How to Use Technology to Drive Growth and Profitability | Part 3 – Follow Up

Written by Jesse Fox | Jun 2, 2022 6:45:17 PM

“It’s the best business investment I ever made.”

That’s how one of our customers feels about using Sales Builder Pro, the industry’s best HVAC proposal app. And we want you to feel the same.

To help guide your success, our 10-Step Guide: Digital Sales Tools for HVAC offers proven tips and tricks direct from other HVAC owners, managers, and salespeople. It’s designed to help you sell more in less time, become more profitable, and build a better business.

In Part 1 of this three-part blog series, we discussed preparing for the sales call.

In Part 2: Conduct the Sales Call, we discussed the five vital steps for conducting a successful HVAC sales call or comfort consultation. We even discussed some key features of Sales Builder Pro and how they can strengthen your sales process.

Now, we’ll discuss the third phase: follow up. Streamline your follow-up sales process by following these two simple steps:

1. Win Pending Deals

Go get them. If you won at the kitchen table, that’s great. But, in many cases you’ll need to hustle to win follow-up deals that you didn’t close in that first meeting.

Start every day with a prioritized to-do list. Follow up with deals by age — past 2 days, 7 days, or 30 days.

Make Your Life Easier With Deal Manager

Deal Manager is a collection of features designed to help busy HVAC contractors better manage their proposal pipelines by making it easier to do the many little things that need to be done, but are often overlooked in the course of a busy day.

We developed Deal Manager using input from busy contractors like you who were looking for a better way to:

  • Keep in front of HVAC sales prospects.
  • Communicate information with your customers, sales team, office staff, installers, and business managers.
  • Keep your team productive and your company growing.

Enhance Communication and Coordination

Improving communications and coordinating activities will help you:

  • Actively engage with customers to win more HVAC deals.
  • Automate communications between field workers and office workers, assuring that everyone has the right information at the right time to do their job effectively. Accurate and timely sharing of information will help you grow faster and operate more efficiently.
  • Move work to the next stage of the process more efficiently. Every day, hour, or minute that you can remove from a process allows you to work more efficiently and more profitably. In the process, you’ll also provide exceptional customer service.

Make a Big Impact

Deal Manager is packed with small features that create a huge impact for your company by simplifying processes, accelerating the speed of communications, and enabling your sales, office, and install teams to work more efficiently.

Sales Builder Pro simplifies the complex, time-consuming, and sometimes tedious work so that you can focus on what you do best: installing HVAC systems and delighting your customers.

Run a Better Business With Sales Builder Pro

From the time your Comfort Consultant walks in the front door until your install crew walks out the  back door, Sales Builder Pro helps you run a better — more profitable — business.

Remote Acceptance: Office personnel can accept pending deals, document the entire process, and set the stage for a successful install.

 

Digital Job Folder: Sales Builder Pro stores proposals, forms (including Comfort Surveys and Site Surveys), and any documents needed to fully document every job.

2. Track Results

Keep score. Famous management consultant Peter Drucker once said, “What gets measured gets managed.” Review every call — won, lost, and pending — so you can measure and improve your HVAC sales process over time.

Consider tracking the following:

  • Scheduled and completed sales calls: Once you’ve committed resources to a time-consuming home visit, your sales expenses begin to rise dramatically. There may be a drop-off in scheduled and completed sales calls due to cancellations from customers and/or contractors. A 5%-10% drop-off rate is common.
  • Quotes and win rates: A major milestone is putting together a quote or signed proposal. Should you measure your win rates based on leads, scheduled sales calls, or completed sales calls? All these measurements have validity but measure slightly different things.

Many contractors measure their win rates beginning with a scheduled sales call, since that’s when you first commit your resources and need to get a return on the investment.

 

Only Sales Builder Pro Offers These Game-Changing Tools

 

Stay On Top of Proposal Pipeline With Pending Deal Search

Only Sales Builder automatically filters your pending deals by 2-, 7-, and 30-day categories:

  • 2-day deals: Your fastest moving deals — pending deals from the past 2 days — require immediate attention.
  • 7-day deals: Slower deals are generally from the past 7 days.
  • 30-day deals: Your slowest moving deals are from the past 30 days. They might involve cautious decisionmakers or reflect a ”wants-based” buyer. Or, you may have already lost the order but you don’t know it yet. Many contractors set their deals to expire in 30 days. However, with the price changes we’ve seen in 2021, you might want to set deals to expire sooner.

Efficient Timeline Tracking

Unique to Sales Builder Pro, timeline tracking allows you to see what was presented, in what sequence, and for how long. This gives owners and sales managers the ability to know what’s going on inside the home during a sales call. It’s the first and only app to allow you to manage your sales team remotely.

For more tips and tricks to strengthen your sales process, get our 10-Step Guide: Digital Sales Tools for HVAC. Or request a demo to see Sales Builder Pro in action.