Insights
CRM for construction and engineering firms
A construction pipeline is not a sales pipeline. The work runs for months, the contact list includes the people you buy from as well as the people you sell to, and most of the team is nowhere near a desk. Here is what a CRM does about that, and what it does not.
Published
What does a construction firm actually use a CRM for?
Knowing where every live bid stands, and who has not been spoken to. That is the bulk of it.
The rest of the job already has software. Estimating, project management and accounts are usually well covered. What tends to be uncovered is the period before a job exists: the enquiry, the pre-qualification, the bid, the wait, the chase. That period can run for months, and it usually lives in one estimator's inbox.
Why does a standard sales pipeline fit badly?
Because most CRM pipelines assume a deal moves forward every week or two, and a construction bid does not. It sits in tender for six weeks and there is nothing to do about it.
The fix is to build stages around the real gates rather than around sales activity. Something like enquiry, qualified, pre-qualification submitted, tendering, tender submitted, decision. A deal parked in tendering is not a stalled deal, and a pipeline that flags it as one trains people to ignore the flags.
What about subcontractors and suppliers?
Put them in. A construction contact database that only holds customers is missing most of the value.
The specialist you used on a job two years ago, the supplier who quoted well and did not get the work, the site manager who has since moved firms: all of that is commercially useful and all of it is normally held in somebody's memory. Tagging contacts by trade and by area is what makes it retrievable when a bid needs pricing quickly.
Does it need to work on site?
Yes, and this is where a lot of implementations quietly fail. If updating the system means going back to the office, it gets done on Friday afternoon from memory, or not at all.
The practical test is whether someone can log a site conversation on a phone in under thirty seconds. If they cannot, the record will be incomplete no matter what the training said.
Which CRM suits construction best?
Pipedrive suits firms whose main problem is bid visibility, because it is a pipeline tool first and does that one thing well without much setup. HubSpot suits firms that also want to do marketing properly. Workbooks suits firms with heavier reporting requirements.
None of them are construction-specific, and construction-specific systems tend to be project management tools with a CRM bolted on. Which way round you want that depends on which half is actually broken.
When will a CRM not help?
When the firm wins work through relationships that a small number of people hold and will not write down. A CRM cannot compel that, and rolling one out without solving it produces an expensive, empty database.
It also will not help if the problem is that you are bidding for the wrong work. Better visibility of a poor hit rate is useful, but it is diagnosis, not treatment.