By Ron Yarbrough
Last week in The Books Close Themselves Now I wrote about the least glamorous job in an association, keeping the books. This week the story moves into the painting company itself, to the job at the very front of the line: taking in a new lead.
The job
Every new customer starts the same way. Somebody has to enter the contact, who the caller is, name, address, phone, email, and what kind of customer they are. Then the company, which often has a different name and address than the caller gave. Then the job itself, the opportunity we are chasing: the project address, the scope, the description of what is involved. In HubSpot, the CRM we use, that record is called a Deal. A CRM is customer relationship management software, a database of your customers and the work you are pursuing with them.
Then, if we decide the job is worth bidding, the file has to be set up. We are a paperless office, so that means dragging in a template estimate folder with all of its subfolders for estimating, bookkeeping and record keeping on that one project.
None of that is optional and none of it is casual. We have a network, and several people have to be able to find everything related to a bid, from the first phone call through closeout if we are awarded the work. Setting it up properly the first time matters.
At the front desk, one intake is about fifteen minutes.
What changed
I trained an AI agent to do the intake, the same way I would train a new employee at that desk.
When the lead arrives by email from a form on our website, the contact, the company and the job are created automatically, and so is the Windows folder from the estimate template. When a customer calls instead, the call is recorded and my AI agent transcribes it, better than I would transcribe it, and pulls the same information out of what the customer actually said, including the scope of the work.
Then it does something no one at a front desk has time to do. It looks up the property address, and puts a Google Maps link and a Google Earth link right on the record. An estimator sees the property before he ever gets in the truck, at his computer or on his phone on the road.
Being in the system is not the same as bidding it. We still qualify the lead ourselves. That judgment is ours. If we confirm it as a bid, the bid date goes on the calendar and the job is fully set up.
Why it matters to a painting contractor
Fifteen minutes does not sound like much until you count the leads in a week, and then count what it costs to have somebody sitting there to catch them. Most of us do this work at night, or badly, or not at all, and a lead sits in an inbox for three days.
It is the same lesson as the books. The task repeats, it follows the same steps every time, and the steps can be written down. That is what an agent is good at. I did the intake once alongside the agent, then told it to write the procedure, and now it runs.
I never wrote a line of code to get any of it. I am training it the way I train an employee, by speaking plain English to a computer.
Bring the intake in your own office to the next Peer Exchange and we will look at it together. Painting contractors: apply to join.