Streamline Your Lead Management Funnel for Construction Industry

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good afternoon everybody this is delisa medlin director of sales and i have the honor of welcoming you to the eighth episode of top builders webinar series today's topic is how effective funnel management increases sales and profitability we have very exciting information to share with you today but before i turn it over to dave our speaker i'd like to go over a few housekeeping items we're using go to webinar all attendees are in listen only mode however we encourage you to enter your questions in the go to webinar console at any time and they'll be addressed at the end of the webinar if you would like handouts or presentations they're available in the console as well the go to meeting console can also be minimized by clicking the red arrow button and just note that this webinar is being recorded and we will follow up with you after the webinar to provide links to the webinar series as well as the handouts and presentations thank you so much for joining us dave i'll turn it over to you uh thanks to lisa can you hear me i can okay great um so thank you everybody for uh attending and also for the folks that registered um who will hear this recording later um we have a kind of a bet every time we start one of these webinars on the over under and i'm happy to say i lost because i bet a certain number and we have more attendees actually quite a few more attendees than than my my guest was so that's fantastic um so let's go ahead and jump in uh let's go ahead and start with the standard agenda that we have every week um so if you've attended our webinars in the past you'll know we follow the same format every week and we're that way you know what to expect um and and how the presentation flows also um we try to keep it to about 35 minutes sometimes it's challenging depending on questions but we're going to shoot for 35 minutes here today including the introductions and the q a okay so we'll start with the webinar series update we're going to talk a little bit about us i know there's some folks on the phone or on the webinar that are not current customers with us so you don't know that much about us yet um we'll do a quick poll question typically today we're not going to do a poll question it's not really appropriate for the topic so we'll skip that we'll cover the topic background we'll cover the topic itself and then we'll show you some examples um keep in mind uh that when we do these webinars you know we have to keep it sort of high level and somewhat generic we do use specific and real world examples in our webinars but it's hard to get into too much detail because it's not a one size fits all but the concept is a one size fits all and also for those of you who haven't attended our webinars in the past we try to make our our webinars authentic so to speak it's not scripted it's not necessarily you know overproduced or over rehearsed we try to talk to you guys from our experiences we try to talk to you guys from the feedback that we've gotten from our customers and just share our knowledge and our best practices with you in a very authentic way so i hope you can appreciate that um and i hope that comes comes across that way as well okay so let's we'll jump into the the webinar series update uh so we're we're covering a a best practices topic today we try to rotate between a general topic a feature spotlight and an educational topic sometimes it doesn't work out exactly that way especially since we had spring break we had a freeze here in houston and some other things so we kind of juggled things up a bit we're going to cover an educational or a best practices topic today it's on funnel management and then what we're trying to do is trying to build on the webinar so what we're doing is we're going to introduce a topic but then we're going to follow up with a related or a a topic that really builds on a topic that we've already done and for example we're talking about funnel management today and funnel management best practices for construction companies but then next week we may focus on analytics and reporting around the your funnel your sales funnel so so we're trying to provide some continuity if that makes sense between between the topics and i hope we're doing that so we're doing the best we can okay so let's go ahead let's talk a little bit about top builder i do see oh it's hard to see everybody on the list but there's there are people that are not customers of us yet so i think it's important for you guys to know that when we talk about these things uh we talk about best practices we talk about our services it comes from real experiences i mean top builder's been around since 2008 but we've been around quite frankly for quite a while and uh their our company does have real world experience in construction and mechanical engineering um some of us have owned and well some of us have been on cruise um myself included i've been on a roofing crew i've been on a construction crew as a mechanical engineer uh we've been involved in the building materials supply industry and certainly crm um and so we're we're doing this for hundreds of builders in the us and canada and a lot of what we're talking about today are things we've learned from our customers and learned from our experiences i hope you can benefit from that okay so we're going to skip this slide if anybody wants to see these things you'll get the slides tomorrow actually and we're going to skip the poll question for the week for this week since it's not really appropriate for this topic okay so let's go ahead and talk about the topic itself why are we talking about this and why is this important funnel management i believe doesn't get enough credit i think a lot of companies whether you're a construction company or any company thinks of the sales funnel as really just tracking your leads through the process okay and it certainly does that managing your funnel is an important part of sales it's important important part of you know moving a prospect through the process to get them to close but it's much more than that when you really really look at it in the way we're going to describe it to you today so we're going to talk to you about why funnel management is so important to your business not just sales we're going to talk about some some best practices and and what it takes to create an effective funnel or funnel management