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but my sales guy promised me this no he didn't we got you covered [Music] hey everyone it's ben here from the building business channel and i've got colton from solo with me today super glad to have you and i want to talk about sales enablement and specifically about how you can automate your sales process because i think we have our sales people doing a lot of things that frankly could be done by somebody else faster and get them to selling where do you think some of the biggest pain points or problems are in the slowness of the sales process right now definitely be preparing your quote there's always several elements whether it's equipment pricing availability purchase options all those different parts and pieces need to be aligned for your sales people to close a homeowner and if they don't have tools in place that organize that now they're responsible to keep track of all that information yeah and there's actually a lot of moving parts let's get in a little more detail do you have any data or information on how long it typically takes to put together a quote let's say in the solar industry so if you already know your costs have your purchase options and all those lined out depending on your tools anywhere between 20 to 30 minutes that includes some designing that either your sales people or a design team member are doing inputting that into a template that matches what you want to present to homeowners and then getting that in front of them so probably 20 to 30 minutes i bet on average wow so what parts of that process if you're doing it manually could be automated uh the design can be automated all of your pricing and templatizing of proposals can be completely automated and it can include all of your offerings all in one place too and so what's that going to do for your timeline how much faster can you be so we can deliver within five to ten minutes wow an active proposal that's ready to present to a homeowner and it looks more professional than probably a lot of things that you could come up with on your own right now 100 yeah there's uh great things you can do with xl but if you're using a tool that's built for that it just turns out to be a better experience so in the process of actually selling the customer you've got this big big bottleneck where you've got to put together your estimate and your proposal and your quote what other parts of the sales process are really bottlenecked right now uh documents is one part maybe talk a little bit more about that yeah documents so there's installation documents where it could be market specific utility documentation that's definitely market specific so it's just another thing that you can automate to keep your team members from having to track that info why are you trying to automate it what are the benefits besides time that you're trying to get out of that um really it just allows the sales reps to have a smoother process and interaction with the homeowner and the smoother that sales process is with each homeowner the easier it is for them to say yes throughout that sales cycle do you find that they close better with that or do you have any um data on like what close rates do when you actually automate these processes yeah definitely it's between about five to eight percent increase in closing percentages when you go from your traditional diy presenting tool over to what a product like solo has and why is that why does it close better what is it i think it's just speed is one of the biggest things and then just the ease of use everything is built in a way that sales people are enabled to make adjustments admin users can have the confidence that their teams have some autonomy but they're never going to hurt their margins because you set different limitations for each team member that's using it how important is professionalism in the whole process of delivering that quote it's a massive piece of that you want your company to be represented in a good way to each homeowner if you have a handwritten quote or something that you're kind of trying to piece together through different systems it just comes across in that same way to homeowners which doesn't make them make that buying decision very easily solo can bring all those pieces together in a very customizable and company specific presentation platform that allow allows you to have all of that professionalism throughout the whole process so you guys focus a lot on solar what happens if let's say i'm a roofer and i'm actually interested in getting more into solar how could solo help me get there one of the biggest things is because we take care of the proposal creation and design you can easily transition your existing sales force into offering solar using the solo products because all of the organization is already in place a really good salesperson can request a roofing proposal for one customer a solar proposal for another one and all those offerings are already available for what they have to sell organized set up in a way that's clear and easy for them to use if you have great sales paralysis you can easily self-learn the solo proposal tool clearly see the information and get that to homeowners we have a lot of roofing customers here at job nimbus and so we're always thinking about what the trends are we have a lot of different customers frankly in all of home exteriors and we're seeing a lot of things where people are adopting solar into their product mix at a higher rate than we'd ever seen before why is that probably the biggest reason is product availability and really that's been in the pricing of solar equipment it's come down quite a bit yeah incentives are play a big part in that and also the cost of energy so all those things have kind of adjusted over time to get to where we are today which makes most residential projects really feasible for solar if i was a one trade type of contractor should i be looking at going to multiple trades over time and then how would i do that i think if you're in roofing and that's your trade solar is a really easy addition to that you're already in the home talking about their roof you can easily offer an additional product and add that to your revenue line which would really just sync up with what you're already there doing easy for homeowners to understand everything is mounted on the roof you're already kind of talking about that also the installation isn't something that a roofing contractor cannot overcome you can easily either hire a certified resource internally or contract with someone to train up your teams so that they can start doing the installation too yeah and what's the margins like in solar right now what's the average margin out there uh the margins will vary all depending on how your relationship is with the with each solar project if you're sales only then you can carry a pretty positive margin and you're just working on a commission or a redline type basis if you're doing the installation as well your margin is going to fluctuate based on the efficiency of your crew the margins have been very beneficial to the contractors that have been solar over time with the decrease in equipment costs then that's just increased their margins too what are some of the benefits of having a system that delivers the same type of quote to every customer the biggest perk will be consistency throughout your sales force because the designs are taken care of in a standardized form what your teams are selling and what your installers are installing are going to be consistent throughout that whole process as well so you can have any level of sales professional working with homeowners and all the products will have the same quality and consistency that you're looking for so later when you're assessing your sales team's uh effectiveness you can use that same data in both places to make comparisons yeah absolutely because one piece is very standardized you can just focus on what your team members may be doing not so much on are they selling properly plus are they technically savvy enough you can just have the focus on the sell side yeah it's more about their selling techniques at that point and less about well he's giving a different quote and it looks totally different so maybe that's the reason that he didn't close it right yep absolutely thanks colton appreciate it okay so using tools to automate your sales process is going to make you more efficient it's going to make you look more professional and it's going to get you into more revenue opportunities thanks a bunch for joining us today we'll see you next time keep on building your business [Music]