Speed to lead went from 4 hours to 7 minutes. Carrier registration nearly sank it.

The 14 to 7 stage cut is the whole post for me. Same disease on the management side, owners describe eleven steps for a maintenance ticket and the techs use three.

What happened to the records that were sitting in the seven stages you deleted? I've watched a stage cleanup strand 200 leads with no warning in a status that no longer triggers anything, and nobody noticed for a quarter because the reports only counted the live stages.

How did you get a reliable baseline of 4h 10m and 31% contact rate out of a shop that had two CRMs and a spreadsheet? That's the number the whole improvement claim rests on. If the old contact rate was really 31% of logged leads and half the leads never got logged, then the true before number was worse and your improvement is understated, which is fine. But if the spreadsheet only held leads someone had already touched, your before number was flattering itself and the 58% is a smaller jump than it reads.

Doing the client's arithmetic. $7,400 plus $850 for six months is $12,500 in year one. They went from 4 contracts a month to about 6. At any normal assignment fee that pays for the build inside the first month, so the build isn't the risk to them.

The question I'd want answered before renewing is what happens to those numbers if fees compress or their mail response drops. Their cost per lead is fixed by the marketing spend, and you improved the conversion side. If the market gets thinner and they cut mail, does your system still earn $850 a month on 200 leads instead of 400?

What's the carrier registration thing? Starting from zero here and I don't know why sending a text needs anyone's approval.

@ember it's the business-and-campaign registration you go through before automated texting from a business number gets delivered reliably, and mobile carriers run the approval. I only know because I asked the same thing here two months ago.

@lantern the dispatcher part is what I want more of. She refused for two weeks. Did she tell you why or did you have to go find it? I'd assume most operators in that seat just half-use it and let you believe it's working.

How many hours total, build plus the migration plus the eight weeks you didn't bill? Trying to work out what your effective hourly was on a $7,400 build, because I suspect it's lower than a beginner reading this would guess.

Genuine question, no snark. How much of that lift is the system and how much is just that someone is now calling leads in seven minutes? If they'd hired one dedicated person to sit on the new lead queue with a phone and a legal pad, they'd have gotten from four hours to maybe fifteen minutes for a lot less than $12,500 a year.

I'm asking because I keep hearing that speed to lead is the whole ballgame, and if that's true, the software is the cheapest way to get speed rather than the thing that creates the result.

My follow-up cadence on land owners runs 18 to 30 months, four touches a year, and half of them are mail. Everything in your build assumes the value shows up in the first ten minutes. Does the same architecture hold at that pace, or is a long-cycle pipeline a different thing entirely? I've never seen a CRM whose default reporting could tell me anything useful about a lead I first touched in 2023.

11,000 duplicate merges and you reviewed the ambiguous ones by hand. What did you do with the pairs you couldn't resolve, delete or leave both? I'd be scared of merging two different sellers who shared a phone number.

The documents interest me more than the pipeline. Who holds the sub-account and the billing relationship, and what does your agreement say happens on termination? Specifically whether the client can export contacts, call recordings, and message history, and in what format, and whether that's an obligation on you or a favor.

Also the 20% holdback. Is that written with a defined test for what "live and working" means, or is it a handshake? A holdback with no acceptance criteria just moves the argument to day 31.

Somebody explain lead scoring to me at some point. I keep seeing it next to these builds and I don't understand what the number is made of.

Two full months at 6 and 7 contracts and one at 5, against a prior average of 4. Was the mail spend flat across all six of those months? If a bigger drop landed in the good months, some of your lift is the mail. Not saying it is, but the post would be stronger with the marketing spend printed next to the contract count.

We do maybe 40 leads a month in a rural county across two of us. At that volume I can't see how any of this pencils. Is there a floor below which the build is just an expensive contact list?

@kestrel your one-person-with-a-phone version breaks the day that person takes a vacation or quits, and then nobody knows what was said to whom. What the build bought them is that the process survives the staff. I'd argue that's most of the $12,500.

I'll also say I'm skeptical of automated texting doing the persuading. The machine's job is to get a human on the line fast and remember the follow-up. Anything past that and sellers can smell it.

What's a stage, in plain terms? I've read this thread twice.

@juniper a stage is one column in the pipeline, a named point a lead has reached. New, contacted, appointment set, offer made, under contract. The lead moves left to right and each move can fire off a task or a message. @lantern's point is that if you have 14 of them, people stop moving cards and the whole board lies to you.

@lantern what did the handoff document look like? On builds I've had done for me the drawings were fine and the as-built information was garbage, and six months later nobody could tell me why a thing was wired the way it was. Same failure mode with automations, I'd bet.

@windlass asked the question I'd have asked. I'd add the attribution one: with cold calling, PPC, and mail all landing in the same pot, how confident are you that a contract gets credited to the right source now? If the source field is set by whichever integration fires first, then a mail lead who later clicks an ad gets logged as PPC and the client will overspend on ads for a year on the strength of your reporting.

That's the part of these builds I'd want audited, because it's the number the owner will use to make his largest spending decision and it's the number least likely to have been checked.

If you could only keep one of the changes, which one produced the most of the result?