process um and we're going to speak to that in terms of a construction company we're going to talk about how to set up your funnel and we're going to speak a little bit generic but we are going to use real examples when we talk about how to define your funnel how to set up the final process and the management tools involved in managing your funnel again we're talking about construction companies here we're not talking about anything else um keep in mind however everybody we do this ourselves we live this stuff we breed the stuff we do exactly what we're describing to you today so we can speak to it and we've been doing it internally at top builder for years and um so we can we can speak to it okay so that's that okay so why why do we care all right why do we care about the sales funnel and why is the whole concept of funnel management so important okay again traditionally funnel management has been thought of i guess in general as you know managing your leads moving them from one step to another hopefully to hopefully moving to them to a one sale or a closed sale but really when you peel the onion back a little bit here what we're talking about is allowing your company and your set your teams within your company your sales teams your marketing teams even your operational teams your management teams to really monitor the overall performance of your company and your sales and marketing programs so if you look at your funnel as a way of defining uh predicting what your sales and marketing should look like to reach your goals monitoring that and tying them back to your company goals you can see why funnel management is so important okay you know and i i use the word control a lot when i'm when i'm talking about this but it is true that control is very important when it comes to sales and marketing because sometimes man it feels like there's no control you're you're just you're you're doing marketing and you're hoping it works out and i'm not speaking for you guys i'm speaking in general so your marketing and you hopefully you get qualified leads you're selling and you're hoping hope you hope to convert those leads to a sale but it's not controlled it's not monitored and when you put a good funnel management process in place you're tying everything back to a goal you're tracking it you're monitoring it and you're you can you can adapt and grow and change which to me means control of your marketing and your sales processes and even operations okay and we're going to talk about some of this um some of these examples in a second all right um it also will help you identify and really zero down on areas of improvement if you look at bullet point number three here you're you're zooming in on on an area let's call it a pain point that just doesn't work and you'll be able to see if i don't fix this i'm not going to reach my goals so it identifies areas of improvement it also allows you to effectively predict and forecast sales and resource requirements and since we are in construction we're talking about managing our crews hiring folks scheduling trades being able to get in front of the hiring process um i'm not as familiar with the procurement process like you know getting equipment materials and things like that but it certainly helps predict and forecast what's needed yeah with pretty good reliability as well um also of course you're able to identify clearly identify what's going on if we're looking at bullet point number five here with each one of your opportunities and then maybe what's holding them up what's standing in their way of moving forward things like that um and then also you want to be able to be more efficient be more productive find areas that are just not um as efficient as they should be and we've got some examples here maybe it may be the bidding process and maybe the estimating process it may be the follow-up process it may be the quoting process it could be the forecasting process all of these things are pain points well we're pain points for our customers that we've able we've been able to solve with a good funnel management program okay and also you're able to be proactive and what i mean by proactive is um nobody wants to get to the end of the quarter or nobody wants to get to the end of the year and figure out that you missed your sales goal okay you know nobody wants that and this allows you to get ahead of that and act before it's too late and i'll explain in my examples okay so let's go on to the next slide which is what what makes funnel manage a funnel management program or process whatever you want to call it effective okay it literally i mean it make this makes sense and this may be obvious but it it begins with defining the funnel and defining it with a very specific purpose and those are two things primary you're gonna you're gonna set up your funnel to make sure you're tracking the performance of your sales and marketing goals okay and and that way you can monitor uh what comes into the funnel because that's your marketing your marketing is generating the the the top probably two layers of the funnel okay and then also being able to measure how you're moving uh prospects through the funnel and in a predictable way to reach a sales goal okay so what you're trying to do is you're trying to figure out okay what are those key phases and i put that in parentheses next to one be there that i need to pay attention to to make sure i'm monitoring my processes and i'm able to reach my goals okay and again i've got examples in in about two slides okay now also part of this is yesterday you want to understand how you want to track your goals when you're defining your funnel but you also want to define activity through the funnel next steps are workflow you can use all these fancy terms but or automation so a lot of people like to use that word but really it's what activities take place as you go through the funnel so as you define your funnel you're looking for key activities um following up on a bid as an example or following up on a new bid opportunity um are good examples um and then what happens let's say if you get a qualified bid opportunity what are the next steps okay and if you don't have that that phase defined in your funnel well then how can you define the next steps once you hit that phase well you can't okay and so it's very key to to define how you want to act on each phase of the funnel or what you want your activities to be and how are you measuring the effectiveness of