// Pillar Service · Sales & Leads

Sales automation for Michigan contractors who keep losing bids to the faster guy.

We build the lead-to-quote pipeline that 15–50 employee GCs, electricians, mechanical contractors, and roofers in Bay City, Saginaw, and Midland are missing. Operator-built, not consultant slideware. From $7,500.

// 01 · The Problem

A bid request hits your inbox at 9:42 AM. Three days later, you remember to call them back.

Walk into the office of a 28-person general contractor in Saginaw on a Tuesday morning. The estimator is in a meeting. The owner is on a site visit. The office manager is handling three calls and trying to keep the master tracker current. A homeowner fills out the “Request a Quote” form on the website. That form submission lands in a shared inbox that nobody owns. By the time someone notices it, the lead has already gotten quotes from two competitors and ghosted.

Or the call comes in at 4:50 PM on a Friday. The receptionist writes the name and number on a sticky note. The sticky note ends up under a coffee cup. On Monday, someone vaguely remembers there was a call, but nobody knows who took it. That’s a $40,000 kitchen remodel that just walked out the door.

Meanwhile, the estimator is rebuilding the same quote document from scratch every time. Pulling unit prices out of a 2019 spreadsheet. Calling the supplier to verify a material cost. Cutting and pasting boilerplate scope language from the last proposal. A bid that should take 40 minutes takes 3 hours, and the proposal goes out 4 days after the homeowner asked for it. Speed-to-lead is the single biggest predictor of close rate in residential and light-commercial construction, and most Mid-Michigan shops are operating in the 24-to-72-hour zone where close rates fall off a cliff.

Then there’s the follow-up. You sent the quote on the 8th. It’s now the 22nd. Nobody’s called the prospect because everyone assumes someone else did. The deal goes cold. You find out three weeks later they signed with a competitor who had the discipline to call back on day 4, day 10, and day 18. You weren’t outbid. You were out-organized.

// 02 · The Cost

Run the math on what slow sales admin costs you in a year.

Take a typical 25-person Mid-Michigan contractor. Office manager and estimator spend a combined 14 hours a week on lead intake, quote drafting, CRM updates, and follow-up reminders. That’s before we count the deals lost to slow response.

hours_per_week = 14
weeks_per_year = 50
loaded_rate_mid_mi = $52/hr
annual_admin_burn = 14 × 50 × $52 = $36,400
lost_deals_estimate = 6 deals/yr × $28K avg gross = $168,000 in gross revenue walking out the door

We typically cut the admin burn by 70% and pull speed-to-lead from 48 hours down to under 5 minutes. The lost-deal recovery is bigger than the labor savings by an order of magnitude. The math gets ugly the moment you write it down.

// 03 · What We Build

Five sub-automations. One sales pipeline that runs itself.

// 01

Speed-to-Lead Router

I/O · Form / call / email in → Qualified lead in CRM + SMS ping to rep in under 60 seconds

Every inbound lead — website form, Google Local Services call, referral email, Facebook DM — gets captured, deduped against your CRM, scored against your qualification rules (zip code, job type, budget signal), and routed to the right estimator with a text ping. You go from 'we'll get back to you Monday' to 'thanks, we just got your request, can I clarify the scope?' in 90 seconds.

// 02

Quote & Estimate Generator

I/O · Scope intake (form or 5-min Loom from estimator) → Branded PDF quote with line items, terms, and signature link

Pulls from your live rate card, applies your margin rules, drops in the right boilerplate scope language, and produces a quote PDF that looks like a $5M GC put it together. Estimator reviews, tweaks, sends. 40 minutes of work compressed into 8.

// 03

Follow-Up Sequence Engine

I/O · Sent-quote stage in CRM → Automatic touchpoints on day 3, day 7, day 14, day 21

A drip of personalized check-ins (not spam — they look like the estimator wrote them) goes out until the prospect responds or the deal is marked dead. Owner gets a daily digest of who’s gone cold so a human can make a real call before it’s lost.

// 04

CRM Auto-Sync

I/O · Every email, call, and calendar event → Logged against the right deal automatically

The biggest reason 'we have a CRM but nobody uses it' is that updating it is a manual chore. We make it invisible: Outlook or Gmail activity automatically attaches to the right contact and deal. Your pipeline stops lying to you.

