Turning sales into active jobs in minutes

Marge Haley:

Welcome back to The Better Way, the Buildertrend podcast designed to teach you how to run your business better with Buildertrend. I’m your host, Marge Haley. Today on our season finale, I’m joined by Shelbie Hoggatt with a very special anniversary. Congratulations, three years at Buildertrend.

Shelby:

Thank you.

Marge Haley:

Awesome. Introduce yourself. Tell me a little bit about you.

Shelbie:

Yeah, so as you mentioned, I’ve been with Buildertrend for three years as of today. Wonderful journey here at Buildertrend. Held a couple different positions in my time. Started out as an onboarding specialist, so helping clients that were brand new to Buildertrend. Moved into an implementation specialist role, during COVID mind you, so that was a lot of fun working with clients that were a little bit more vetted into the program, kind of continuing their journey. Then in November of this last year, I started as an onsite consultant. For any listeners that may not be familiar with onsite consulting, I travel these great United States meeting with clients in person, typically for a two day visit, and really help them build out their processes fully within Buildertrend.

Marge Haley:

Excellent. Excellent. Well, we’ll go ahead and get started. With your experience at Buildertrend working in the customer success department and actually going onsite with current clients, the one question I really want to ask and what you’ve seen in the field and getting really a deep dive into contractors’ business is a little bit about the struggles you see about winning a construction job the old way, or without a software like Buildertrend.

Shelbie:

Yeah, no, that’s a great question. And definitely something that we see across a variety of contractors, whether it be new construction, remodelers or specialty contractors. The biggest thing is there’s a lot of competition and contractors need something that puts them above and beyond the competitors in their market. So without a tool like Buildertrend, first and foremost, follow-up processes get a little sloppy, to be honest. And a lot of times I’ll ask the guys that I work with, “How do you keep track of potential deals?” “I keep track of it all in my head,” which is an answer that we want to try to get away from. So having organization, obviously with a tool like Buildertrend, is going to be super helpful.

Another important thing would be the contract process and being able to have a tool to manage that versus making agreements maybe verbally or over email. Again, that’s kind of the old school way of doing things without a tool like Buildertrend.

Marge Haley:

Yeah, absolutely. So I think one thing that is not talked enough about is really the communication between sales and project managers or sales, office and project managers. You have the sales team typically out on an island, or maybe it’s just the owner or just a one man show doing the sales. And then you have a larger team on the backend doing the project management and project planning. Can you tell me a little bit about maybe challenges or if you’ve heard anything with your experiences that relate to the communication between two departments of a construction company?

Shelbie:

Yeah, absolutely. This is actually one of the topics that I hit on a lot with my onsite clients, because a lot of times there is a disconnect between those two departments, especially in bigger organizations where we have multiple members of the sales team and multiple members of the project management team. The biggest thing that I see is a disconnect on the transfer of information. The information that the sales team has collected, whether it be the client’s interest, kind of the general scope of work, even little things like the code to get into their home does not get transferred over to the project management team and so the project management team is having to come back a lot of times to that sales side to gather that information. So, it’s a very reactive way of transferring information between the two teams.

There’s also a lack of visibility between each other’s processes and really understanding how the sales team is maybe running things versus project management. And as we know, the project managers are the ones that are actually providing the product to the client. If we can provide more information to the sales team, they’re actually able to sell better on what the final product is going to be and who they’re going to be ultimately working with. So that’s a huge thing that I work on when I am onsite with clients, kind of making sure we have a clean handoff process.

Marge Haley:

Absolutely. That handoff process is a big deal. My experience training clients and talking with clients is it’s the handoff that gets a little bumpy. Can you tell me a little bit about the steps that you can take within Buildertrend that can make a clean handoff and make that process a lot smoother?

Shelbie:

Absolutely. Absolutely. So first and foremost is visibility. In Buildertrend we have the ability to set up permissions, whether you can have the ability to actually edit or delete things or just be able to view things. I always recommend giving each department at least a view level access to the others’ departments. It allows them again to have that transparency of what’s going on, allows them to also go look back maybe at the sales lead or for the sales manager to go and look at where the project is at and kind of follow up with their clients that way. So gives that visibility without giving too much access to things that people don’t need.

Another big one, that I set up with pretty much every client that’s going to be using sales, is custom fields. For maybe some of the members that are listening, custom fields are a way to customize the data that you are tracking within Buildertrend. So we have the ability to set up a number of different custom fields on the sales side of the program that actually copy over during the conversion process into the job. So some of those things that I mentioned earlier, miscellaneous client notes, a code to get into the home or into the neighborhood, make sure you park on the left side of the street, not the right, kind of those little bits of data we can make sure are easily transferred over into the job. So that transfer of information and knowledge is very easy for everyone. Everyone knows exactly where to go to find that data.

Marge Haley:

Yeah, that’s excellent. I think that the custom fields and linking it from the sales to the job is an underutilized feature in Buildertrend that a lot of builders can really implement and run with right away. So I’m glad you shared that. That, in and of itself, that makes the transfer of information just so quick and seamless. So I think everyone that’s listening that has departments on one side of the software to the other can start utilizing that right away.

