Keep Your Sales Pipeline Full!

by Marcy Marro | 1 May 2020 12:00 am

Does Your Sales Pipeline Stay Full?

How do you ensure your sales pipeline stays full of profitable projects proposing against only a few qualified competitors at high margins? Look around at very successful construction companies in your market. Their sales strategy is not to sit and wait for the phone to ring. They have a proactive business development system that attracts continuous customers and preferred targets, stays in touch with customers and spreads the word around town who’s the best at what they do. When you wait for customers to call and ask you to bid, you’re at the mercy of their decision whether to call.

Track Your Sales Pipeline!

To get started building a steady sales pipeline, determine first how much money you need to bring in every month and annually to build and grow your company. I help clients determine the sales they need to hit their goals using a Sales Award Tracking System spreadsheet, which lays out the bid, proposals, bid-hit ratio (number of bids versus awards won), and award volume they need on a monthly and annual basis.

Determine What Type of Work to Target!

Next, decide what kind of projects and customers you want to target and attack. Without a focus it’s hard to aim at anything or improve your sales results. Contractors who struggle with profitable sales tend to do any job, any size, anywhere, for anyone. Because they are not focused on one or two project or customer types, they can’t develop a steady sales pipeline full of good jobs to win.

What are your best customer types that you have a potential to develop an ongoing flow of high margin work with? What are your best project types, job sizes, locations and contract award methods? By concentrating on only a few customer types or markets, you can build a reputation as an expert in that type of work. Plus customers are easy to find if you know who you want to target.

Create a Target Market and Customer List!

To keep the sales pipeline full, you have to have customer targets to market and sell to on a regular basis. Make a list of your existing and new customers you want to go after, target and do business with in the future including new markets:

Sales Pipeline Target List

• Top loyal customers
• Repeat customers
• Past customers
• New customer targets
• New market targets

Develop a Sales Activity Calendar!

Now that you have a sales pipeline customer target list, do something about it! Start with the customers you already know. Determine how you can you best get them to want to hire your company more often than they have in the past. For each top, repeat or past customer, develop a plan of attack. List out all of you customer targets and decide what sales activity will work for each to improve the bid-hit ratio or sales pipeline with them. Include the specific sales activities for each target and how often you will attack them (minimum three times per year per customer). Keep track of your sales pipeline activities every month in your regular business development meeting.

Stay Focused on Getting More Work!

Contractors are generally too busy working on building their projects and often put their estimating, bidding and sales activity as a second priority. Business is simple—GET work and DO work. When you spend all your prime time doing work, getting profitable work never happens. To develop a steady sales pipeline full of high-margin customers and contracts takes a top commitment to make getting and winning work just as important as doing it.

Profitable construction company owners dedicate almost 50% of their time on the get work side of their business. They hold monthly business development strategy meetings, review their sales and award tracking results, focus on building customer relationships, make sales calls weekly, and make sure their company marketing plan is in place and operating on a continuous basis.

They also focus on potential, future, current, and recent proposals, estimates and bids. And most importantly, they concentrate on pro-active follow-up after submitting each and every bid and proposal.

Weekly BIZ-DEV, Sales and Estimating Meeting Agenda
Who: president, marketing, sales and estimating
When: weekly Monday morning

1. Review estimating, proposal and bid schedule
   1. Potential projects to bid, propose and estimate
   2. Current jobs estimating and bidding
   3. Bid and proposal follow-up activity
2. Schedule weekly loyal customer activities
3. Review weekly sales call action plan
4. Develop weekly customer target action plans
5. Review and plan future sales opportunities
6. Commit to new customer target activities
7. Plan upcoming marketing activities

Commit to Keep Your Sales Pipeline Flowing!

By committing to take regular business development, sales and marketing activity steps, your company will begin to find better customers and higher margin work. When all you do is bid and build, it’s hard to maximize your bottom line. Be more proactive and stay focused on getting the work you want, and your sales pipeline will flow the way you want it to.

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George Hedley, CSP, CPBC, helps contractors grow and profit as a professional business coach, popular speaker and peer group leader. He is the author of “Get Your Construction Business to Always Make a Profit!” and “Hardhat BIZSCHOOL Online University” available—on his website. Visit www.hardhatbizschool.com[1] for more information.

Source URL: https://www.metalconstructionnews.com/articles/keep-your-sales-pipeline-full/

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