Know who you owe a call back, before they call someone else.

The board has seven columns: New, Contacted, Qualified, Estimating, Proposal Sent, Won and Lost. Each card is one prospective job: the client, the address, the kind of work, what you think it is worth, and who on your team owns it.

Drag a card to move it. Each column shows how many jobs are in it and what they add up to, and the dashboard carries the total still open. If you would rather read a table, the same leads show as a list with the follow-up date beside each one.

Give a lead a follow-up date. When the day comes, whoever owns the lead gets a reminder in Ridgepole and by email. If nobody owns it, the person who entered it gets the reminder, because they are the one who set the date.

Miss the day and it keeps reminding you, and says how many days overdue it is, until you move the date or close the lead. Won and lost leads are never chased: nobody needs a reminder about a job they already signed.

Log calls, emails, meetings, site visits and notes against the lead. Every move between columns is written into the same history on its own, with who moved it and when. The next person to pick it up reads that instead of asking the client the same questions again.

Moving a lead to Lost asks why: price, timing, went with another GC, project cancelled, no response, or something else. A season of those answers says a lot about your pricing.

Start an estimate from the lead and the two stay linked. When the client signs the proposal built from that estimate, the lead moves to Won by itself and points at the new job. You do not retype the client, and you do not forget to close the card.

Build a quote request form in Ridgepole, choose its fields and the wording on its button, and put it on your own website with a short snippet. No website? Every form also has a hosted page with its own link.

Each submission becomes a lead in the New column with the fields you mapped already filled in, and the people you pick get an email with the name, phone and notes. Spam is filtered without a puzzle for the homeowner: a hidden field, a timing check and a limit on how often one address can submit.

• Text, email, phone, dropdown, checkbox, number and date fields
• A default owner and a default source for every submission
• Your own thank-you message, or send them to a page on your site
• Turn a form off, or issue it a new link, without touching your site

The pipeline is for the office: owners, admins and project managers. Field crew, sub-trades and clients cannot open it, so who you are chasing and what those jobs are worth stays with the people who need to know.