We are often asked at ProLine about the best setup for phone numbers as a contractor. We've tested dozens of different setups across many of our customers, and one arrangement has consistently stood out as the best by a substantial margin. Let's dig into it.
To start with, it's important to know that there are three fundamentally different types of phone numbers that you will use as a contractor:
Office Lines: These are phone numbers for your whole company (or a division of your company) and are not associated with a specific individual on your team. Small companies might only have one person answering an office line, but that still does not make it their direct line; they just happen to be the person picking up the calls.
Direct Lines: These are phone numbers associated with specific team members and will always ring to them. A team member's direct line should go on their business card. Homeowners who call a direct line expect to be connected to the person associated with it or their unique voicemail.
Marketing Lines: Also known as "tracking numbers," these are *optional* phone numbers that are used for specific marketing and advertising channels to help track lead sources. These numbers should be forwarded to your office lines and only used for collecting leads from the marketing channel they are assigned to.
Rules of Good Contractor Phone Organization
These four rules cover contractors' most common mistakes with their phone number setups. Follow these rules to sell more, stay organized, and keep your customers and employees happy.
Rule #1 of Good Contractor Phone Organization
Do not mix direct and office/marketing lines, ever!
An owner's or sales rep's direct line should never be used as an office line or promoted in marketing efforts. Even a brand-new business run by a single owner/operator should have two phone numbers: An office line and the owner's direct line. Establishing this early avoids headaches and lost sales down the road due to confusion and disorganization.
It is okay (and sometimes ideal) to use your office line in marketing efforts. Marketing lines are optional and only necessary for advanced tracking of marketing ROI.
Rule #2 of Good Contractor Phone Organization
One office line per division of your company.
A contractor with a single location with one team serving all customers should have a single office line for the business. This phone number is published online as part of the business's NAP (Name, Address, Phone), which is important for SEO. A contractor with two locations in different cities should have one office line for each location.
In rare cases, it may be necessary for large contractors to have separate office lines for a single location if they have separate divisions (Commercial and Residential, for example) that are served by entirely different teams of people at the same location. This is only necessary if you have completely separate employees answering and scheduling these different types of leads and should otherwise be avoided.
Rule #3 of Good Contractor Phone Organization
Never make an outbound call or text from an office line.
Office lines are for collecting leads via inbound calls. That's it. Once someone has communicated with your business in any way, they should be assigned to a specific person on your team who will then communicate with them via their direct line.
This includes people who call the office line and leave a message. A specific team member should call back voicemails left on office lines via their direct line.
This approach makes a HUGE difference in close rate and lead conversion. Homeowners want to feel they have specific people looking out for them and their project rather than being a number to a faceless organization. If you're having your team make outbound calls via a generic office line, you are unnecessarily losing valuable leads and sales.
Handling all communication after the initial inbound call via a direct line is also more efficient. It is always clear who is communicating and responsible for a lead. Fewer leads will slip through the cracks, and your team will be able to handle higher lead volumes.
Rule #4 of Good Contractor Phone Organization
Never use personal cell phone numbers for any business phone line.
Every member of your team that communicates with leads or customers should have a direct phone number that is different from their personal cell number and is owned by your company.
There are multiple benefits to this:
Separation of work vs. personal communication ensures more professional communication with prospects/customers and provides better work/life balance to your team (aka better employee retention).
If the team member ever leaves your company, their contacts and conversations stay behind and can't be used by them or a competitor that employs them.
If you use virtual direct line phone numbers (like ProLine numbers) then communication can be automatically logged and tracked for transparency, accountability, and training.
Summary of How You Should Organize Your Phone Numbers as a Contractor:
Each location of your business should have a single office line published online and used in all marketing for that location. Inbound leads will call this number when they are searching for a contractor. This number should forward to your inbound call answering team.
In most cases, we recommend using a simul-ring forwarding setup so that inbound calls ring to all your answering team's direct lines simultaneously and connect to the first person to pick up. Large companies with high inbound call volumes may need to use a round-robin call forwarding setup instead to optimize for the even distribution of calls to their answering team.
Your inbound call answering team can take on many forms:
The Owner (in a brand new company)
Office Manager/Assistant(s)
Inside Sales Rep(s)
Answering Service
Virtual Assistant(s)
The only thing we strongly discourage is having inbound calls forward to conventional outside sales reps. Outside sales reps should be focused on interacting with existing prospects face-to-face and cannot effectively juggle both inbound leads and closing sales. These roles should be separated as early as possible in your business.
Unless you are using an answering service, every member of your call answering team should have a direct line. Inbound calls from the office line are forwarded to the answering team's direct lines via simul-ring or round-robin. Any outbound calls your answering team makes (such as calling back missed calls and voicemails) should be made from their direct lines.
Every sales rep on your team should also have a direct line. Once your answering team has scheduled an appointment, the assigned sales rep should communicate with the prospect via their direct line throughout the sales process.
Every project manager on your team (if you have project management and sales responsibilities separated) should also have a direct line. Once a project is sold, the project manager should communicate with the customer via their direct line to schedule the job and keep the customer updated throughout the process.
Where Does ProLine Fit In?
ProLine numbers replicate the experience of having a second cell phone number for each person added to your account as a team member. Use ProLine to provide direct lines to every member of your team who communicates with leads or customers. Check out this guide for details on adding and managing team members and ProLine numbers in ProLine.
ProLine is not designed for office lines, but it can still work for this use case as long as a single person is answering all inbound calls. Taking this into account, you have three possible setups for your office line as a company on ProLine:
Setup A: Leave your office line(s) on other phone services or platforms and only have your team's direct lines on ProLine. We generally recommend this (since ProLine isn't designed for office lines), but this does have the downside of not automatically logging and recording your inbound calls in ProLine.
Setup B: If the person answering inbound calls to the office is only answering inbound calls (not doing sales or anything else in the business), then you can set this person up with a ProLine account, and their ProLine number can be the office line number.
Setup C: If the person answering inbound calls to the office is also a salesperson or fills other roles in the business, then they will have to have a direct line (their ProLine number), and then you will need to add the office line as a separate user. On the manage team page, select the office line's user to forward calls to the ProLine account of the person who will be answering the inbound calls. In this way, the person's direct line and the office line remain separate. Additionally, if that person ever gets too busy, you can always hire someone to just answer inbound calls and set them up with the existing office line user account, with little to no disruption to operations.
If you need any of the following features for your office line(s), ProLine will NOT work for your office line(s) at this time:
Round Robin
Simul-Ring
Forward After 2 Rings
Inbound Call Analytics
Call Routing (e.g. "Press 1 for sales, 2 for production")
For this type of functionality, you need to use a different service for your office line(s). We recommend CallRail since it has excellent call analytics and both simul-call and round-robin forwarding.