One of the great thinks about having a variety of online friends is learning what other skills they have. Fellow Painting Contractor Patrick Miller has long been a contributor to a popular forum I frequent. He recently share an app he created with the members and I asked him to tell us about it, see what he has to say!
As a painting contractor for the last 20 years or so, I always thought myself as being pretty organized. All estimates, invoices, receipts for materials have been saved. Not till recently did I discover that the one area I really needed to improve was all the leads I receive. Being that I’m an owner/ operator where I’m in the field most of the day and in the office in the evening. It seemed I was always looking for that little piece of paper, cardboard, napkin or whatever else I could find at the moment to right down the name and phone number of a potential customer. So I tried several different methods from keeping a writing pad next to the phone, a second pad in the truck. This worked ok, but there would be times when the pads were not close by so again I just grabbed the first thing to write down the info.
The end result always ended up that I would just have a box full of different pieces of paper with names and phone numbers written on them. This was not being organized.
One of my hobbies is fooling around making .net apps for windows. So I decided it was time to make an app where I can keep all the info in an easy to use program “Lead Tracker” I designed this program to be simple. Here are some of the features for Lead Tracker:
Works with Google calendar – If you’re out in the field and have a smart phone, you can simply open up your calendar and input the info. When you get home you can sync the program to retrieve your leads you created using Google calendar. Also on the other hand, when you are in the office, and you input a new lead, it will upload it to your Google calendar. This way you have all the names and phones on your smart phone.
You can assign status to each lead – example: “called and left message, scheduled estimate, performed estimate but have not heard back, and so on…” A total of 9 statuses as of this writing.
Search through your leads by their status.
Search for phone numbers, names and so on
View leads by month in a simple looking bar chart
View leads by where they were referred from. This is useful when trying new marketing ideas.
There are a few more features, but these are the main ones. I also want to point out that the value in the program comes from using it, the more disciplined you are, the longer you use it the more value it becomes.
So if you find yourself in a similar situation where you could use a little more organization when it comes to how your deal with your leads then by all means give this program a try. It’s 100% free.
