You Can't Scale Your Construction Company Without A Defined Sales Process

By Ryan Groth, Sales Transformation Group.

Standardize your sales process to be more successful and effective. 

In this post, I am going to talk about this next important step in growing your construction company – having a defined sales process. I sit down with Gregg Wallick of Best Roofing in Fort Lauderdale to discuss the importance of standardizing the best construction sales process and how that looks in his organization. Gregg mentions the importance of driving consistent behavior when a lead come into your organization and how that allows leads to flow systematically through the organization. This allows the specific functionality of whatever is done in that process gets done effectively each time.

Gregg talks about what the construction sales process looks like at Best Roofing. When a phone call or an email comes in, do you think they bid everything that comes in? No! The first thing they do is prequalify the lead. Best Roofing pre-qualifies leads based on who they have defined their company to be, and who are they are going to do work for. If a guy calls in and says ” I live in Fort Lauderdale can you fix my residential roof, we probably wouldn’t do that.” Gregg shares. “Because we are a commercial roofing company.”

Gregg continues. “So whenever a new opportunity comes into the company we have somebody who does that pre-qualification, after that pre-qualification, we assign it to an account manager because we separated estimating from account management. Then you got to have one person who’s actually going to do the takeoff. If it’s a new construction job your estimators are going to do the take-off. Sometimes the estimator would go out on that job, but sometimes if you have enough of it where you could dedicate a person to it, you have a dedicated person do it. This way you will have a take off coming back the same way all the time.”

Gregg shares their next step in their Best construction sales process. “Then the next step is to do your estimate. I am a real believer in having an estimating system. I’ve personally used one for over 25 years. We have a database that is set up to where no matter who the estimator is if the quantities are put in there you’re going to come out with the same price. After the estimate is created then what you have to do is that you have to draft your proposal. If you are transaction focused you will just send it out via email and wait to hear from somebody. If you are relationship focused you are going to put it into a format that is going to present itself to the client in such a way that hopefully, they will find favorable. Always do that in person. Most of the time it’s not a one call close. So what are you doing after that, you follow up. You need to ask the client when is the most appropriate time for me to call you again. You also need to ask what’s the most effective way for me to communicate with you going forward. We scold our guys at Best Roofing if they just “send” and bid. You always “present” a bid.”

We scold our guys at Best Roofing if they just “send” and bid. You always “present” a bid.”

“That’s so critical because the salesperson is now still in control of their future. On the other hand, when a client is interested in your services they hold you accountable to those next steps, so you can ask the same of them. When you ask permission and then you follow up when you say you’re going to follow up your credibility goes up. When you don’t your credibility goes down. Let me tell you the other day I went in to buy my wife a new car and she test drove it. When we asked him for an appraisal on the existing car we were going to trade in this was on a Sunday. Monday came and I never heard from the car sales salesman. Tuesday and Wednesday came never heard from him. I will not buy from that person just because I would go against my own principals.”

The nationally recognized statistic that we talk about all the time is 80% of sales are made on the 5th – 12th contact. That’s something that you know we teach. Picking up the phone and then asking when can we follow up again shows you that your sales people are in control. Best Roofing is not a “quote and hope” company anymore or another way to put it is “bid and beg.”

48% of all sales people do not follow up. Just by picking up the phone you are separating yourself from the competition so that’s probably most important part of building a sales organization. 

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Source: Sales Transformation Group