Shelbie:

Absolutely. And again, another one of those tools that I have seen be helpful from individuals in new construction, down to remodels and specialty contractors. I worked with an insurance restoration company recently and we created about thirty custom fields for all the special things that they needed to keep track of because that was a huge issue within their company. They had about a dozen different sheets that they were passing around the office to keep track of that and Buildertrend was able to streamline that process for them and get it set up in about 30 minutes.

Marge Haley:

That’s excellent. So not only setting it up, but then creating that standard process around it really makes Buildertrend at the epicenter of all of your data. Anyone that needs that information knows where to go to find it. So not only setting it up, but creating that standard practice, having them rely on it rather than relying on those passed notes. Miscommunication happen can happen so quickly when you have handwritten information.

Shelbie:

Absolutely. Putting that responsibility on the different members of your team. So during that handoff process, the next person kind of in line has exactly what they need, that accountability, is huge in developing those processes in Buildertrend.

Marge Haley:

Yeah. So I actually have another question relating to the Buildertrend platform. Notifications are a hot topic. We send a lot of them out, so you really want to tailor them towards the client and the appropriate people. Can you tell me anything about utilizing notifications to alert the other parties, so sales to project managers, and is there any sort of notifications that can be sent automatically so there aren’t any missed texts or missed phone calls or anything like that?

Shelbie:

For sure. For sure. Absolutely. I think one of the biggest ones that I always recommend is having the acceptance of a proposal. I think that is huge because once a lead proposal is accepted, that typically is the trigger for a conversion into a job. So having those project managers, even though they’re not managing the proposal process, have that notification turned on allows them to know really quickly that there’s something coming down the pipeline for them.

In addition, when setting up a new job and we assign a project manager to a job, we have the ability to go ahead and notify them upon save. And again, I think that is huge. That’s kind of their notification to themselves that it’s their turn to jump into the process. They can open up the job information, begin to review all of those custom fields and data that’s transferred over and get started with what’s next for them.

Marge Haley:

That’s awesome. That notification, I really like the proposal that kind of flips their switch of like, okay, I’ve got a job starting and then the official conversion of job notification to project manager, that really solidifies and streamlines the green light to go move forward with that project. So that’s really cool that Buildertrend could do all of that all while managing all this information we’ve talked about so far on this episode. So that’s awesome.

Kind of switching gears here, we’ve talked about how to do it in Buildertrend and how to convert that information from one side of a construction company to another. Can you tell me a little bit of maybe the biggest benefit or what you’ve seen customers really react to when using an all-in-one software like Buildertrend, rather than a standalone CRM compared to a standalone project management tool?

Shelbie:

Absolutely, absolutely. The biggest benefit, and we’ve kind of talked about this a little bit already, it’s your one-stop shop. It is the epicenter of all of the information for your company. When separating things into separate software, and whether it’s just CRM versus project management, I’ve also seen it where we have the time clock in a different software, is you end up having to do duplicate entry of everything. And that duplicate entry takes up a lot of time. It really does. And as we know, time is money. So being able to have a streamlined process of information, carrying through Buildertrend from phone call number one with your client until the last invoice is received really helps make sure that someone’s sole job at your company is not just entering things in three, four times, the same information on one project. So I think that can be a very simple solution, but a very impactful one for sure.

The other biggest thing that I preach with my clients is documentation. Having all your date and time stamps, having all your documents in one platform, and you can always kind of lean on the fact that Buildertrend is always going to give you a date and time stamp of when something was performed and who performed it, which is not always the case with other software. So, for documentation and a legal standpoint, that can be a huge benefit as well.

Marge Haley:

Absolutely. So just utilizing Buildertrend, it sounds like from what you’ve said is all-in-one, organization, communication, legal standpoint, I mean, there’s just a litany of reasons why using a software like Buildertrend from start to finish on a project is so impactful and important to when running a successful building company.

Shelby:

Absolutely. Absolutely. It can change the way that you guys perform your jobs, improve your relationship and experience with your clients. Save a lot of headaches around the office too. I say it all the time, to make life easier, to make the process easier is really kind of the goal I think that Buildertrend can provide to its customers.

Marge Haley:

Yeah. I’m sure you’re sick of hearing this word, but as an onsite consultant, it’s all about the process, right? Yes. Establish the process.

Shelby:

All about the process. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. From, I say it all the time, from A to Z, first phone call, to last invoice, we should know what our steps are in Buildertrend. We know what information should be entered. And again, the biggest thing is who’s responsible for that? I find that a lot that there’s sometimes a lack of accountability and it’s not anybody’s fault, it’s that no one’s ever written it down or really talked about why we’re going to do it that way. And that’s kind of the biggest thing is with that process who’s responsible for each piece, making sure everyone has what they need.

Marge Haley:

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you, Shelbie. We appreciate your time.

Shelbie:

Thank you, Marge.

Marge Haley:

Thank you for listening and be sure to rate, review and subscribe to “The Better Way” wherever you get your podcasts. For more construction tips, tricks and strategies, sign up with the link in the show notes to be notified when the next season drops. Or check out our other podcast, “The Building Code”.