CRM for trades: the UK guide for 2026 (with prices, features and what actually matters)

Every UK trades business hits the same wall around the third or fourth full-time member of staff. Quotes get sent twice or not at all. Customers slip through the gaps. The owner is doing admin past 9pm. The question of whether to bring in a CRM gets asked. The next question is which one. This guide answers both, with real prices, real features, and an honest take on why generic CRMs do not fit a trades business.

What a trades CRM actually needs to do

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management system) is software that holds every customer, every quote, every job, every email and every follow-up in one place. The name is misleading because CRMs are mostly about jobs and money, not relationships. For a UK trades business the must-have features are concrete and small in number.

It must hold every customer with notes, addresses, contacts and history. It must track every quote you send through stages (new, sent, accepted, lost) so you know what is in the pipeline. It must send those quotes professionally with your branding, ideally from your own email address. It must remind you to follow up before a quote goes cold. It must work on a phone because trades work happens on sites, in vans and at jobs, not at desks. And it must integrate with the rest of your tooling so accounting (Sage, Xero, QuickBooks) and compliance do not become separate worlds.

What a trades CRM does NOT need is the marketing automation, lead scoring, AI-powered customer journey, account-based marketing or revenue intelligence that 90% of CRM marketing copy goes on about. Those features exist for software companies selling to other software companies, not for a roofer in Plymouth quoting on a barn conversion.

Generic CRMs vs CRMs built for trades

HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and Monday all sell CRM software. None of them was built for a UK trades business. Here is why that matters.

Generic CRMs charge per user

HubSpot Starter is £15 per user per month. Salesforce Starter is £20. Pipedrive Essential is £14. Multiply by every estimator, every site manager, every admin who needs access. A 30-employee scaffolding firm easily reaches £450 to £600 per month before they have sent a single quote. Trade-focused CRMs like Complys charge a single business rate (typically £30 to £99 per month) regardless of how many people in your business use it.

Generic CRMs ignore compliance

The thing that wins UK construction work is not a slick sales pitch, it is whether your insurance is in date, whether your workers have CSCS cards, whether your last RAMS document covered the activity. A generic CRM does not know any of this exists. A trades CRM puts insurance, accreditations, RAMS documents and worker training on the same record as the customer, so when a contractor asks for proof you can send it in two clicks.

Generic CRMs assume office work

HubSpot is built for sales reps in front of laptops. Trades work happens with one hand, on a phone, in bad light, possibly while standing on a roof. A trades CRM has to load fast on a phone, use big tap targets, work offline when signal drops, and put the actions a worker actually performs (log a call, sign off a job, upload a site photo) at the front. Most generic CRMs technically have a mobile app. Most of those mobile apps are unusable on site.

Generic CRMs do not understand the trade workflow

A trades job goes: enquiry, quote, quote accepted, RAMS prepared, workers assigned, job done, invoice sent, payment received, testimonial requested. Generic CRMs handle the first three steps. The rest are missing. A trades CRM treats the whole flow as one continuous record so the quote that was won on Tuesday becomes the job that gets RAMS on Wednesday and workers assigned for Friday.

Real costs in 2026

Honest current pricing for UK trades to use as benchmarks:

• HubSpot Starter: £15/user/month (CRM only). Marketing Hub Starter another £45/month. Quickly reaches £200+/month for a small business.
• Salesforce Starter Suite: £20/user/month. Real cost typically £50+/user once you add the modules anyone actually uses.
• Pipedrive Essential: £14/user/month. Advanced (most useful tier) is £29/user/month.
• Monday CRM: £9/user/month for the basic plan. Standard is £24, Pro is £36. Per user.
• Tradify: £15/user/month. Trade-focused, no compliance side.
• SimPRO: Quote-only pricing, typically £80 to £150/user/month. Heavy enterprise focus.
• Complys: £30/month for Pro (whole business, unlimited users), £99 for Growth Plus including the tender finder and AI bid writing. CRM included on every plan.

Per-user pricing is a tax on growing your team. The bigger your trades business gets, the more you pay just to give your own staff access to the same data. A flat-rate trade CRM aligns with how trade businesses scale.

