How To Improve Your Sales Part 2 of 5 – Managing The Sale
We recently introduced our series, “How to Improve Your Sales”. In Part 1 we discussed “Winning More Business.” In Part 2, we are all about “Managing the Sale”. Here, we go through several tips and best practices for successfully managing a new sale and the sales process.
Defining Your Process
A sales process is a formal set of steps that your technicians should be following at every stage of the sale. When there is a proper process in place, everyone on your team will know what they should be doing at each stage in the process. This means your employees will be able to work efficiently and give your customers a sense of confidence in your ability to complete a job.
An example sales process for a glass shop may look like this:- Receive interest from a potential customer
- Discover need (repair, installation, etc.)
- Gather Customer information
- Schedule Appointment
- Estimate, and create work order
- Complete job
Clarifying and refining your sales process ensures your shop operates at top efficiency. It is important that your employees have formalized steps and instructions that they can follow so that nothing is left undone or incomplete.
Remember too, that your process is fluid and should be reviewed often. For instance, the process outlined above ensures all customer information and needs are gathered, before scheduling an appointment. This may have developed because the original process just had techs jumping right to scheduling and made customers feel rushed and unheard. Reviewing what is working and what is not during a sale will help inform future changes to your process.
Providing Timely Service
If a customer is calling you for an estimate, you want to do your best to provide them with an accurate and timely response. If you are in an auto glass shop putting together an estimate for a repair, a phone call with a customer may be all that is required. This could be especially true if you are a user of our new service, RightGlass.
However, if someone is calling about a residential glass repair or installation job, then an estimator generally needs to go to the location to calculate an estimate accurately. Being able to provide a same day (or next day) estimate can give you a huge advantage.
No one wants to sit around forever waiting for their glass to be repaired or installed. The first company they feel provides a fair estimate is the one who will most often win the business. If you can schedule and complete the job on-time you are likely going to have a satisfied customer who feels appreciated and respected. Proper scheduling and time management of your estimators is absolutely paramount.
How We Can Help
GlasPacLX has a visual scheduling feature that can help you see when your estimators and technicians have gaps in their schedules. You can also see the location of their jobs so you will know if anyone is in the area. This helps technicians to be efficient with their time and enables them to fit more customers into their schedules.
Creating Accurate Estimates
Creating accurate estimates is a make or break moment for any glass shop. If you overbid, the job you will look expensive and may lose a sale. If you underbid, you can lose money and have some very unhappy customers when the job costs more than they expected.
While there may be a select few who can calculate a ballpark estimate based on the size and general window specifications, it is far more preferable to have the right tools to help with the calculations. Have software that is available to you on-site that can provide accurate estimating for any job and any glass shape.
How We Can Help
GlasPacLX is completely customizable to your business the type of jobs you do. This means you can create set prices for things like the labor fee associated with a window installation. In addition to taking the guesswork out of labor costs, GlasPacLX also interfaces with three of the major glass distributors, PGW, Pilkington, and Mygrant.
With this information your technician can create an estimate based on the current price of the actual window, door, or glass product your customer chooses. These two features combined can eliminate most of the human error mistakes that occur during estimates.
Once you have created an estimate directly in GlasPacLX and the customer inevitably decides to go with you, (because of your amazingly quick and accurate estimating) placing an order is easy. You take the estimate, change its status and the estimate becomes a job and order form. Using GlasPacLX from start to finish can drastically reduce the time and mistakes in your estimating process.
Meeting Profit Margins
Fast and accurate estimating and happy customers does not mean a whole lot if you losing more than you make! Make sure you are always reviewing your prices and looking for ways to decrease your costs and increase your efficiencies. Fortunately, this is easy to do if you are following the guidelines we have already discussed.
Proper scheduling means that your techs have less down time and they are not being paid to have nothing to do. It also means they are not overworked or overbooked which helps prevent incomplete or insufficient work.
Accurate estimating means that you will not be undercharging for parts or taking on jobs that will pay you less than what the job costs to complete.
How We Can Help
GlasPacLX has been built from the ground up with your profit margins in mind. The more of your process you run through GlasPacLX, the better your margins will be.
We have built in advanced scheduling features with Google Maps integration to reduce your tech’s wheel time and allow them to fit more jobs in per day.
If an estimate is made that does not meet the guidelines you have established, GlasPacLX will show the total cost of the job in red so the estimator knows the profit guidelines have not been met. This will give them a chance to adjust the estimate and communicate with the shop to determine a course of action.
We have also made it an incredibly easy to turn any estimate into a work order. Just a simple button push is all it takes, greatly reducing administration time and the chances for information to get lost
Creating Value
The final piece of managing the sale is a little more abstract, but might be the most important. It takes more to manage a sale and win business then just being on time and accurate, you must also create value for your customer. You need to make your shop stand out in ways that go beyond numbers and figures.
This can be little things or actions where your shop goes above what is required but add up to make a big difference for a consumer. Are your techs friendly and make people feel taken care of? Do you have a strong online community (SEE PART 1!) where people feel connected to your shop and fellow customers? Do you offer jobs or discounts to veterans, people in need, etc? Do you just plain go out of your way to make sure your customer is beyond satisfied?
These are the kinds of questions you need to answer, and if you can’t find areas where your shop provides extra value, start creating them! There is almost no extra cost when it comes to creating this kind of added value, and the returns are potentially enormous.
Take it from us
We like to say that GlasPacLX is an investment, we offer features that go above and beyond the typical POS products. We help you grow your business and provide the most value to your customers.
But beyond that, we create value for our customers through methods just like this. We run a blog that has important news, updates, and helpful guides. We keep in touch with our customers via our Facebook and LinkedIn pages, and through our Uservoice forum and email newsletters (which you should join by the way, they are awesome – just fill out the form below). We do this because just being a software provider is not enough for us, we take pride in being an ongoing resource and community for those in the glass industry. That is what creating value is all about.
Are you new to GTS and maybe looking to learn more about how GlasPacLX can help take your business to the next level? Contact one of our experts! They will be more than happy to speak with you and walk you through a demo of our software.
Are you a current customer and curious to know how you can better use our software? We have one of the best support and customer success teams in the business. Get in touch with us here and we can help you get the most out of GlasPacLX!
Whoever you are, let us know what you think! Have any tips you have used in the past to better manage your sales? Anything special that you like to do to create extra value for your customers? Let us know in the comments. Don’t forget to look for Part 3 of this 5 part series; “Doing the Job Right.”
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