The branch manager's playbook: a lead process that runs itself

You run a branch. Five to eight reps, a customer list that lives in the ERP or in somebody's head, and a Monday that starts with someone forwarding the city's permit list. You know how to sell and you know your builders. What you have never had is a process that keeps running without you chasing it, and you do not want a system that gives your reps more typing. This guide is that process. It is short because BuildMapper does most of it.

The shape of it: new permits land every Monday, each one is checked against your customer list and routed to a rep with the reason written on it, you approve the week, and every rep gets their leads on their board, in their inbox and by text with the first message drafted. They call. They tell Scout what happened in plain words. The board keeps itself current and you read it on Friday instead of asking five people.

What you get, in your terms

The best week and the worst week

Be honest about the floor before you sell this to your reps. Here is the week when everyone uses everything, next to the week when a rep does the bare minimum. The point is that the bare minimum is still a better week than the one you have now.

That is the floor: leads on a platter, and a nudge when one goes quiet. Everything above it is a rep choosing to type less.

Setup, in one sitting

About an hour, once. Have two things ready: your customer list (a CSV or Excel export from your ERP; account names are enough, column order does not matter) and your reps' email addresses. The price list can come later.

1. 1
   Create the team and invite the reps

   Settings → Team & roles → Create team. Invite each rep by email, or share the join code with the branch. Team Flow appears in your sidebar the moment the team exists; there is nothing to install. Each rep is a seat with their own board and their own Scout.
2. 2
   Set your scope

   On the Team Flow setup screen, or later on the Routing tab: where you sell, which builds you supply, and the smallest job worth a rep's time. This is one setting for the whole branch and it decides which permits are in the week at all. Start wide; you can narrow it once you have seen a real Monday.
3. 3
   Drop your customer list

   The Customer list card on This week takes the file. Every account name is matched to the builders named on permits, and re-matched after every Monday import, so a customer who starts building shows up as yours. This is what makes the first routing rule, their account, fire. If the file has a rep column, even better.
4. 4
   Link the rep names from your file

   The Routing tab lists every rep name it found in your file, with a Routes to dropdown. Link each one to the teammate it belongs to. This one step routes most of the week correctly on its own, because ownership beats everything else.
5. 5
   Switch reps on and give them zones

   Tick Takes leads on every rep who works new leads. Give each one the zones they actually drive. Leave fit wide open unless a rep genuinely never sells into a build type; a narrow fit only pushes leads into No eligible rep.
6. 6
   Get Scout onto their phones

   Each rep opens Settings → Integrations → ScoutRep, enters their mobile number and replies CONNECT to the text. Two minutes each. Do it in the same meeting where you hand out the rep guide, so nobody is asked to do it alone later.
7. 7
   Later: the price list

   Drop your price book and spec sheets on Product Brain and quotes draft from your real prices. It is the only piece that depends on your catalog, and the loop runs without it.

Your week, once it is running

That is the whole management overhead: under half an hour a week, and none of it is data entry. A week you skip keeps its leads until you assign them, so a holiday does not lose a batch; it just waits.

What to say to your reps

The rep's version of this process is three sentences, and the shorter you keep it the more of them will do it. Say it in the meeting, then hand them The rep's one-page guide: leads on your phone, and what to ask Scout, which has the questions worth asking Scout.

• "Your leads come to you." Monday morning, on your board and on your phone, with the reason each one is yours. Nobody is asking you to go find them.
• "Call the builder about the material, then tell Scout what happened." Left a message, quoted them 24k, won it. The board updates itself. Nobody re-types anything.
• "Scout writes the first message. You send it." From your own phone, in your own name. It never texts a builder for you.
• "If a lead goes quiet, you will hear about it before I do." Scout nudges you first. The Stale list is where I look second.

Ask the page instead of reading it

The bottom of the Performance tab is a chat over your team's numbers. It answers from the same figures the tables show, so it is a shortcut, never a different answer.

For the market rather than the people, ask Scout in the app. It reads the permits across your whole territory and your own pipeline, not your reps' boards; that is what Performance is for.

Three mistakes that quietly break the process

• Skipping the customer list. Without it the first rule never fires: every lead deals out by zone and rotation, and your own customers get called cold by whoever was next up.
• Setting fit narrow. Fit is eligibility, not relevance. A rep whose fit says "detached homes only" is skipped for everything else, and those leads sit under No eligible rep until someone notices.
• Letting weeks pile up. A skipped week keeps its leads, but nobody is calling them. Assign on Monday even if two rows are wrong; moving a card afterwards keeps its stage and notes and tells the new rep.

Where the detail lives