5 ways to win more projects from your estimates

Estimating is a big part of a field service contractor’s sales process. You need to win as many as you can while spending as little time as possible on them as a whole and concentrating on the ones that are likely to convert. Just a small percentage increase in these wins will have a dramatic effect on your profitability.

1. Measure your closing ratio

If you don’t know this at the start, you can’t measure how effective you are being when you change strategy. Take the time to collate the data on all your appointments. Then add up what you won to reveal what you didn’t. Analyse why you won them and how much they made. Was it worth it?

Now experiment. Lower your prices and measure for a month. Raise your prices and measure for a month. Discover the geographic areas where you convert most estimates and make the most profits. Find out the worst areas – and drop them like a bad habit. In other words just don’t quote in this areas.

Now that you know your estimatation closing ratio and have worked out the most profitable projects, cut out the chaff and concentrate on the wheat. Move on to step two to improve your estimates further.

2. Look at the details

Have a good look at the estimates you are sending out. Are they any good? Send them to your family and mates. Ask for their feedback.
You need to make estimates that make you stand apart from the competition. The client needs to be impressed with the look of the estimate, it’s detail and scope. After all, this is how clients make their decisions – on your professionalism (and price :).

Customers want information and transparency, so every estimate you send out should contain enough detail to educate your customer, but not provide a roadmap for your competitor to quote from. At the end of the estimate, the customer should feel fully confident in all of the services they are receiving and the materials they are paying for.

A checklist:

a) Obviously, make it easy for clients to follow up with you by including your office and personal phone and email. Or even easier send it by Whatsapp, Telgram or some other messaging platform aggregator software.
b) list the labour and materials charges – they always ask for them anyway
c) Put in a brief description of what you are going to do for them – it saves them asking
d) Have a nice spiel on the benefits of your services
e) Include images and videos of the areas discussed for reference

3. Make it clear what you will and won’t do

There is a famous line about assumptions, you can look it up. The thing is not to assume anything and don’t let your customer do that either. Otherwise you will hear this line at the end of the project ‘I just assumed you would do x,y,z. Why didn’t you tell me this wasn’t included.’

So list what you will do – and list what you won’t be doing or if it is the responsibility of another contractor.

4. Make sure you know your profit on each line item

So many contractors win a job only to find at the end of it that they have made no money or even worse, they have lost money. This is because they don’t know the mark-up that they need to add onto each line item of the estimate. So, either labour or materials – you need to know how much to add on each one to cover all your expenses and still make a profit.

5. Qualify, qualify, qualify

Don’t be a busy fool. A rooky mistake in contracting is to provide everyone who wants an estimate with an estimate. No, no, no. You need to qualify them to determine if this is a customer you want, whether they are someone who is going to buy or whether they are just giving you the run around. Ditch those people quickly or you will be going out of business fast.

Don’t quote or estimate unless:

a) The person calling is the decision-maker or you will at least be meeting the one who makes the decisions. If they are calling for their boss, forget it.
b) Ask them for a budget. Don’t be shy. They have one. They always have one.
c) When do they need the work to be done by? Can you do it in those timescales. Do you want to?
d) Is this a genuine enquiry? Are they benchmarking you against someone they have already just about given the project to? Is it an insurance quote? In which case – bin it. You won’t win them. Have they been watching Grand Designs and they are calling up for some whimsical project that will never come off?

Ask the tough questions to save yourself a lot of time.

Final instructions

Now, test and track. Put a procedure together for winning more high-quality estimates and increasing the closing ratio. This can be shared with your colleagues and staff to enable you to scale. Your reward will be more money for a lot less work.