your business okay very good now what makes a funnel management program effective is documenting and communicating i talk about this in almost every webinar it doesn't matter if you have a really awesome funnel to find with next depth with keep key performance indicators all of these things but if you don't document that define what what each step in the funnel means how do you qualify for each phase of the funnel what are the activities that are triggered by each step in the funnel well it ain't gonna work okay you have to communicate that okay to your teams and you need to document it and i'm looking at the attendee list right now and i see some people on here that are doing that and are doing that very well and so they know um that this stuff works and that's fantastic um you need to you need to you need to develop your toolbox okay what how are we going to monitor these things really i mean that's just a list of reports or metrics or or analytics that goes on your dashboard okay but but you need to identify how are you going to report these things and monitor these things and i've got about three or four examples that i'm going to show you today but there's hundreds of them and then what we're going to talk about is i just as you need to um and really you're going to adjust your marketing your sales maybe even your metrics if you need to but do it quick before it gets too late and what we recommend and we're going to talk about this um yeah on this slide i'm i'll guess i'll wait uh but bullet point number six is we recommend reviewing these funnel definitions and your progress weekly no no no more no more than weekly no less than weekly weekly is perfect okay and we do it ourselves okay so how so this is so this is the why this is the what and again you're going to get these slides now this is the how okay the house starts from the bottom of the comma okay and the bottom of the funnel is your sense okay so at the bottom of the funnel you're gonna say how many sales do i need you can you can you can reflect this in numbers of sales or dollar amounts um typically you know the size of your jobs and you can average it out and come up with a number but whatever you're doing you need to be reasonable it needs to be a reasonable number you can't throw some number out and say we're going to do these this we're going to get this these many new new construction jobs this year or we're going to get this many new service contracts a year if it's not reasonable it ain't going to work so we we have a professional services team that you can engage with what that will help you get to these numbers we're doing it concurrently right now for half of a dozen companies actually right now um and we're helping them to determine what the bottom of their funnel looks like okay and then um what you do is you you work backwards from there and you work backwards using historical conversion rates um from your company hopefully we have those in your crm or we'll pull those from some reports that you have on your data we'll analyze that and come up with some conversion rates through the key stages of your funnel we also can pull industry standards and candidly common sense works as well you know your business and you may say well look if i submit 100 bids i'm going to get about 30 of them or 40 you you can you can you can come up with a with a number that makes sense but we'll use that number to track your kpis or your performance and then you monitor it and if if it turns out that that doesn't make sense okay then you change it or you adapt or you just okay and that's why we recommend you meet weekly because if you don't then you may find out monthly quarterly that your numbers aren't reasonable okay and then also part of funnel management does get into more of the tactical side of sales as i move somebody through my funnel what key data points do i want to track we re we we recommend between around seven i have an example here around seven key data points okay but if you get too many then it then your team's not going to keep up with that data if you get too few well you're missing important key pieces of information so you find you try to find the sweet spot and again you adjust if you need to now once you come up with your your phases and you come up with your goals you're going to use that to extrapolate into weekly monthly and quarterly targets now seasonality does make a difference in in construction of course so you got to be careful with that when you're monitoring weekly sales or weekly bid opportunities um but you know your business is you know better than we do in the seasonality of it and of course it depends on where you're located i mean we're in houston and they they build year-round here but in the northeast north you know the northwest not so much so you got to keep that in mind okay so let's go into a couple more suggestions for the how what we want to make sure that we're doing is when we identify the stages of our funnel is we do want to look at the sales cycle and how long each step takes okay a good example is a qualified bid opportunity comes into your into your sales file well you know if you sit on that too long you may miss your window and so we've had customers say look i want to shorten that window from you know seven days to three days or once you identify a bid that you are accepting you want to shorten that cycle tremendously because if you're not shortening that cycle from a qualified bid opportunity to an actual bid submitted status well you're spending too much time doing it that's that's all there is to it okay and and so you want to try to identify those key areas that you want to shorten and look for tools and utilities to help you with that and then also um you know you always want to be able to have some sort of nurturing campaign or keep some people refer to it as a kid keep keep in touch campaign but it's a way to keep in touch with your prospects whether you won their job or lost the job or maybe it never materialized even into a valid bid opportunity you want a nurturing campaign to stay in touch with them so that they know about your company and they remember you when it's time for a new job a new service contract or whatever it may be i mean it depends on your business but we have you know roof residential roofing repair companies we you know that go out and they fix roofs when a hurricane comes through um you know we had to freeze here in houston and in texas and when somebody