A CRM for a one-van business: what you need and what you don't

What a CRM is for when there is only you

You do not need a customer relationship management system. You need a list of open enquiries that nags you. Everything else is decoration.

The list has to answer four questions in the van, in under ten seconds: who has enquired and not yet been called back, who has had a quote and not yet answered, what is booked for tomorrow, and who finished a job recently and has not yet been asked for a review.

If a tool answers those four questions from your phone without typing, it is a good CRM for a one-van business. If it takes a laptop and a login and a dropdown, it will be abandoned by week three, which is the subject of our piece on why most trades CRMs fail.

The six things it must do

Notice what the list is built around: statuses and reminders. A CRM for a sole trader is a status machine with a nagging habit. The status changes are the triggers for the automations described in our anatomy of a trades lead system.

Requirement	Why it matters	Test
Create a record from a call or text automatically	Typing in the van does not happen	Miss a call; does a record appear?
Hold one status per enquiry	New, contacted, quoted, won, lost, done. No more	Can you change status with one tap?
Remind you when a status goes stale	Quoted-and-silent for 4 days is a lost job in waiting	Does it notify you, not just show a list?
Send a text from inside the record	Follow-up should not mean switching apps	Can you text the customer from the record?
Fire an event when a job is done or paid	That event triggers the review request	Does it connect to your invoicing app or SMS tool?
Work entirely on a phone	The laptop is at home	Spend a day using only the mobile app

The twelve things you do not need

Every one of those is a reason a CRM costs more, takes longer to set up and gets abandoned. If a tool leads with them, it was built for a different customer. Our comparison of CRMs for tradesmen notes which products hide the complexity and which parade it.

• Sales pipeline stages with probability percentages
• Revenue forecasting
• Lead scoring
• Deal values weighted by stage
• Team permissions and roles
• Email marketing campaign builders
• Custom dashboards
• Contact import from LinkedIn
• Activity logging of every email opened
• Multiple pipelines
• Products and price books
• An API you will never call

The minimum data model

Resist the urge to capture everything. For a one-van business, a record needs:

Name. Mobile number. Postcode. What they want, in one line. Where they came from (Google, recommendation, Checkatrade, van). Status. Date of last contact. Quote value, once quoted. A notes field.

Nine fields. Anything beyond that, add only when you have found yourself wishing it existed three times. The 'where they came from' field is the one people skip and the one that makes measuring marketing in jobs won possible later, so keep it, even if the answer is a guess.

Where the records come from

Manual entry is the enemy. The sources that should create a record on their own:

A missed call, via your missed-call text back service, which already knows the number and time. A website form submission. A WhatsApp or SMS from a new number, if your tool can watch an inbox. An answered call, which is the hard one: the best you can do is a one-tap 'add last caller' button or a quick voice note that becomes the notes field.

If half your enquiries arrive by answered call and the CRM has no quick way to log them, that half will never be logged and the CRM will slowly become fiction.

The statuses, and what each one triggers

Six statuses. If your tool insists on more, hide the extras. If it has fewer, 'Quoted' is the one you cannot live without, because quote follow-up is where the recoverable money is. Riley Marketing's fixed-fee CRM is built around lead status tracking of this kind with quote pages attached; Trustmark Trades offers a jobs CRM as an optional add-on to its website system.

Status	Meaning	Automation it should fire
New	Enquiry received, not yet spoken to	Remind me in 1 hour if unchanged
Contacted	Spoken to, visit or quote pending	Remind me in 2 days
Quoted	Price sent	Text customer at day 3 and day 8 if unchanged; remind me at day 10
Booked	Date agreed	Confirmation text now; reminder text day before
Done	Work complete, invoiced	Review request 2 to 4 hours after paid
Lost	Went elsewhere or cancelled	Nothing. Optionally a 'how did you get on?' text at 6 months

Cost expectations

Worked example only. A standalone small-business CRM with an app typically costs from nothing up to around £30 a month for one user. An SMS add-on adds a few pence per message, so 200 texts a month is perhaps £8 to £12. A connector tool to link the invoicing app to the CRM, if the two do not talk natively, adds £15 to £25 a month.

A bundled trades system that includes the CRM alongside the website and review automation can work out cheaper than assembling those parts, which is the case the ranking of marketing systems for trades weighs up. The right comparison is total monthly cost against the number of jobs recovered, not the sticker price of the CRM alone.

The one-week test

Before you commit to any tool, run it for five working days alongside whatever you do now. At the end of the week, answer three questions honestly.

Did every enquiry end up in it without you having to sit down in the evening and catch up? Did it tell you about anything you had forgotten? Did you open it more than once a day without being prompted?

Three yeses means it will survive. One or two means it will be a spreadsheet by Christmas. None means stop paying for it now.

Frequently asked questions