The features that genuinely matter

Skip the marketing pages and ask: does it do these six things well?

1. Customer database with searchable history

Every customer's full history (quotes, jobs, calls, emails) on one screen. Searchable by name, postcode, phone or company. If your CRM cannot show you "everything we have ever done with the Trent estate" in one click, it is not earning its keep.

2. Quote pipeline with stages

A kanban board where you can see at a glance how many quotes are out, how many were opened, how many are sitting waiting for a response, how many turned into jobs. Drag a card from one stage to another. The board is the reality of your business.

3. Email integration with your own address

Quotes and follow-ups should go from your own Gmail, Outlook or business address. Not from a generic noreply@ email address that gets junked. Recipients should see your name. Replies should arrive in your inbox. Open and click tracking should be built in so you know when to follow up.

4. Phone-first call logging

Most trade business is still done by phone. The CRM has to make logging a call (date, what was said, what to do next, who to follow up) a 10-second job. If logging takes a minute, nobody does it, and the phone-call paper trail vanishes.

5. Compliance attached to customer records

Insurance certificates, accreditations, RAMS, worker passports, training matrix - all live records you can share with a customer in two clicks. This is the differentiator a trade CRM has over a generic one. The trust signal that wins UK construction work is "we are compliant, here is the proof", and the CRM should make sending that proof effortless.

6. Mobile work that actually works on a phone

If you cannot send a quote, log a call and check a customer's history from a phone in 30 seconds, the CRM is not built for trades. It might be technically responsive. That is not the same as usable.

Why Complys is built for this

Complys is a CRM with compliance, RAMS, worker passports and quote sending all in one platform. It was built by a working scaffolder (DDC Scaffolding in Devon) who got tired of running his business on three spreadsheets and a paper diary. Every feature exists because a trades business actually uses it.

Customer database, quote pipeline, email integration with Gmail and Outlook, phone call logging, AI-drafted intro emails, compliance documents on every customer record, RAMS in 30 seconds, worker passports for every employee, GPS clock-in for time tracking, vehicle compliance tracking, training matrix - one platform, one flat business rate, no per-user pricing.

The 90-day free trial includes full feature access. No card needed. Most users have their first quote out within an hour and their first job won within a week. See the CRM features or start the free trial to try it on a real customer.

Common questions

Can I switch from HubSpot or Pipedrive easily?

Most CRMs export to CSV. Complys imports CSV customer data, so the switch is typically a 30-minute job. The harder part is getting your team to actually use the new system, which is mostly about choosing one that fits how trades actually work rather than retraining people on how to use generic CRM concepts.

Do I need a CRM if I have an accountant doing my Sage?

Sage tracks money. A CRM tracks the work that becomes the money. They do different jobs. The cleanest workflow is Sage for accounting and a CRM for everything before payment lands (quotes, jobs, customer relationships). The two should work together, not replace each other.

What about WhatsApp - that is my CRM today

WhatsApp is not a CRM. It is a chat tool. It cannot show you all your open quotes at once, cannot remind you to follow up, cannot track who has paid, cannot send a branded quote. Most trades businesses use WhatsApp for fast comms AND a CRM for record-keeping. The two complement each other rather than competing.

Can I trial it without a card?

Yes. Complys offers 90 days free with full features and no card required. After day 90 it drops to a free tier where you can keep the CRM working with reduced limits, or upgrade to a paid plan from £30/month.

How a trades CRM actually saves you money

The value of a CRM for a trade is not really about neat contact lists — it is about the work that quietly leaks away without one. Every enquiry you forget to quote, every quote you never chase, every customer you meant to call back and didn't, is money that walked out of the door unnoticed. A CRM's job is to make sure nothing falls through the gap: the enquiry gets logged, the quote gets sent, the follow-up gets prompted, and the customer who said "not right now" gets contacted again in three months instead of never. For most trades the single biggest return is simply chasing quotes that would otherwise have gone cold, because the difference between a fifty and a seventy per cent conversion on quotes you have already done the work to produce is pure profit.

The second saving is time. Hunting through texts, emails and a notebook to remember what you promised a customer is unpaid admin, usually done late at night. A system that holds it all in one place hands you that time back, and time is the scarcest thing a busy trade has. Money won and hours saved are the two returns, and for most firms they dwarf the cost of the tool.

