When I first started working with Texas Select, it was just the owner who was selling the jobs, there were no other sales reps. Jobber was a great fit for the business. It had everything built in and was super easy to setup and get going with. Jobber is really great for the solopreneurs who are doing everything themselves.
Dylan (owner) eventually brought on a sales rep and we tried to make Jobber work but noticed quickly there were limitations.
We couldn't:
There were many more limitations that we finally just decided to tear it all down and rebuild elsewhere that supported sales reps and a bigger organization structure. I did some digging and decided that JobNimbus was the next home for the CRM.
We needed a platform that gave us maximum flexibility. We wanted to design a customer lifecycle that worked for our business, not bend our operations to fit in a box that didn't work for us. Some of the specific reasons are:
There really were many reasons why, but the main driver was that Dylan planned on expanding the sales team and we needed a platform that supported that. JobNimbus was the answer for this and it's been a huge success since the move over.
It really isn't as scary as you would think to switch CRMs, especially when your business is so young. For Texas Select, at the time they weren't doing big numbers, it was early for the business, so there wasn't a crazy overlap. There is always some overlap when switching systems: you have estimates you sent in your old CRM that aren't in your new CRM, so you're working two different systems temporarily to make sure you're working the leads in both systems. You have a lead sign an estimate on the old CRM, so you have to recreate the estimate and invoice in the new system. This is just one of the pains when transitioning.
Setup and training. We had many many many iterations of how we wanted things to flow and work in JobNimbus, so there were some frustrations there. You teach someone one way and then a week later you say never mind, we're doing it this way. But it's growing pains you just have to work through as a team. You start with a big block of marble, and piece by piece you end up with a beautiful sculpture at the end of it.
Migrating the data from the old CRM was part of the effort, but they make this really easy to do. We were able to export all clients from Jobber and import them into JobNimbus. Same thing with the products. Piece of cake.
We have a custom fence sketch app that I now had to make work with JobNimbus which required me to write some new code to make that happen. This wasn't completely automated in Jobber, but I was able to do it with JobNimbus because of their custom webhook features and super user-friendly API service. Shoutout JobNimbus.
The biggest obstacle of them all when switching CRMs is always recreating all the automations. I had to recreate all the different Zaps we had for Jobber, but now make them work for JobNimbus. This was tedious work.
This is how we have everything setup in JobNimbus:
We have the following stages: Lead => Estimating => Sold => In Production => Accounts Receivable => Completed => Lost
I should really draw out a graphic detailing how everything works. I will add it to my todo list for later. There are really a lot of pieces to this sequence, it's hard to post screenshots of how each board works together.
If you are a fence business owner and are needing help setting up your CRM, book a free call with me or shoot me an email, ([email protected]) I love setting up systems and would love the opportunity to work with you!
