Most CRMs sold to a plumber or a med spa were built for a sales team with a manager. What a service business needs is simpler and harder: every call, text and form in one place, answered inside a minute, followed up until it books. We set that up and run it.
A CRM for a service business needs one inbox for calls, texts, email and forms, a contact record with the whole thread, booking with reminders, a first reply inside 60 seconds and follow-up that runs itself. Martello Systems sets up and runs three of our own: Relay for most service businesses, TradesBackbone for trade shops, Quag for practices. We migrate your contacts; you never have to log in.
Strip away the dashboards and the pipeline stages and a service business needs five things from its CRM. If a tool does not do all five, the owner ends up running the business from their phone's call log anyway.
Everything else, lead scoring, deal stages, forecasting, is built for a company with a sales team. A 6-person cleaning company does not have one, and a CRM that assumes it does becomes a second job for the owner.
We do not resell someone else's CRM. The three below are ours: built, hosted and operated by Martello Systems, which is why we can run them for you rather than hand you a login and a training video.
Phone, texts, email and forms in one inbox, one thread per customer, the 60-second first reply, booking with reminders, follow-up sequences, missed call text back, and an AI front desk that answers calls when you cannot. It answers our own line. Fit: cleaners, landscapers, med spas, clinics, groomers, studios, and any business whose work is a conversation followed by an appointment.
The same inbox and first reply, plus the parts a trade shop needs and a general CRM does not have: jobs, quotes, scheduling, technicians, invoices, and the customer texts around all of them (the on-the-way message, the invoice, the quote follow-up). Published, no-contract pricing on its own site. Fit: plumbers, electricians, HVAC, roofers, pest control, and the operators who run a crew.
A lighter CRM for businesses that do not need job costing: pipeline, contacts, follow-up and booking without the field-service weight. Fit: consultants, agents, small practices, and anyone who mostly needs to know who they spoke to and when to speak to them next.
Relay and TradesBackbone read from Mycel, which holds your business's memory: prices, hours, service area, policies, the way you handle a cancellation. The first reply to a customer, the booking page and the reminder text all pull from the same place, so a customer is never quoted one price by the auto-reply and another by the person who picks up.
Most automation fails because the answers live in the owner's head. Mycel is where they live instead, and it is why the system can send a reply in your words at two in the morning without inventing anything.
The offer is not a subscription to software. It is a small team, led by Artie, directing an engineering fleet that builds and operates the system for you:
Setup usually takes one to three weeks, with the highest-payback piece (normally the phone and the first reply) live first. Month to month, no long-term contract.
A connected Facebook and Instagram inbox is built into Relay and is going through Meta's app review before it opens to customers. Once it does, messages from your Pages arrive in the same thread as the customer's calls and texts. Until then, calls, texts, email and forms are the channels we run.
The 15-minute conversation with Artie usually settles it with three questions. Do you send quotes and invoices for jobs done at a customer's property? That is TradesBackbone. Is your work a conversation and then an appointment, with calls and texts as the main channel? That is Relay. Do you mostly need to know who you spoke to and when to follow up, without booking a van? That is Quag. Bring the number you answer on and a rough count of enquiries per week, and you leave knowing which one, what the setup looks like, and what it would cost.
Fifteen minutes with Artie, the founder. Bring the number you answer on, where your contacts live today and a rough count of enquiries a week; you leave knowing which system, what the migration looks like, and what it would cost.
Book 15 minutes with ArtieThe one that puts calls, texts, email and forms in one inbox, replies to a new enquiry inside a minute, books and reminds, and follows up on its own. For most service businesses we run Relay; for trade shops that need jobs, quotes and invoices, TradesBackbone; for practices and professionals, Quag. All three are ours and we operate them for you.
For a service business, yes. Customers text, and a missed call that gets a text back straight away is often the difference between a booked job and a voicemail nobody leaves. Every CRM we run sends and receives texts from your own business number, with the thread against the customer's record.
Yes. When a call goes unanswered, one text goes to the caller from your business number while they still have the phone in their hand. Withheld and anonymous numbers are not texted. See missed call text back.
Yes. You export your contacts from your current system, or from your phone or a spreadsheet, and we import, de-duplicate and check them. We do not run a live sync with other CRMs; we migrate the data across once and then run everything from the new inbox.
No. We set it up, write the messages with you, and run it. You can log in whenever you like, and most owners glance at the inbox on their phone, but nothing depends on you learning a tool.
TradesBackbone, because a trade shop needs jobs, quotes, scheduling, technicians and invoices as well as the inbox, and it has published no-contract pricing on its own site. If you are a one-van operation that mostly needs the phone answered and the quote chased, Relay can be the lighter fit; we settle it on the call.
The done-for-you service is quoted on a 15-minute conversation, because the honest number depends on channels, locations and people. TradesBackbone's own pricing is published on its site. There is no long-term contract. See pricing.
Pick a time and it lands on Artie's calendar directly. You will get a confirmation by email and, if you leave a mobile number, a reminder by text. That booking system is the same one we run for clients.
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