How Software Consolidates, Simplifies Business, Operations
BY AsphaltPro Staff
From sales leads to project management, software platforms offer assistance in paving contractors’ operations
Construction software providers wish to offer both a simplified experience for contractors and smart systems that result in more business for the user. More tons is the mantra for the asphalt professional.
During his work zone stage presentation at the National Pavement Expo (NPE) 2024 in Tampa, Jared Hislop of Bitumio, Garden City, Utah, shared facts and ideas for streamlining sales and operations in a construction company with software and automated responses. He shared with the audience on the tradeshow floor how to implement efficiencies in the back office through software and he started with how to close more sales.
Respond and Propose
Whether you’re a hot-mix producer servicing FOB customers or a striping contractor seeking schools and businesses with parking lots to stripe, you want to capture and respond to every lead that comes into your shop. Hislop shared some statistics that should make us all feel the pressure to hustle more.
In terms of conversion rates, he explained, when a lead comes in, you want to capture and respond to that lead within the first five minutes of its arrival. You’ll have an eight-time higher conversion rate if you respond within the first five minutes.
You can respond via an email, a phone call or a text message, but confirming with that lead to say, “Hey I saw you, and here’s the next step that you can expect,” is critical to closing the sale.
“Additionally, following up on the lead after 30 minutes is 21 times less effective than within that first 30 minutes,” Hislop said.
Hislop’s first key takeaway of the presentation was to set up a CRM or some process that not only captures and stores leads, but that can follow up with your leads and can notify the internal staff when a new lead has come in.
The next step after responding is to get a proposal to the potential customer. Hislop shared a statistic from a company that has collected data from sending tens of thousands of proposals: “We can see that after 12 hours of that proposal request coming in, your customers start to lose interest.”
What data showed, and logic confirms, is customers reach out to more than one source for work and they start to lose track of who they reached out to. The companies they’ve reached out to blend in their minds and they can easily confuse your brand or offered services with another.
“After two to three days, they’re about half as interested,” Hislop shared. This means it’s vital to have your process in place where you can quickly send out new proposals during that first 12-hour window, when the customer’s interest is the highest.
He shared the next step is to make the proposal easy to access and “close,” stating almost half of the Bitumio proposals can be opened on mobile. “We saw that within 10 seconds of sending that proposal, the customer had opened it, viewed it and signed it.”
The key is making the process easy and painless for the customer, but don’t forget you’re incorporating processes that make it easier for your staff, as well. Hislop pointed out the need to follow up with leads who don’t respond right away or who might have questions. Building the follow-up reminders into the system is smart thinking for a company. “Almost half of salesmen give up after one contact, after one outreach.” How we improve our system is with one that follows up with the customer automatically to close more leads.
The goal for the software system you look to is to have a process that helps you quickly put together proposals, within that first 12-hour window—or at least the first two days. You want to make it extremely easy for your customers to access and open the proposal, and then you want to follow up with that prospect, at least five times after sending the proposal, “and I promise you, your close rates will thank you,” Hislop finished.
Work and Request
Once the proposal is signed and that new lead is closed, it’s time to get to work. Integrating software into your process can help on the operational side, as well. Hislop told the audience, 54% of customers have higher customer service expectations than they did a year ago. And 7% of them are willing to pay more to get it.
This comes into play not only when estimating and bidding, but also when you see repeat customers. You want to be the HMA plant all the FOB customers flock to. You want to be the sealcoating contractor all the residential property managers recommend to their BODs. You want to be the pavement maintenance contractor the DPW short-lists for the year’s PMS contract.
Hislop outlined how to be the contractor who gives the higher customer service experience—starting with communication both internally and externally. By having software that entrains all the aspects of the upcoming job, you don’t have your community operation team calling up the customer to ask basic questions about the contract or the parameters of the job. By having software that includes pre-job reminders, you can instead reach out to the customer to let them know exactly what to expect and when.
“Once the job is scheduled, or rescheduled, we’re going to be communicating that to the customer. Let them know we’re coming on this day to start the job and share more details as we’re getting closer.”
He recommended to the audience multiple pre-planning “touches” to confirm the customer’s obligations to minimize problems on the day of the project.
“Seven days, four days, one day before the job starts, you’re sending out communications to the customer and saying, ‘Hey, we’re coming on this day,’ just so they can help you.” You want to say, “Please make sure your sprinklers are turned off. Make sure your garbage isn’t running. Make sure the cars are out of the parking lot.”
This is so your arriving crews can get to work on the customer’s project and execute a good job. The last thing you want is to have the foreman call the boss at 5 a.m. saying, “Hey, we’re at the job but there are cars that need to be towed.”
This means you must call the customer, and suddenly the experience is no longer great. By using proactive communications to set expectations, Hislop shared, you eliminate some of those situations.
One of the aspects of the job Hislop reminded the audience to do better is the final step of asking for a review. After the job is done and closed, it’s time to ask the customer, “How did we do?” You can ask for recommendations to be posted on whatever platform you’ve selected, but using software for that task can automate the ask and free your staff for the next job.
Lower Your Stress
Hislop explained to the audience, when building Bitumio, they wanted a user-friendly, smart system. He said they wished to place the daily repetitive tasks for contractors—such as calculating trucking, materials and travel times, and scheduling route planning—in one platform, freeing contractors to close more business on one side of the coin and streamline operations on the other. While his goal on the NPE stage was to talk about business processes and operations no matter what software platform a contractor uses, he shared a specific example from a Bitumio user that can illustrate the backup or double-checking of an app for readers.
When preparing a proposal, the staff have a detailed list of line items. When software is integrated, there are ways to work efficiency into cluster scheduling, traffic control, shared equipment, materials and so on. All team members can access the app to see what assets are available to what job and at what time. No longer should the paving foreman get 30 or 50 text messages the night before a project starts confirming start time, location and so on. All the crew members can see the details in the app.
Finally, management can double-check the margins and the parameters. The foreman can look at the app and recognize when something catastrophic is missing.
It may seem a silly example, but the line item of trucking was overlooked on an estimate before a client added the Bitumio software to help them. Hislop showed an example of estimating for a project that included a 3-inch lift of asphalt pavement. “We underbid our material costs, we underbid our equipment and for some reason, we didn’t even count for trucking in our proposal, right?” By using software to double-check the bid, the customer could narrow down their estimates, see their true margins and have improved oversight.
With this software, the contractor is “not allowed” to send out a proposal with zero material unless he or she explicitly agrees to that parameter.
Soon, Bitumio is also adding a fleet management feature to the software and incorporating AI that helps use aerial imagery to enhance estimating. By using AI, the software will assist in calculating parking stalls to stripe, the length of a job to pave and so on.
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At this time, software is a tool to assist contractors in performing tasks they might otherwise forget or might not get to in as timely a fashion as called for in today’s climate. With the knowledge that potential customers need a response before they forget who you are, you want to pounce on every lead you can.
“No matter what system you’re using, you can do any of these things,” Hilsop said. “You don’t need the software to say, ‘every time I send a proposal, I’m going to pick up the phone, and we’re going to call that prospect five times for five days.’ Follow up. You don’t need the software to get that. You need the process, right? Same thing with communicating with the customer before a job. You don’t need the software. But software can automate and remove a lot of these processes that you have to streamline and make sure that they’re actually getting done.”