Hey what's up my name spread, hope you're having a nice weekend enjoying this weather
wanted to respond to Will's recent post that you put up on the group
in regards to your customers missing the quotes that you're sending on
due to the quotation potentially falling into their spam box on their email
and I wanted to talk to you about some simple systems that you can use
in your business, free systems and also paid systems that you can use
to prevent this from happening so on your socials we've got something called
read receipts on messenger and also whatsapp as well
which tell us obviously if they've received the message so
many people will use whatsapp because it's simple quick and easy you can share
images videos files quotes documents etc
but it also tells you if they've actually read
the message and the quote that you've sent so that's quite handy
messenger does the same thing as well and when it comes to email I use a
system called your trade base as you know which is a paid system you can get
that for twelve and a half quid a month if you're a coaching group member it's
about 25 pound a month to have a couple team members on there if you want to add
more members on there such as you know field stuff if you're a business that has
scaled a little bit you might have a few lads on the tools on the books then you
can add these lads into your trade base and basically every time you organize and
manage your projects you ping off a you know a message and it sends that out to
your field team and says this is a location this is the address this is a
specification this is the job here's some images and videos of the job and gives
them a framework of what they need to do without giving them access to your
financials on the quote and in the price inside of it and the estimate inside of it
so you can kind of control the information that your lads get so you can use it as a
sole trader or you can use it as a larger limited company setup so it's quite handy
in that way and you can kind of tailor fit it to suit your the size of your
business and what you're doing but the reason I use it is because I use my sister
as an admin team member so she has full access to all of my admin through your
trade base and it means that I can kind of hand over a lot of the heavy lifting in
the way of admin emails quotes estimates emails that are sent to and fro asking
questions and all that kind of stuff which as you know can take up a lot of
your time she's now doing a lot of that because she's a team member inside your
trade base so you could potentially set your misses up inside your trade base you
can't you concentrate on the actual work and doing the work on the tools she can
take over or he whoever is it's helping you can take over and with the admin side
of things but what's also good is just like the read receipts on whatsapp and
messenger you'll also get notified whenever your customer opens a quote or
opens an email or opens an invoice you'll get a notification to say mrs smith has
read your invoice on this day on this time so it kind of rules out the whole
falling into the spam folder problem and avoids that problem but on top of this
guys listen to this what's awesome about it is you can run your business through
your phone it's not just a desktop software you can run this completely off
the cuff off your phone when you're sat in the van so if you need to send a
receipt or send an invoice or send a quote you can do that in three clicks once
you set everything up you know you can even include price lists and job lists so
rather than having to keep typing and re-typing the same same information over
and over when you're writing out quotes you can pull a template through but
you've already set up and press send so if you've got jobs where they're
reoccurring let's say you've you're doing bathrooms or kitchens for a company for
example or conservatories and they're all quite similar in spec and cost much need
to tweak a few bits here and there you can pull a template in and press a couple
of clicks and send and obviously all the customer information and material prices
labor prices are all there you just press a couple clicks and it shreds all this
admin time I'm speaking to a few lads recently that are using still using word
documents and struggling taking them hours to send simple quotations or
sometimes people will want like her you know like a scope of works like the
church that I've just done and they wanted a few legal docs and stuff like that
and if you're trying to type up this stuff on a word document it's gonna take
fucking hours to do this so you can pull in you can save documents to your trade
base and you can fire out this information but essentially guys what it's doing
because I still think people are scratching their heads on this CRM software and
thinking well do I need it do I not need it essentially what it's doing is it's
just collecting all of your customer information and putting it in one box
addresses names work images emails and texts sent to and fro the customer and
rather than sort of scratching around and looking for information all the time and
and losing information we can just press one button on our phone open the app type
the customers name into the search bar and we've got every single piece of
correspondence to do with them and their jobs and their invoices and text
messages and emails and images everything it's just all there from the past
history that you've had communications with that customer and that also will
protect you as well because you can always refer back to previous
conversations and emails etc so I've scratched the surface a little bit there
on your trade base there's lots of automations on there guys as well so for
example if you want to send follow-ups so if you've quoted a job for somebody
and it's been a week they haven't got back to you like we'll mention there your
trade base will send out an automatic follow-up that is pre-written in a
friendly manner so it just looks like you've wrote it out off the cuff hi mrs.
Smith just wanted to check in on on the project because we've not heard back from
you and just wondered if you had any more questions or if you need us to pop
around and have a look at the job you know we can do that for you hope you
want to look forward to hearing back from you many thanks a friendly email like
that you can preload that on a template and your trade base will just
automatically fire it off and you can set when do you want it to fire so it could
be like four days five days six days later if you've not heard anything back then
the automation will fire out but you can do this and for everything in your
business not just on follow-ups so you can do it on everything if an invoice
hasn't been paid you can fire an automatic follow-up as well or if you've sent an
initial response back to a new inquiry and then you haven't heard a reply you
can send out a follow-up again for that hi there just checking you got my message
and can we help with anything can look forward to hearing from you like all these
little follow-ups instead of leaving inquiries on the table or assuming that
the customer is not interested or they've gone with a cheaper quote this
just rules out those questions that we might have also we could be leaving money
on the table as will's mentioned in his post but listen I'll put a link in below
this video twelve and a half quid a month is an absolute bargain when you
consider how much time you're going to get back from handing over the admin to AI and
which is something I believe we should all be doing as self-employed trades people in
2025 we certainly shouldn't be using word documents or pen and paper pads and
stuff like that because it's just in a world that's moving so fast if we're
using these old school and slow methods we're just going to get left behind guys
that's the reality so listen click the link have a look it's a free trial it's
not going to cost you anything for the first month and you can try it out it's
just something that I've been using for the last two and a half years in my own
business and now your trade base are working with trial talk and offering us
this 50% discount for this year guys so make use of it and take advantage of it
have a good Sunday and I'll catch you soon
you