Financials and budgeting

Make informed business decisions with Buildertrend’s Revenue Forecaster

Want to measure the future health of your business and make informed business decisions? Meet Buildertrend’s Revenue Forecaster.

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Have you ever wished for a tool that could help you measure the future health of your construction business? Wish granted.

Our Data Science team has built and optimized the Revenue Forecaster, a tool that can automatically calculate average contract price, average days to close, average project duration and close rate for each of your job types. Using this new tool will help you to determine how many leads you need in your pipeline in order to meet your goals for the future.

We don’t have to tell you that a funnel full of leads is a key contributor to the success of your business. And you’re already using Buildertrend to manage your leads, so why not take it a step further and use the Revenue Forecaster to generate great insights on how to maintain or increase the health of your company? Using this tool will give you the power of making data-driven decisions that will greatly impact your business’ future success.

To learn more about the Revenue Forecaster and why it’s so important for business owners like you to project outcomes and make decisions based on numbers, we chatted with Justin Rediger, a senior industry analyst here at Buildertrend.

forecaster for revenue

Why do builders so often make the wrong decisions based on their gut instead of what the numbers show?

Most builders have been in business for years. Long before they had any real-time data at their fingertips. Making the transition to informing business decisions based off live data takes a change in mindset. Some builders may be apprehensive to the idea since they’ve run a successful business for so long without relying on calculated metrics and forecasts.

The concept of infusing data into their business decisions shouldn’t be seen as a replacement to their gut instincts, but a supplement to give them some guidelines for making better decisions.

Why is it important to use the power of making data-driven decisions in the construction business?

Construction is both cyclical and highly correlated to the health of the economy. COVID-19 has somewhat confused what is “normal” though. While builders and remodelers are generally doing very well right now and demand is high, the economy and consumer buying habits could quickly change with many things up in the air in the coming months.

There is an election that could change economic policy decisions, a historically low interest rate and lots of government stimulus that is keeping things afloat. If one or a few of those things change, the construction industry could be faced with a sudden drop in demand. And for the builders putting up spec homes, they don’t want to be caught with excess inventory they can’t sell.

How can the Revenue Forecaster Dashboard help business owners make important decisions?

Buildertrend recently released their WIP (Work in Progress) report, which is meant to give builders a snapshot of their cash flow based off the projects that are already sold. The Revenue Forecaster is meant to give builders some insight into the potential dollars they have coming from their sales funnel. The general concept is to look at how many leads they are currently pursuing, how many leads they are likely to close and the dollar value of those leads. This makes the report a really powerful report while also giving builders the ability to create their own scenarios to forecast future revenue potential. They can even break it down by each project type.

How will this tool help with managing leads?

Since the Revenue Forecaster is pulling from live data within the customer’s Buildertrend account, they can look at their close percentage by project type to determine which projects have the highest ROI based off their investment in marketing and sales. For example, if a builder sees that they close 50% of all sunrooms and only 20% of all deck leads with similar margins, they might decide to shift their marketing content to focus on sunrooms. In short, it can help a builder decide where to put their marketing dollars and which leads to prioritize.

How do the numbers give insights to a business and reveal where the actual issues lie?

In the hustle and bustle of running a construction business, sometimes perception doesn’t match reality. It’s easy for salespeople to think they will close 30% of their leads when in the past they only close 20%. Or a project manager to think they average four weeks to finish a project when it actually takes four and a half. Those small differences add up over a year and can be the cause of missing targets.

Live data prevents these misconceptions and gives hard numbers to otherwise tedious metrics to calculate such as close percentage, average contract price and average project length. The Revenue Forecaster eliminates the pain of having to find the data, enter it into Excel, calculate the values, etc. The hope is that by giving these metrics to builders in an easy to use format, they can focus their energy on deciding how to respond to and improve their numbers instead of wasting their time and effort on manually calculating them.

Don’t gamble with the success of your business

Use the power of data-driven decision-making to ensure the success of your business. See how using the real-time data right at your fingertips can help you make strategic, informed business decisions. If you’re a current Buildertrend customer, you can access the Revenue Forecaster dashboard by clicking here and logging in with your Buildertrend credentials.

If you’d like to learn more about how you can use the Revenue Forecaster to gain insights into the health of your business, give us a call or reach out to your account executive and they’d be happy to help!

About The Author

Chelsea Cole headshot

Chelsea Cole Chelsea Cole is a senior content marketing specialist at Buildertrend

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