Category: Construction Software

Guessing at your bottom line is never a good idea. You might think a project went perfectly, but your profit margin was razor thin, or even in the red. Or maybe it seemed like everything that could go wrong did go wrong, but it didn’t have as much of a financial impact as you feared. 

Monitoring project margins isn’t just good practice, it’s essential for identifying profit leaks and securing long-term profitability. With a construction software tool like TopBuilder and ContractorBI™, featuring powerful analytics and reporting features, you can streamline this process and focus on boosting your business.

Let’s explore why profit margins are so important and how technology can help you identify losses and capitalize on opportunities.

Why Monitoring Profit Margins Matters in Construction

Building projects have high stakes and thin profit margins everywhere. In the U.S., for instance, they hover around a slim five percent on average. With rising costs for labor and materials, even a slight misstep in estimates or execution can lead to significant profit erosion. That’s why it’s important to identify and stop revenue leaks as quickly as possible.

But what exactly are revenue leaks? They are the hidden losses that drain from your business due to inefficiencies, errors, or overlooked details. They’re often subtle, compounding over time until they significantly impact your bottom line.

Common profit leaks in construction include:

• Underestimated labor
• Material and equipment costs
• Not fully understanding general and administrative costs
• Failure to properly understand estimating and preconstruction costs

Dealing with these issues can be tricky: the causes are not always obvious. But, with the right tools, you can not only fix the problem but end up in a better place than you expected.

Monitoring margins isn’t just about fixing issues – it’s about using insights to drive smarter practices and higher profits.

The Role of Construction Software in Managing Margins

Construction software is a game-changer when it comes to understanding and protecting your profit margins.

Centralized Data for Greater Visibility

TopBuilder consolidates data from sales, bidding, project management, and accounting into a single platform. This provides a comprehensive view of where your profits are coming from—and where they’re leaking.

Real-Time Monitoring To Stay on Track

When you can track ongoing project performance against initial estimates, you can address potential issues before they escalate. Business intelligence dashboards like those in ContractorBI allow you to compare actuals to estimates, keeping you informed at every stage of the project.

Actionable Insights for Better Decisions

Analytics can uncover trends and highlight areas for improvement, such as underperforming job types or inefficiencies. ContractorBI provides visibility across key parameters and lets you pinpoint what is working and what needs immediate attention. It also goes a step further by identifying hidden opportunities (revenue gaps) to maximize your margins.

How To Identify Revenue Leaks and Act Fast

If you want to plug a leak, you have to know where it is. With ContractorBI, you can quickly pinpoint problems and take action.

Spot Inefficiencies With Targeted Analysis

ContractorBI’s dashboards let you analyze performance by sales agent, job type, lead source, and more. For example, if you notice that projects from a specific lead source consistently underperform, you can revisit your bidding strategy to address the issue before it impacts your bottom line further. Stopping a leak is great, but it’s even better to prevent it in the first place.

Address Early Warning Indicators

Use job cost performance reporting to spot revenue and profit leaks during construction.

Suppose you are three months into a six-month build and mid-project labor costs exceed estimates by 10%. Data-driven insights allow you to dig deeper into what’s causing the overages – whether it’s higher-than-expected overtime, unexpected delays, or increased material costs. It can be challenging to make adjustments to mitigating factors like these, but having real-time data gives you power over your next steps – so you can quickly respond to minimize further impact and keep the project on track. 

Discover Untapped Opportunities

Revenue leaks aren’t always about losses – they can also represent missed opportunities. 

ContractorBI helps you spot revenue gaps that can signal untapped opportunities, such as underutilized teams or overlooked markets. For instance, you might discover a specific area is consistently delivering profitable projects but has fewer bids submitted. Knowing where to bid is often as savvy as how to bid!

Optimize Your Operations and Your Margins

In project management, a proactive approach beats reactive management every time.

The proactive business owner or contractor makes decisions and plans based on a clearly defined goal and is always looking for new opportunities. The reactive one waits for a problem to come up, or is too busy to take time to address matters before they become problems, and then deals with it the best they can. The right tools give you the insights needed to anticipate issues and make informed, proactive decisions. 

• Forecast challenges: ContractorBI’s workforce utilization dashboard helps you predict labor shortages and plan accordingly, preventing margin erosion.
• Benchmark for growth: Use AI-powered benchmarking to compare your performance to industry averages, setting realistic goals and tracking progress.
• Focus on closing revenue gaps: Analytics help you identify where to invest resources, whether it’s targeting high-potential regions or boosting underperforming job types.

