How TopBuilder CRM Helps You Close More Deals

You’re working on a bid for a local dentist’s office build-out. One of your team members was texting with the project owner and meant to schedule a follow-up call, but someone accidentally threw out the sticky note reminder. Now it’s been a week and a half, and when you call the project owner, they say, “Oh, I thought you weren’t available, so I went with another contractor.”

Closing deals in construction is hard. Long sales cycles, multiple stakeholders, and inconsistent follow-ups make it easy to miss opportunities. And when you use manual processes and disorganized systems, mistakes are even more likely.

To get a clear picture of the solution, start by understanding the problem.

The Problem With Traditional Sales Management & Bidding From Spreadsheets

While it can get complicated, let’s break down the problems with traditional sales management into four areas: disorganization, missed follow-ups, visibility, and scalability.

Disorganization

You have to be on top of the details to close more deals. If you spend a week scouring your spreadsheets and emails to find information before responding, the potential client has likely already chosen another contractor.

On average, construction workers lose 14 hours per week solving avoidable issues and searching for project information. Think about how much you could do if you gave your crew nearly two extra work days each week.

Missed Follow-ups

Most of the time, disorganization is at the root of missed follow-ups, but there are other causes. Manual tracking means increasing the chance of human error in each phase of your process. Think about the last time you worked over a spreadsheet with 400 names on it. What are the chances you might have had a typo in an email address or gotten the response date wrong in your tracking column?

Visibility

It’s not just about communicating with your leads, but with your team. Some 70% of construction professionals say they deal with visibility problems, and managers spend 13% of their time sorting through information to find what they’re looking for. Weak internal communication leads to mistakes, missed follow-ups, and poor customer relations.

Scalability

An Excel spreadsheet works great for five leads, and if you’re good, you might be able to juggle 10 at the same time. But can anyone on your team manage 25 leads at once on Excel? What about 50? As your company grows, you need solutions that keep up with demand. At some point, you’re going to get beyond the capabilities of a normal human being, no matter how detail-oriented they are.

These problems plague any growing construction company, which is why TopBuilder CRM has built the tools.

How TopBuilder CRM Helps You Close More Deals

You can probably think of a workaround for most of the problems we’ve talked about. You could insist on no sticky notes in the office, or allow more time for double-checking manual data entry. And that would work, for a little while. But as your company grows, stopgap solutions simply won’t cut it.

TopBuilder CRM focuses on several key areas that solve the major problems most contractors face.

Quoting and Proposals

TopBuilder’s quoting and proposal features let you build quotes from templates based on up-to-date pricing, and store documents in a central location. You can also set up automated reminders to help you follow up on leads, and full Excel integration to make the move from your current system easier.

Improved Visibility

Get better visibility with pipeline tracking that lets everyone know who’s doing what, so nothing falls between the cracks. For example, you won’t have to make a call to ask who sent out a bid — you’ll see it in real-time in the software.

Better Organization Through Integrations

TopBuilder also tackles disorganization head-on through seamless integration with your existing software.

Let’s say you just landed a big project. TopBuilder’s systems will pull all the information you have from this lead — specs on the project, who they are, budgets, etc. — and put it directly into the software you use for those tasks. If you’re working with TopBuilder-compatible software, no more manually copying spreadsheets into your budget software, your project management software, or anywhere else.

Email Tracking

Beyond bids and proposals, TopBuilder’s email marketing features help you maximize your visibility to customers and track email performance to ensure you’re getting the most out of your marketing efforts.

So, how can you use this efficiency to grow your business and close more deals?

Data-Driven Insights That Drive Smarter Selling

Sure, it’s nice to save a lot of time with automation and shared data entry, but TopBuilder can help you close more deals because it lets you see big-picture data and use it to make strategic business decisions.

TopBuilder does this through dashboards that let you focus on a specific aspect of your company to identify trends and spot what’s working (and what isn’t). To understand how this works, let’s walk through how good business intelligence can help you solve a problem.

Let’s say you start at the Executive Insight dashboard, a high-level snapshot of company health and performance. As you review, you spot a pretty big delay between getting lead information and sending them the initial bid.

From there, hop over to the Bids and Proposals dashboard for a real-time breakdown of bid activity, performance, trends, and win/loss reasons. Turns out these delays are causing some losses. But what’s causing the delays? A closer look shows that bid assignment is taking far too long, so you visit the Workforce & Job Resource Planning dashboard.

This dashboard shows that while you have a robust team, you only have two people with enough experience to build quotes for complicated projects. The solution? Either take those two qualified workers off all other projects and put them on writing quotes, or hire a few more skilled estimators. With fewer delays, you’ll be closing more deals in no time.

This is just one example of how TopBuilder can grow your business and keep you from missing opportunities.

Start using TopBuilder to close more deals today.