What's really going on

You run ~80 jobs a month. Most are cash, one-off, never coming back — a CRM adds zero value there. But a handful of regular customers drive most of your revenue, and jobs are never true repeats, so every quote is a fresh conversation. That's where leads slip: a regular rings, someone quotes, it goes quiet, nobody chases. Your workflow tool tracks live jobs beautifully and forgets everything before the job exists.

What to do instead

1. Zoho Bigin (free for 1 user, ~NZ$11/user/mo paid — check current pricing) — one pipeline: Enquiry → Quoted → Won/Lost. Only put named/repeat customers and jobs over some dollar threshold (say $2k) in it. Walk-ups stay out.
2. A shared "regulars" list — 20-40 accounts, last job date, who owns the relationship. Bigin's Contacts view does this. Ring each one every quarter.
3. A habit: every Friday, the office spends 20 minutes moving stale quotes forward. One call, one email, or mark it lost. Nothing sits.

First action today: open Bigin, create the three-stage pipeline, and load every open quote over $2k from the last 60 days. One person, 30 minutes.

What you're being oversold

Someone will pitch you Salesforce or a "manufacturing CRM" with job costing, BOMs, and quoting modules bolted on. Wrong shape — you already have a workflow tool for live jobs, and Salesforce is built for teams with dedicated admins. Jobber sounds close but it's for field-service trades who quote-schedule-invoice in one flow; you're a shop, not a van. Doing nothing means a few $20k jobs a year quietly go to a competitor because nobody followed up — you won't see them leave.

When to revisit this

When a second person in the office starts asking "who's chasing that quote?" more than once a week.

The part worth getting right

The judgment call is where the line sits between "worth tracking" and "just quote it and move on." Get it too low and Bigin fills with cash-sale noise nobody updates, and the team abandons it inside a month. Too high and you miss the mid-size regulars who quietly drift. It's set by your quote value mix and how many enquiries the office actually fields a week — numbers only you have.