All these advantages let you focus on closing revenue gaps and optimizing operations within your specialty. This could mean improving resource allocation for specific job types, expanding on the geographic areas you serve, or capitalizing on trends within your area of expertise to secure more lucrative opportunities. 

Profit leaks are a silent threat, but with TopBuilder, they’re not insurmountable. Contact us today to take control of your profit margins and identify hidden opportunities.

Whether you are a sales rep, estimator, marketing person, or the owner of a specialty construction business, a customer relationship management software (CRM) enables you to manage projects, relationships, and bids effectively. 

A construction-focused CRM brings all your sales, bidding, project management, estimating, and accounting data into one place, giving you easy access to customer contacts, project history, and project performance. This information is invaluable for preparing bids you can win while staying profitable. Collaboration tools help your team stay on schedule and on budget, while features like workflow alerts, reminders, and bid calendars ensure you never miss a bid due date or follow-up opportunity. New bid opportunity alerts and calendar synchronization with Outlook and Google further streamline your operations.

There are hundreds of CRM options on the market with as many features, each offering different CRM features and options to fulfill different business needs. Choosing the CRM designed for construction means you’ll get the features you need to fulfill your goals and objectives without paying for features you don’t need.

Let’s look at seven must-have CRM software features that every subcontractor business needs to enhance productivity, improve customer relationships, support sales teams, and drive growth.

1. Bid Management 

Do you get multiple bid requests for the same job?  Track all of them together with TopBuilder bid management. …. A robust bid management tool helps subcontractors organize and track bids, proposals, and estimates in one place. Often, you’ll submit multiple bids to multiple GCs for the same job — so you need software that organizes all those submittals under a single job heading to avoid a logistical mess. Centralized bidding management reduces time spent on manual tracking, ensures consistency and accuracy in proposals, and provides insights into bid statuses. 

This means you spend less time on bids, increase your chance of winning, and stay on top of follow-ups on pending proposals: 

1. Prepare professional quotes and proposals right from the lead.
2. Integrate pricing and takeoff information from your estimating platform, Excel, or predefined assemblies.
3. Attach all necessary documents, including specs, cover letters, and scope of work.
4. Email proposals directly from the platform.
5. Track activity with alerts, such as when proposals are received, opened, or approved.
6. Collect electronic signatures to finalize approvals quickly and efficiently.

2. Document Storage and Management 

Think about those dozen clients we mentioned — then think about the hundreds of documents each project involves — and you can see why this feature is so essential for a CRM. A centralized document storage system that allows easy access, sharing, and management of all project-related documents has some major benefits. Not only can team members access and share documents seamlessly for better collaboration, but you can stop worrying about losing papers in your office filing cabinet.  

3. Customer Relationship Management Software

You only get invited to closed and negotiated bids when you’ve built a great reputation. To do that, you need a comprehensive CRM solution designed specifically for contractors to manage and nurture client relationships effectively. Tracking and personalizing customer interactions within the CRM helps build stronger client relationships. Software that gives you access to detailed customer profiles means you can personalize communication, while tracking features let you maintain regular and meaningful contact. All this works together to build stronger client relationships, leading to repeat business and referrals.

4. Collaboration and Calendaring 

Subcontracting is not a solo job. You rely on GCs, project owners, the sales team and others to run a smooth project — so collaboration tools to manage workforce assignments and project schedules efficiently are essential. You need to be sure to assign the right personnel to the right tasks at the right times to optimize resource use, reduce downtime, and enhance accountability. CRM software should make it easy to connect with the person or group you need.

5. Analytics and Reporting/Business Intelligence

If you want your business to grow, you can’t just rely on a gut feeling to tell you what’s working and what isn’t. Powerful analytics and reporting tools are some of the most valuable features of any CRM because they provide insights into business performance and outcomes that help you shepherd your company over time. Sales forecasting, using CRM analytics to predict future sales based on historical data and trends, and sales pipeline, is crucial for making informed decisions. Beyond that, you need software that can give meaningful, data-based suggestions on day-to-day choices. With the right software, you can get a clear picture of your business’ overall health and spot trends and patterns so you can predict future opportunities and challenges.

