All Pro Builders wants to stay lean and efficient even as it grows, so when the Fullerton, Calif., company finds a low-cost method that works, it sticks with it. Such is the case with All Pro’s system for tracking leads. It starts with pen and paper when office manager Carrie Harris takes phone calls and email inquiries and writes the information into lead sheets. Then she transcribes much of that data to Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that have been set up by co-owner Lisa Paniagua to automatically count and compile the sources of those leads into a one-page report.

Lisa and husband Paul Paniagua then use that leads report to see which marketing investments are returning the most. “Lisa is a guru about all this,” Paul says. “I come to her with ideas all the time. I wanted to know what’s paying off.” ­­

All Pro could have taken this automation one step further by setting up a system that compares marketing costs with number of leads generated to produce a rough return on investment, but since the Paniaguas buy so few ads, they pretty much know those numbers already and can thus do the math in their head.

A: Creating a Code

Information for each lead is written down by hand as it comes in. At that time, it’s also tagged with a source code.

B: Auto-Counting

The source code is included when the lead is entered into a spreadsheet organized by month and date. This summary page is coded to add up all the times in which the source code appears on the monthly lead sheet; that number is then put onto this page of the report.

C: Worth It?

All Pro is paying particular attention these days to whether its Yellow Book ads are worth the expenditure.

D: Tally Ho

The system automatically tallies the total number of leads from each source, computes a grand total, and then determines the percentage of total leads that came from each source. All Pro has been doing this for several years, so by pulling up past spreadsheets, the Paniaguas can get a quick sense of call volume over the years.

—Craig Webb is editor-in-chief of REMODELING. Follow him on Twitter at @craiglwebb or @RemodelingMag.