You don't need a sales CRM, you need a job thread
Most CRMs are built for salespeople: pipeline stages, deal probabilities, activity quotas, email sequences. That's the wrong shape for a contractor who talks to a homeowner, walks the site, sends a proposal, and either wins the job or doesn't. Your "pipeline" is a handful of real people and real properties, and what you actually need is for the conversation, the price, and the work to stay attached to each other from first call to final invoice.
When the client, the proposal, and the job are the same thread, you never lose the context. Open the client and you see the property, the proposal you sent, whether they accepted, and the live job underneath it, not a contact card sitting in one app and the actual work living in another.
The client should flow into the estimate, and the estimate into the job
The test of a contractor system is whether information moves forward without you re-keying it. You add a client once. Their details carry into the proposal. When they accept, the proposal becomes the job and its budget, still carrying the same client and property. Nothing gets retyped, and nothing drifts because there's only one copy of the truth. A bolt-on sales CRM can't do this: it captures the lead, but the estimate and the job live somewhere else, so you enter the same names and addresses two or three more times.
Bolt-on sales CRM vs a contractor system
A general-purpose sales CRM is fine at what it was built for, tracking a rep's deals, but it stops at the sale. For a GC, the sale is the start of the real work, and a CRM that hands off to a separate estimating tool and a separate job tracker recreates the exact fragmentation software was supposed to remove. A contractor system keeps going: lead to proposal to job to invoices, one record the whole way.
It also has to run from your phone, honestly. "Mobile app available" isn't the same as phone-first. If logging a new lead or checking what you quoted takes ten taps and a good signal, it won't get used. TradesMetrics is designed to be driven from the field, and you can talk to it, capturing a new client or a note by voice while it's fresh.
Pricing that matches lumpy, seasonal revenue
Per-seat CRM subscriptions charge the same whether you're flat out or waiting on spring, and they punish you for adding your office help. TradesMetrics uses a 0.5% usage fee tied to the work that flows through the system: busy months cost a little, slow months cost almost nothing, and there's no per-seat lock-in, so putting your whole team on it doesn't raise the bill.
How to evaluate anything you're considering
A quick checklist you can run against TradesMetrics or any competitor:
- Does a client record flow into an estimate and a job without re-entry?
- Can I see the client, the proposal, and the live job in one thread?
- Is it built for a contractor's work, or for a salesperson's pipeline?
- Can I add a lead and check a quote from my phone in under a minute?
- Will the price scale down when I have a slow month?
If a tool answers "no" to most of those, it's sales software with a hard hat on, not a system for running jobs. See how the project-management workflow keeps the client, proposal, and job on one thread, and how a construction proposal turns straight into the job.
The fastest way to feel the difference is to price a real job. Try the free estimating tool, then see how the client, the proposal, and the live job stay on one thread inside TradesMetrics.