6. Integration Capabilities 

When you enter an update about a toilet install, you don’t want to rewrite it ten times for each project management system you are using. CRM systems are just a part of the larger construction management ecosystem — and for that system to work efficiently, you need all of your software to interface. A system with good integration smooths data flow between different systems while minimizing errors and discrepancies by synchronizing data across platforms  It also streamlines operations by integrating critical business functions. 

In short, the more you can integrate systems, the less time spent on data entry, and more mistakes avoided.

7. Automated Workflows (Lead Management) Set the Foundation for Business Growth 

If you are working on multiple projects, the number of emails, updates, and check-ins you have every week is a lot to deal with — and while that content is important, it’s not very personal. Many CRMs feature automated workflows that let you outsource repetitive tasks to AI. This automation saves you time, ensures consistency, and leaves your sales and marketing teams free to focus on more strategic activities. Automating tasks within the sales process can significantly improve efficiency, streamline operations, and bring sales and marketing efforts together.

Set the Foundation for Business Growth

TopBuilder is a CRM designed specifically for the construction industry, offering a suite of tools tailored to subcontractors’ needs. TopBuilder’s comprehensive bid management tools allow you to efficiently manage and track bids, ensuring you can handle multiple projects and clients with ease. TopBuilder also integrates with other major construction tools, providing a unified system for your business. 

Choosing a CRM solution such as TopBuilder with construction-specific features can significantly enhance your business’s efficiency and effectiveness. By streamlining bid management, project tracking, customer relationship management and marketing campaigns, you can simplify you operations, build stronger client relationships, and drive business growth. The result? Win more work, faster and easier. 

Want to learn more about how TopBuilder can support your business? We’d love to show you a demo. 

Just as the best coaches build a lineup of powerhouse players and put them in a position to succeed, effective specialty contractors have mastered the art of bid management. Continue reading “Proven Techniques for Effective Bid Management”

The benefits of effective customer management aren’t always obvious. It’s hard to connect an exact dollar amount to a good conversation or a few hours saved here or there, but the numbers show that customer relationship management (CRM) software has a massive impact on overall company effectiveness and customer lifetime value. A recent report found that 74% of users said CRM software improved their access to customer data, while 64% said it improved relationship management. Big picture, this means that the CRM ROI for every dollar spent on CRM software is around $8.71. That’s a pretty solid return.

With numbers like that, you can see why construction CRM is one of the most critical tools to help grow your business. Here’s how to maximize your CRM return on investment.

Understanding the ROI of CRM Software for Construction

In the construction industry, projects can range widely and represent millions of dollars, meaning any margin for error is narrow and critical. One frustrated customer can cost you both won projects and earned dollars further down the line. That’s why a CRM’s return on investment in construction is so significant. With the right CRM platform, you can benefit from improved efficiency, streamlined processes, higher win ratios, enhanced collaboration, better decision making and stronger fiscal health. Each one of these factors contributes to a more profitable operation overall.

Improved sales revenue is a key performance indicator reflecting any CRM’s impact on sales efficiency and customer acquisition, showcasing its strategic importance in calculating return on investment and overall business success.

But you can’t expect this kind of ROI merely by having any CRM in place, or even the right CRM – you also need to know what to do with it. The key is identifying metrics with the most impact on your ROI and tracking them so you can both adapt to changes and make the best decisions. Good CRM software will highlight metrics like sales numbers, bid and quote time, and customer retention so your team has the data they need. Once you’ve got software that lets you track that information, it’s time to start building a foundation that will help you maximize benefits.

Setting the Foundation for Success With Your Construction CRM Implementation

You’ve chosen a CRM, and you’re ready for CRM implementation — but you’re not exactly sure what to do next. Before forging ahead, you need to make sure you actually are ready to implement it. Here are a few key questions to ask:

• Have you set clear objectives? Make sure everyone understands why the company is using the CRM and how it will benefit the business and individual stakeholders. Consider meeting with members of your team that will spend significant time with the software and clearly outline goals and timelines. If you can start with everyone on the same page, like any effective start to a building project, it makes long-term positives much more attainable. Having a well-defined CRM implementation strategy is crucial for success.
• How are you going to get buy-in? Adapting to new ways of doing things can be hard – particularly for a team set in its ways. Top-down support from leadership for the CRM system and champions within each department is important. Also, consider ways to incentivize employees to familiarize themselves with the system by showing how it will make their jobs easier.
• Have you established an internal process review? You need to document and refine internal CRM processes — with particular attention to data entry and management. If you start the process and have your team collect a massive amount of data without a clear path for it to follow, you’ll end up with huge spread seats full of numbers that you have no idea how to interpret.
• Have you set up training? Just like any other software, CRM software has a learning curve. Make sure everyone understands the CRM’s features and how to use it for specific tasks. Some CRM providers offer workshops and training to make sure you are getting the most out of your software.

