What a CRM Should Do When You're Away From the Desk

It is 11:40 on a Wednesday and you are on a ladder, halfway through a job. Your phone buzzes in your pocket. You ignore it, because you are on a ladder. At 12:30, eating lunch in the van, you finally look: a new inquiry came through your website form fifty minutes ago, someone who needs the same kind of work you are doing right now, two streets away. You call. They thank you politely and say they already booked someone who picked up.

Nothing about that story is a technology failure. You were working, which is the point of a business. But it shows what a CRM on your phone is actually for, and it is a much narrower job than most mobile apps try to do.

I will say up front that this post is partly about the NetWebMedia app, which is not released yet. The page lists it as coming soon to iOS and Android, with a waitlist for early beta access. I would rather write about what a mobile CRM should do before we ship ours than after, so you can hold us to it.

The phone's job is narrow

At a desk, a CRM is a place to think: review the pipeline, write proposals, look at reports, clean up records. On a phone, between jobs, you are not thinking. You are reacting in the minute you have. So the phone version should be judged on how well it handles that minute.

• Tell me a new lead arrived, in a way I will notice, with enough detail to know whether it can wait.
• Let me call them back with one tap, from the lead itself.
• Let me hand the lead to someone who is not on a ladder, so they call back instead of me.
• Show me the few deals I care about today, and leave everything else for the desk.

That is the whole list. Reports, bulk edits, campaign builders and settings all belong at the desk. A mobile app that tries to reproduce every desktop screen ends up with every screen too small to use, and the one thing you needed buried three menus down.

Notifications are the product

For someone who works away from a desk, the notification is the most important screen in the app, and most apps treat it as an afterthought. Two things decide whether notifications help or become noise you learn to ignore.

The first is selectivity. A new inquiry deserves a notification. A report being ready can wait for the evening. If every event buzzes your pocket, you will silence all of them within a week and be back to the fifty-minute story. The NetWebMedia app page describes push notifications for events such as a new lead or a finished report, and says you can silence them at any time. My advice for any app, ours included: leave the lead alert on and turn the rest off until you miss them.

The second is what the notification says. New lead is almost useless on a ladder. New lead, water heater, two streets from you, asked for a call is something you can decide on without climbing down. Whatever tool you use, fill in your website form fields so the alert carries the detail that lets you triage from your pocket.

Decide the handoff before you need it

The fastest callback is often not yours. If you have someone in the office, or a partner who is between jobs, the useful move is to pass the lead on in one gesture and get back to work. The app page describes tapping a lead to call it or to hand it off to your team.

Handoffs only work if the rule exists beforehand. Agree now who takes leads when you are on site, and for how long a lead can sit before anyone takes it. Write it down. Otherwise both of you assume the other one called, which is the office version of the fifty-minute story.

What the desk is still for

The phone reacts and the desk decides. The weak point in that split is the call you made from the van: it happened, it mattered, and nobody wrote down what was said. A week later the lead is a name with no history, and whoever picks it up starts from zero.

So keep one small habit at the desk, whatever app you use. At the end of the day, spend ten minutes going through the leads you touched from your phone and add one line to each: what they need and when you will speak again. That line is what turns a quick callback into a deal someone else can pick up tomorrow.

Security on a device that lives in a van

A phone that holds your customer list gets left on café tables and car seats. Before you install any business app, check two things: how it stores your login, and what happens if the phone is lost. The NetWebMedia app page says login tokens are kept in the device's secure storage and that every request is encrypted. It also says the app signs in with the same email and password as the web dashboard.

Separately from any app, turn on a screen lock and remote wipe for any phone that holds customer data. That protects you more than any feature a vendor can add.

What you can do while the app is on its way

You do not need a native app to fix the ladder problem. Most of it is process.

1. Set a callback rule, in minutes, for new inquiries during working hours, and tell everyone who might pick up.
2. Make sure your website form collects the detail that lets you triage a lead from a notification: what they need, where they are, when suits them and how they want to be contacted.
3. Agree the handoff: who takes leads when you are on site, and how they find out.
4. Put your number in a tap-to-call format on every page, so the customers who would rather call can reach you in one tap. I wrote about the details in formatting phone numbers for tap-to-dial.

Who the app is for

The app page is honest about its audience: operators who do not work from a desk. It says the app itself is free and signs in with an existing NetWebMedia account, with plans starting at $249 a month on the pricing page. It will follow your account's language, English or Spanish. If you spend most of your day at a desk, the web version is the better tool and you will not miss much on the phone.

If you are the one on the ladder, the NetWebMedia app page has the waitlist. Whatever you install, judge it by one question: would it have saved the fifty-minute lead?

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