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Sales Automation & Reporting In Construction: Why It’s Important 

Residential construction is a competitive business. If you have a sales team working hard in the field to deliver opportunities to your company, it’s important to help make their process as efficient as possible. Even great sales professionals can underperform if much of their time is taken up with mundane tasks, such as data entry, that could be automated. In addition to relieving them of repetitive low-skill tasks, it is important to give your sales team the information they need to succeed in a form that is easy-to-understand and actionable. Adding a reporting function to your ERP that can pull your existing data and organize it into informative reports is an effective way to accomplish this. 

ROI of Construction Sales Automation 

Automating your sales reporting can have multiple benefits for not only your sales team but your company as a whole, including purchasing, accounting, marketing and your executives. By analyzing the data from past sales campaigns, you can:

Organize Opportunities. Analytics inform you about the deals you’ve won and lost, to help your team focus on clients that are most likely to purchase and that may bring the most revenue to the business. To guide your sales efforts, you can organize prospects by their value to the company and their specific interests. You can also analyze your sales opportunities and efforts by regions and divisions.

Save Time. Administrative tasks are time eaters. Automation can make internal processes more efficient and cost-effective. You want your sales team to spend less time compiling reports and more time applying the results of those reports to the formation of productive connections with prospects and clients.

Turn Opportunities into Deals. Getting prospects to the closing table requires a series of steps. Sales reports can help your team see what has worked well in the past and what hasn’t. Reports can help the team target the customers most likely to buy, develop an effective sales script, keep prospects aware and interested, optimize your offer and motivate final action. 

Support Sales Connections and Satisfy Clients. When you have data on what particular types of clients need during and after the sales process, you are better able to satisfy them. Sales reporting can help you determine if a client needs a more detailed cost breakdown, a broader range of options, specific contingencies or simply more hand-holding across the board. When you anticipate and meet client needs, you improve conversion rates.

360 Integration. Your sales team is an integral part of your business team, and their activities and costs affect your overall profitability. Integrating information on sales productivity and budgets into your strategic planning is essential in a business like residential construction with tight margins and high levels of competition.

Tracking, Reporting & Construction Sales Summaries

Sales Tracking Log 

A sales tracking log helps you accurately track all sales in progress, completed or canceled within a given time frame. It can include prospect and buyer contact details, ranking, steps that have been taken and next steps. This type of log ensures your sales team won’t lose track of their sales pipeline or activities, that they stay organized and follow up on all opportunities. Current and historical information on your overall sales process also can help in developing strategic growth plans.

Sales Cost Report 

A sales cost report focuses on the financial aspect of the sales process — how much is your sales team spending in time and money to generate a certain level of revenue? This can be analyzed enterprise-wide and by region, office, subdivision, sales team, job, etc. Cost reports will help you assign resources appropriately and efficiently to optimize ROI. They are critical in developing financial predictions and goals for the company as a whole.

Construction Sales Summary

Construction sales summary reports can be designed to focus on the type of information your executives and sales team find most useful. Although industry-wide sales information is available and can be useful, the most important factors in sales are individual to your company. Sales summary reports can help you understand these factors, including:

  • The type of customers that provide you the most value 
  • The markets that offer you the most opportunities and highest rates of success 
  • Your most desirable project locations 
  • Your most profitable project sizes 
  • Your desired minimum profit per job
  • Your most effective marketing campaigns
  • Your most productive sales techniques

How To Analyze Sales Performance In Construction 

Successful builders have an effective plan to find and attract new customers and they follow it diligently. Looking at your sales track record through your historical data can enable you to set budget goals that are both forward-thinking and achievable. In turn, your annual budget goals will indicate to your sales team what they need to accomplish — how many home sales or contracts they need to generate based on their current conversion rate or how they need to adjust to move that conversion rate.

Once annual goals are set, automated reporting can show you how you’re progressing toward those goals on a monthly and quarterly basis. Based on real data, you can change courses, finetune processes or stay on course throughout the year.

Let’s face it, reporting is not the favorite activity of busy sales teams. Report automation can make the most of your valuable time while ensuring that your efforts are focused around and integrated with your overall business strategy.

Improve Sales Automation & Reporting with Hyphen’s BRIX Software & informXL Analyzer 

Hyphen’s BRIX is more than a residential construction ERP software with accounting. It’s a fully integrated enterprise resource platform that allows you to access the most efficient solutions available for any level of home builder. Already used in over 11,000 homes each year, BRIX lets you control purchasing, production, accounting, costs and reporting all in one streamlined cloud-based construction program. 

Simplifying and strengthening home builder reporting and data analysis, informXL’s Analyzer is a real-time Microsoft Excel-based reporting solution that pairs with BRIX. Analyzer lets home builders transform data collected in BRIX into actionable reports that support informed business decision-making in merely seconds. 

Analyzer’s Advanced Sales Summary reports can help your Sales, Accounting and Purchasing teams to: 

  • Track job-level details for sales, starts and closings
  • Show sales and backlog details by division, region, plan and job
  • Project revenue from upcoming closings
  • Analyze sales by project, agent, real estate agent, plan, and much more

Interested in seeing informXL’s Sales Analyzer Reporting? View the recorded webinar or schedule a demo to talk to a Hyphen Solutions expert about how adopting BRIX as your home builder ERP software will transform the way your business manages sales, accounting, job costs, purchasing, payroll and more.