Depending on the CRM software you choose, implementation can take close to six months; TopBuilder’s average implementation time is 30-60 days. Because TopBuilder is construction-specific, we know the issues that come with implementing CRM in construction and can deal with them quickly.

Customer Data Is Key: Ensure It’s Accurate and Complete

The truest source of ROI from CRM software is in how you use data. When the CRM is usede correctly, you have real-time access to high-quality data and can make better, faster decisions. In short, it means you make fewer mistakes and spot more opportunities. Accurate data can also significantly improve customer satisfaction and retention for future projects. But to take full advantage, you need to ensure you are using best practices around CRM data. We can break data best practices down into four basic categories: data entry, data validation, data cleansing, and data ownership.

While it may not seem complicated, data entry is often one of the trickiest aspects of the process. Mistakes made here tend to trickle throughout the system. That’s why sticking to specific protocols is so important. Clear rules for all team members on data formatting let you build a unified and organized database.

Data validation rules are also important because they prevent inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Best practices here range from mandatory fields to data segmentation, all working toward streamlining the process.

Along the same lines, data cleansing involves getting rid of outdated data, fixing formatting issues, removing duplicate data, and scheduling data inspections. These let your team focus on valid leads with the best chance of success.

Finally, deciding exactly who is responsible for each aspect of the database is the key component of data ownership. When your team knows who’s responsible for what, they can avoid mistakes.

Not only does smooth data management help streamline workflows, considering other potential software integrations, it means that that same data can benefit other aspects of your business. For example, what you know about customers can help accounting, management, and every other department through advanced business intelligence.

High-Value CRM Features That Help You Win More, Faster

You’ve got the data sorted, cataloged, and ready to use in the best way possible — now you need a CRM tool with features that change that data into sales for the maximum ROI.

A top-of-the-line CRM for construction will have features like advanced bid management, customer and project tracking, and document storage and management. These let you stay on top of projects as they come together. As projects develop, relationship management, team collaboration, and business intelligence features are also important in making sure projects stay on track. To handle this many features, you also need customer reporting tools and dashboards that make it easy to find the information you need when you need it.

Effective CRM systems can enhance sales efficiency and customer acquisition, allowing sales teams to concentrate on acquiring new customers and optimizing their overall sales strategy.

The Most Important Way to Maximize ROI: Choose the Right CRM

There are many options out there, but not all CRMs are equal. Generic and major player CRM platforms and ecosystems lack features that construction companies need, and they often are loaded with features that aren’t particularly useful for your industry. No one wants to payfor things they won’t use, just as you wouldn’t plan for a gymnasium in a funeral home building project. But a CRM designed for the construction industry, like the one we’ve developed in TopBuilder, offers a suite of tools tailored to contractors’ and subcontractors’ needs. Investing in the right CRM is crucial for maximizing your CRM investment and achieving the best ROI. TopBuilder’s unique features — like comprehensive bid management tools, integrations, an easy-to-use interface, mobile accessibility, dashboards, and business intelligence — make it the right choice for any construction company seeking stronger, more cohesive operations or looking to scale.

A CRM solution like TopBuilder can significantly increase revenue and improve business processes by aligning operations within the CRM to optimize its – and your – effectiveness.

Schedule a demo with TopBuilder to see just how good your ROI can be.

At first, it seems like something you can manage yourself. Taking a few minutes to do some paperwork or data entry doesn’t seem like a big deal. But over time, it adds up. Sales professionals can spend up to 65% of their time on non-revenue-generating activities like administrative tasks and data entry, leading to missed opportunities and inefficiencies. A robust customer relationship management (CRM) software helps address these challenges by streamlining operations, enhancing customer relationships, and boosting overall productivity. Continue reading “How To Choose the Best Construction CRM for Your Subcontractor Business”

You’re about to submit a bid but suddenly realize you don’t have the estimate information. The clock is ticking and other contractors are submitting their bids. You might have just missed a golden opportunity.

CRM integration solves this problem by connecting all your essential sales and customer data to critical information about materials, labor, project timelines, etc. Continue reading “Top 20 CRM Integrations to Help Automate and Grow Your Subcontractor Business”