From first enquiry to paid invoice: the trade sales cycle

A trades CRM earns its place by following a job through its whole life, not just storing a phone number. The cycle usually runs from an enquiry coming in, to a site visit or measure, to a quote going out, to the follow-up that wins or loses it, to the job being scheduled and done, to the invoice and, ideally, the review and the repeat work. At each of those stages something can stall, and each stall is a job at risk. A CRM built for trades maps to that reality: it knows a quote is waiting on a decision, that a job is booked for next week, that an invoice is overdue, and it surfaces the next action rather than leaving you to remember it.

Seeing the whole pipeline at a glance also changes how you run the business. Instead of a vague sense of being busy, you can see how many quotes are out, what they are worth, and where the bottleneck is — which tells you whether to push for more enquiries or chase the ones you already have. That visibility is something a pile of paper quotes can never give you.

Chasing quotes: the follow-up problem a CRM solves

If there is one habit that separates trades who grow from trades who stay flat, it is following up on quotes, and it is exactly the habit a CRM makes automatic. Most customers do not say no; they go quiet, get busy, or wait to compare prices, and a single polite chase a few days later is often what tips the job your way. The trouble is that following up relies on remembering, and when you are on the tools all day the quote you sent last Tuesday is easy to forget. A CRM removes the memory problem: it flags the quotes awaiting a decision and prompts you to chase them, so the follow-up happens whether or not the day went to plan.

The compounding effect is significant. Winning even a handful of extra jobs a month from quotes you had already produced, at no extra marketing cost, is often the clearest return the whole system delivers — and it comes purely from not letting warm opportunities go cold.

Why CRM and compliance belong together for a trade

For a trade, the customer relationship and the compliance paperwork are not separate worlds — the same job that needs a quote and a follow-up also needs insurance to be current, a RAMS produced, and a compliance pack sent to the contractor. Keeping the two in different systems means duplicated effort and things falling between them. When your contacts, your pipeline and your compliance live together, winning the work and being ready to do it become one joined-up process: you quote the contractor, you send your compliance pack from the same place, you track whether they opened it, and you follow up. That is why a trades tool that combines the sales side with the compliance side fits the way trades actually work better than a generic CRM bolted onto separate paperwork.

Getting started without disrupting the business

The fear that stops many trades adopting a CRM is that setting it up will be a big, disruptive project. It does not have to be. The sensible way to start is small: put your live quotes and current jobs in first, so the system immediately reflects the work in front of you, and let the historic stuff come in gradually or not at all. Within a week or two the habit of logging an enquiry and letting the system prompt the follow-up becomes second nature, and the payback — the first job won from a chase you would otherwise have forgotten — usually arrives quickly. Start with what is active, keep it simple, and let the tool prove itself on real work rather than trying to migrate years of history before you see any benefit.

Common mistakes trades make with a CRM

The mistakes that stop a CRM working are nearly always about habit, not the software. The first is trying to import years of history before going live, which turns a quick start into a stalled project; far better to put your live quotes and jobs in and begin. The second is over-complicating it — demanding every field and every feature from day one, when the value comes from consistently logging enquiries and letting the system prompt the follow-ups. The third, and most damaging, is using it sporadically: a CRM that is only half kept up is worse than none, because you stop trusting it and drift back to memory and scraps of paper.

The trades who get real value keep it simple and consistent: every enquiry goes in, every quote gets a follow-up prompt, and the system is the single place the pipeline lives. Do that, and it quietly pays for itself in jobs won; treat it as an occasional filing exercise, and it becomes another abandoned tool.

Related guides

• Do you need a CRM for your construction business? - the original 9-minute guide to whether a CRM makes sense for a UK contractor
• CRM for trades: the UK guide for 2026 - prices, features and what actually matters when choosing a trades CRM
• Construction CRM software UK: a buyer's guide for 2026 - what to look for, what to avoid, and real prices for UK construction
• CRM vs spreadsheet for tradespeople: when to make the switch - honest comparison and the specific signs you have outgrown the spreadsheet