had to leap in their roof they're going to call somebody quickly and you want to make sure you're in front of them when it's time to take action okay i think i beat that one up enough so let's go into some examples um so these are real examples from real companies um so again let's talk about building building our funnel and i've simplified the phases down to four here but let's talk about this so let's let's talk about the process of determining what we think our sales are going to be this could be 100 new construction jobs a year maybe it's 100 new service contracts a year it could be i think you guys get the idea but let's just say your goal for the year is to get 100 new service contracts many of our customers do a lot of new construction but where they want to improve is converting new construction to service because what happens they do the job and then they forget or they don't follow up or something happens so let's just pretend like we're that company and we're gonna our goal is to get a hundred new service contracts for this year and so they know that if i'm going to get 100 service contracts a year i that you're going to work backwards through that you're going to say well look for every bid that i submit i'm i can convert about 30 of those to an awarded uh to an awarded job okay so if you work backwards from the bottom of the funnel to the top that tells you you need to submit about 333 bids this year to reach your goal of 100. okay and then you work backwards from there and you say well for all the qualified requests for service or request for quotes that i get okay only about 17 and a half percent of those are actually ones i'm gonna accept okay that's a small number maybe maybe it's bigger than that hopefully it's bigger than that but that tells you okay working backwards again that i'm gonna i'm gonna need about 1900 qualified bid requests to reach my goal of 100 sales okay and then of course we go backwards from there and we say for every bid request that we get you know half of them actually are legit um you know they're looking for the service we provide whatever you know whatever your criteria is um so that brings you up to 13 uh 3810 bid bid requests for the year okay now you have to define what does it mean to have a qualified bid request an rfq and you don't move them into that phase until they meet that criteria and and then same with accepting a bid and then same with the sale of course but but if you extrapolate this out to an eight from an annual goal to a weekly goal i mean what it boils down to is i want two sales a week okay fantastic so you're monitoring two sales a week which should tell you in your funnel i need about 76 bid requests a week if i'm going to convert them at this rate now you've got to you've got to look at the rates as well and monitor the rates because they may be better or worse and if you think something is wrong there then take some action for example let's say a lot of your bid requests are not turning into qualified bids they're they're not legit they're looking for something you don't do or in a territory that you don't cover it could be a lot of reasons um it's hard for me to say because every business is different but you've got to look at that and say well wait a minute these are coming in from our website um or from our marketing campaigns or social media or or something and they're not legit why well maybe your maybe your campaigns are covering territories that you don't cover or something and so you gotta look at that and try to narrow that down and fix that problem so that you're actually getting legitimate qualified leads okay okay let and so here is an example and this doesn't match up exactly with um what i was just showing you here i'm only showing you three phases because it didn't have i didn't have data at the very top of the funnel to show you from from this customer but this is this is a trend uh for your funnel and this is week to week okay so you're looking at getting a certain number of leads per week week over week and you're seeing if it's matching your goal of you know 76 requests 70 38 qualified requests a week and and you're comparing it to that to see are we getting there or are we trending up are we trending down i mean now you can you can go back in time okay and compare this to for your prior years prior quarters prior months and that will allow you to arrive at these numbers okay that you use to build your funnel i hope this is making sense okay so now another example of a metric and i had to blank out the jobs here so um to protect the innocent here but when we're looking at shortening the time frame that we're responding to bid opportunities this is an example of an aging report that you can look at to say am i getting your my bid opportunities and are they moving into a bidded bid submitted status in that three days remember we said we want to go from seven days down to three days we want to be more efficient at doing our bids so i'm looking at that right here and i'm looking at the column where we have a new bid opportunity or a qualified bid opportunity and i'm looking at how long it takes now this is a bit all over all over the place but you can see that if i'm consistently below the seven days or if i'm consistently consistently within that three-day window well then i'm responding pretty effectively to my bid opportunities and they're not getting there you know i'm able to efficiently understand the bid prepare my estimate and submit the bid in a fair and a reasonable amount of time okay and a lot of people will track that number back to the fact that you know they're getting 30 bid opportunities a week and traditionally they can only respond to two or three maybe five of those they really want to be able to respond to many more and that way if they shorten their bid cycle okay they can they can respond to many more bids and and so that's what they're that's what they're trying to reach and they're monitoring that here with these reports okay and again these are the steps in the sales cycle that we're monitoring okay now let's go into the key key data okay now um this is this is sort of uh i guess the sweet spot i would call it i'm keeping up with what data do i expect my team to maintain okay obviously you need to keep up with the status and when a lead comes in you need your team needs to change the status and move them into the phase that is appropriate or that they qualify them for as soon as possible so