THE SMITHERS FIELD GUIDE / VOL. 01
Less busywork.
More business.
For the CRM nobody trusts. The report that eats Friday. The tools that almost talk to each other. Start with the thing that's annoying you.
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The useful stuff.
41 guides
Replace trigger leads with a mortgage lead plan
Build a post-HPPA acquisition plan with a channel register, borrower-permission fields, follow-up owners, and a small-cohort review worksheet.
Keep Canadian mortgage renewals on a live queue
Create a maturity-based renewal worklist with a timing worksheet, accountable owners, contact checks, and a way to reconcile every loan due.
Make Canadian mortgage records retrievable for FINTRAC
Build a transaction record index with evidence pointers, owners, dates, retention fields, and a safe retrieval test for covered mortgage businesses.
Give mortgage brokers a clear lender submission portal
Plan a broker-facing portal around package intake, condition ownership, file status, access boundaries, and a practical pilot checklist.
Forecast monthly closings from mortgage pipeline stages
Build a loan-level monthly closing forecast with stage evidence, blockers, ownership, a worked example, and a reconciliation worksheet.
Clean up a CRM without losing useful history
A practical CRM cleanup checklist with a merge-decision worksheet, sample records, and checks to protect useful customer history.
Fix your CRM or replace it?
Separate process problems from product limits, then compare a focused repair with the real work of a CRM migration.
Why CRM duplicates keep coming back
Trace duplicate records to their creation paths, identify ownership conflicts, and use an event worksheet to prevent recurrence.
CRM fields your team will actually maintain
Audit CRM fields by the decisions they support, with a keep/change/remove worksheet and a staged retirement process.
Define sales stages around real decisions
Create sales pipeline stages with observable entry and exit criteria, ownership, and a useful next action.
Stop leads from sitting without an owner
Design lead routing with fallback ownership, reassignment, and an exception queue that catches incomplete or ambiguous enquiries.
Why your automations keep breaking
Trace a failed workflow from trigger to destination using a practical diagnostic, event log example, and recovery worksheet.
One-way or two-way sync? Start with ownership
Choose integration direction by field ownership, with a conflict-resolution table and a source-of-truth worksheet.
Map your business tools before adding another
Inventory software by the work it owns, the data it holds, and the manual handoffs between tools.
What to monitor after an automation goes live
Monitor business outcomes, missing events, stale data, and exceptions with a practical automation monitoring checklist.
Document an integration so someone else can own it
A practical integration runbook template covering ownership, data flow, failures, recovery, and access without exposing secrets.
Stop retyping field notes at the office
Design a field-to-office handoff with job identifiers, usable mobile forms, offline exceptions, and an office acceptance step.
Automate the weekly report without automating bad numbers
Build reliable weekly reporting with a metric contract, source checks, refresh ownership, and a worked example you can reproduce.
Why two business reports disagree
Reconcile different totals by comparing definitions, dates, record states, and a simple bridge between two fictional reports.
Is this automation worth maintaining?
Estimate automation payback with an interactive calculator that includes review time, maintenance, software costs, and setup effort.
Choose metrics that change a weekly decision
Design an operations dashboard around decisions, accountable owners, and actionable exceptions rather than a long list of KPIs.
Define a metric once so everyone counts it the same way
Create a reusable metric definition with grain, exclusions, cutoff, source, and boundary examples that expose ambiguity.
Spot stale data before sending a report
Distinguish page refresh from source freshness and design reporting checks for missing batches, delayed records, and partial data.
Client onboarding that doesn't rely on someone's memory
Map a client onboarding workflow with clear triggers, owners, missing-information paths, and a delivery-ready acceptance check.
Collect client documents without endless reminders
Create a document collection workflow that distinguishes requested, received, accepted, and missing items with clear reminder rules.
Turn a signed proposal into an owned project
A sales-to-delivery handoff template for accepted scope, promises, dependencies, contacts, and a clear delivery acceptance step.
Capture scope changes before they become surprises
Track change requests from clarification to impact assessment, approval, and updated delivery with a reusable change register.
Employee onboarding with clear access ownership
Create an employee access checklist with role-based requests, named approvers, verification, and a linked offboarding path.
A finished job still needs a clean office handoff
Move completed field work toward invoicing with an acceptance checklist, missing-information queue, and clear correction ownership.
Do you need a client portal, or clearer updates?
Decide whether recurring client questions need a portal, a better update process, or both using a practical requirements worksheet.
Build or buy a client portal?
Compare portal options against real workflows, access boundaries, integrations, exportability, and ongoing ownership.
Status updates that answer the next question
Write client updates around completed work, next steps, decisions, and uncertainty with a reusable status template.
Follow up on quotes without chasing everyone
Design contractor quote follow-up around current status, useful questions, stop conditions, and clear human ownership.
Which inventory count should you trust?
Reconcile inventory across channels by separating physical stock, reservations, availability, and unprocessed movements.
Close the loop on an ecommerce return
Map return requests, received items, refunds, stock decisions, and customer communication without treating them as one status.
Which business process should you automate first?
Prioritize automation candidates by repetition, process clarity, input readiness, and error impact with an interactive comparison tool.
AI, rules, or a human: choose the right workflow
Decide where deterministic rules, AI assistance, and human judgment belong in a business workflow using a practical decision matrix.
Test an AI email classifier before routing real work
Build a practical email-triage evaluation with clear labels, ambiguous cases, error severity, and a safe fallback queue.
Extract document data with an exception queue
Design document extraction with field definitions, source evidence, validation rules, and a review queue for ambiguous values.
Where a human should approve an AI workflow
Place review before consequential actions and give approvers the evidence, alternatives, and current state needed to decide.
Turn meeting notes into tasks without creating more noise
Convert meeting notes into confirmed actions with explicit owners, dates, source context, and a review step before task creation.
Published by Smithers. Examples are illustrative; use the worksheets with your own context.
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