preferred channel, the property with roof type and age, equipment or roof history with install date and warranty, every job and quote marked won or lost, a dated interaction log, lead source, and consent status. Enough that a new hire can open the file and know exactly what to do next.
How do you get more repeat business from your database?
Mine it on a schedule. Pull the aging-equipment list, the expiring-warranty list, and the seasonal list, then call those past customers with a specific reason to buy again. Reactivation costs a fraction of cold leads and closes far better, because the trust already exists. The dates that trigger it are already in the property records.
Is a spreadsheet good enough for a customer database?
A spreadsheet beats nothing, but it breaks fast. It has no property history tied to people, no interaction log, no follow-up triggers, no consent tracking, and it splits the moment two people keep their own copy. It works until you have a few hundred customers, then a field service CRM that everyone updates from a phone pays for itself.
Do I need consent to text or email past customers?
For marketing texts, the TCPA generally requires prior express written consent, with per-message penalties commonly cited at 500 to 1,500 dollars. Email under CAN-SPAM is opt-out but still needs identification, a physical address, and a working unsubscribe. Store consent per channel on every record, and confirm the current rules with your attorney before any campaign.
What happens to my customers when a salesperson quits?
If the customers live in a shared company database, they stay and the new rep picks up the file with the full history. If they live in the salesperson's phone, they leave with that person, often to a competitor. Owning the data in one system is the difference between an inconvenience and losing customers you already paid to acquire.
Why does no one on my crew update the CRM?
Almost always because entry is slow, requires a desk, or feels like work that only helps the office. Fix adoption by making it easy and mobile, so a note or photo takes seconds on the phone they already carry, and required, with the expectation that a job is not done until it is in the system. Pick the tool for adoption.
How do I migrate my old customer data into a new CRM?
Clean before you import, not after. Deduplicate, standardize address and phone formats, and decide your fields first. Map the old columns to the new fields deliberately, import a small batch to confirm it landed right, then bring the rest. Importing dirty data just gives you a faster mess and undoes the reason you switched.