// 05

Pipeline Stale-Deal Alert

I/O · Daily 6 AM scan of your pipeline → Email digest of deals that haven’t moved in 7+ days

The deal you forgot about. The proposal you sent two weeks ago. The hot prospect that suddenly went quiet. Every morning, the owner gets a one-screen list of pipeline rot, with the action that’s overdue. Stalled deals stop disappearing into the spreadsheet.

// 04 · Outcomes

What this looks like 60 days after launch.

9 hrs
saved per week on sales admin
< 5 min
average speed-to-lead, down from ~48 hr
$1,800
per month in recovered labor
60 days
typical payback at Essentials tier
// 05 · Delivery Timeline

A 14-day engagement. Week-by-week.

Days 1-2
Discovery + integration audit

We walk your inbox, your current CRM (or lack of one), your quote template, and your follow-up habits. Document the exact pipeline state, the systems we’re wiring into, and the rules for qualification and routing.

Days 3-5
Lead capture + CRM sync wired

Form, phone, email, and DM intake all unified. CRM auto-logging turned on. First test leads flowing through.

Days 6-9
Quote generator + follow-up engine built

Your rate card is loaded. Templates are branded. Sample quotes generated end-to-end and reviewed by you. Drip sequences drafted in your voice and approved.

Days 10-12
Pipeline alerts + estimator training

Stale-deal digest goes live. We sit with the office manager and estimator for two 60-minute training sessions. Everyone knows how to use the system.

Days 13-14
Cutover + 14-day support window opens

Live. Real leads flowing. We watch the first week of activity with you and tune the qualification rules until the routing is dialed.

// 06 · Pricing

For most contractors, the Essentials tier is the right entry.

Essentials · $7,500
One pillar automation, fully deployed

For a 15–30 person shop, we recommend starting with the Speed-to-Lead Router and Follow-Up Sequence Engine as the Essentials pilot. Those two alone typically pay back in under 90 days. From there, layer in the quote generator and CRM sync at the Standard tier ($18,000) when you’re ready for the full pipeline. Companies above 50 people, or those with multi-location dispatch needs, should start at Turnkey ($42,000) and get the whole stack at once.

Essentials
$7,500
Standard
$18,000
Turnkey
$42,000
// 07 · FAQ

The objections we hear every week.

We already pay for Salesforce / HubSpot / JobTread / Buildertrend. Are you replacing it?+

No. We wire into what you already pay for. The reason your existing CRM feels useless is that nothing flows into it automatically and nothing alerts when something is wrong. We fix the layer above the CRM, not the CRM itself.

Our setup is too unique — we've tried tools and they don't fit our workflow.+

That’s exactly why generic SaaS doesn’t work for you. We build to your existing process, not a vendor’s opinionated template. Your rate card, your scope language, your qualification rules, your tone in the follow-up emails. If we can’t fit your workflow, we don’t take the project.

We can't afford to stop working on real bids while you build this.+

You don’t. The build happens in parallel — we sit with your team for a total of about 6 hours across 14 days, and the rest is us heads-down. Cutover is a one-hour Saturday morning event. Monday everything just works.

What happens if you build it and then disappear?+

Everything we build runs on your accounts, your CRM, your domain. We hand over admin access, source code where applicable, and a written runbook. You could fire us the day after launch and the system keeps running. We earn the retainer by being useful, not by holding your data hostage.

Can we do a smaller pilot before the full Essentials?+

The free 3-minute discovery assessment is the pilot. It gives you the matched automations, the ROI math, and a written proposal. If after that you want a single feature scoped — say, just the Speed-to-Lead Router for $3,200 — we’ll do it. We’d rather earn the second engagement than oversell the first.

Do you keep our data? What about prospect privacy?+

We don’t store your operational data on our infrastructure. Builds run on your tenants — your Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, your CRM, your storage. We’re a build partner, not a SaaS vendor. Your prospect list never leaves your environment.

What if we need changes after the 14-day support window?+

Essentials includes 14 days of post-launch tuning. Standard is 30 days plus monthly check-ins for 90 days. Turnkey is 90 days. After that, change requests run at $185/hr or you can pick up a monthly retainer (currently $1,400/mo) that covers two changes per month plus monitoring.

We're in Bay City — do you actually work with companies in our region?+

Qintova is headquartered in Bay City, MI. Our ICP is the 15–50 person construction and trades corridor running Midland to Saginaw to Flint. We know the supplier names, the major GCs, the labor market, and the regulatory environment. We are not a generic agency.

// Engage //

Stop losing bids to the faster shop.

Three-minute assessment. Real ROI math. No sales call required.