The symptoms that say 'now'
You re-quote a homeowner who already had a proposal last spring. A rep leaves and their pipeline leaves in their memory. Nobody can say how many open estimates exist past day fourteen. Marketing spend rises while close rate 'mysteriously' falls. Each symptom is the same disease — opportunity state living in heads and inboxes — and each costs real revenue monthly while the tool decision waits.
Why generic CRMs disappoint trades
Salesforce-style CRMs were shaped by B2B inside sales: emails, calls, deal stages. A residential visit is a different animal — the 'meeting' includes a roof walk, twenty photos, a three-option proposal with monthly payments, a financing application, and a signature, often in one afternoon. When those live in five disconnected apps, the CRM becomes data-entry homework and reps quietly abandon it. The trades-native question is: can the rep run the entire visit inside the platform?
The evaluation checklist
Score candidates on the work, not the feature list:
- Visit workflow: photos, findings, and pairing prompts attached to the opportunity.
- Proposals: good-better-best tiers, live option toggling, monthly payments.
- Financing: options presented and applications routed from the proposal.
- Signature & payments: same-visit close without leaving the app.
- Customer portal: homeowner-facing proposal, questions, status, documents.
- Pipeline & follow-up: cadences, engagement signals, aging reports per rep and source.
- Multi-trade catalog: services, add-ons, and bundles your team actually sells.
Migration without mutiny
Move the active pipeline first (not ten years of history), template your three most common proposals before launch, and run one trade or one team for two weeks as the reference implementation. Make the platform the only place proposals can be generated — adoption follows necessity, and within a month the follow-up report nobody could produce becomes the Monday meeting agenda.
