Dropped $1,400 on a fancy CRM setup and my leads stopped calling back
Hired a consultant to build out a whole pipeline for my cleaning biz last spring, but the automations kept dumping people into weird stages so nobody got followed up with. I switched back to a $20 shared inbox and a paper calendar for routing, and my rebook rate jumped from 4 jobs a month to 11. What's the dumbest money you've burned on business software you ended up tossing?
Man, what did the automations actually do once a lead came in? Like, was it supposed to text them right away, or just move them to some stage and wait for you to notice? I'm asking because I ran into the same thing with a booking tool a couple years back, and the problem was never the software, it was that nobody told me a lead was even sitting there. Did the consultant ever explain why people were landing in those weird stages, or did he just hand you the keys and vanish? I keep hearing guys say the pipeline has to match how you already work, not the other way around.