you're tracking the status you understand where they are and most importantly the status change is going to trigger the next step which is number four so if it's a so if you move from a qualify from a new bid opportunity to a qualified bid opportunity okay you change the status that should trigger activity that alerts your estimators alerts your project managers and they start working on that bid because it's now a qualified bid opportunity you move them into that status and they and then and then the next steps in the workflow gets triggered from there i always say to everybody describe where where are you in the process with with this customer the status will tell you one thing the next step will tell you something the history will tell you something but unfortunately you kind of have to dig to understand where you are with that prospect but your management teams and your owners and and even your project managers can quickly understand where you are with with with each one of your opportunities if you just describe in a sentence or less in the description what's going on with this prospect okay and and that saves literally meeting several meetings that could take hours um and it limits that to maybe one or two people that can go through and should get a snapshot of what's going on it eliminates some status reports it eliminates for our home builders traffic reports it really makes things a lot easier on everybody if you just describe where we are with them of course tracking the last activity the next steps any objections or barriers to the deal what's stopping them um is it a budget issue is it you know i don't it could be anything but describe in a couple words what's blocking this sale from moving forward okay and that way somebody can come along and say well look we can we can help with that or you know what there's it's all over the place but but make sure you're documenting that document when the decision is supposed to be made and then in the case of just in in the case of construction since this is construction software what is the bid due date always keep up with that and and the system the crm will tell you um and alert you when bids are due and we'll even put it on your calendar and remind you when when bids are due obviously keeping up with keynotes conversations is very important and make sure you track the sources of your leads a lot of construction companies aren't necessarily getting leads online or from their website but try to break down your leads in as much detail as to where they're coming from and try to to there's tons of reports around this to analyze where your leads are coming from and how they're converting and obviously that's part of funnel management as well and if you're not getting leads from existing customers and you should be that should show up on your reports um especially when you're looking at things like service okay so that's the key data that you want to track okay now this is a fun one weekly reviews what would my weekly reviews look like okay so this is a real report and a real example of a weekly review process okay so what you're going to do is you're going to take those goals that we developed already and you're going to identify what is the overall goal for the year okay and then you're going to track your progress against that goal and so you'll say okay well if i need 100 deals this year then i should have closed 27 deals already okay well i haven't i've only closed 11. why okay why is that well you can see the very top of the funnel is hurting you by now you should have had 1026 bid opportunities okay and you have you've only gotten 723. so your problem in this example is in the very top of the funnel your sales funnel is broken right now because you're not getting enough leads into the funnel so what do you do about that well depending on the type of work you do depending on the business that you're in that's going to that's going to vary but you've got to fix that first because you're obviously not getting enough bid opportunities to hit your goal so what does that mean does that mean more marketing does that mean pay-per-click does that mean uh trade shows does that mean somebody gets on the phone and starts calling existing customers to say hey we've got you know you know we do service or whatever you've got to get the top of the funnel fixed or you're not going to hit your goal but do this every week and then make sure that you're staying on track okay obviously the qualified bid opportunities is red because you're not getting enough bid opportunities and um you're also not converting um if you can see the the red number where it says 32.2 percent you're you're not converting your the opportunities you're getting to qualified bid opportunities why is that again you need to make sure that the opportunities are getting are qualified you should be converting at least 50 of them historically and you're not well why is that maybe we need to maybe we need to fix our messaging or the content on our website or something okay and so you can look at this you can compare these phases of your funnel to where you should be at this point in the process or 14 weeks into the year and then go fix it we we do the same we're not selling jobs but we're selling and we know exactly how many qualified opportunities we should get so we can hit our goal for the year and we also know how we should convert them and that's part of funnel management okay so that's very very important all right so that is it and i was two minutes overdue um delisa do we have questions no questions at this time all right well fantastic um again we're gonna have the recording out to you guys tomorrow i try to shoot for around lunchtime and um it will include a link to the slides it will include a link to the the recording and then it'll come from me it'll come from my it'll come from top builder but it will go through my outlook and then so if you reply to the to this uh recording that we're sending out tomorrow i will get it um also if you want to learn information um from us or you want to engage in our professional services to help you with this process you can fill out a demo request form there's a button on on the email or you can contact us on our website so i hope this helped you guys again i think next next webinar will be on focusing more on the reporting side of funnel management i'm not 100 sure at this point but we'll definitely have that here pretty soon okay thank you guys you