Often as kitchen and bath professionals, you may wonder what you could do to convert quotes into orders more efficiently. Sometimes, customers need multiple quotes before they are satisfied enough to purchase cabinets. However, in most cases, multiple revisions of a quote are unnecessary and point to a flawed quoting process on behalf of the dealer. In these cases, it is not that the customer is too hard to please, but instead, a lack of focused communication between the salesperson and the customer exists.
It is crucial to the sales process and your business to get your customers through a quote as quickly and painlessly as possible.
In some cases, you could have two separate salespeople who consistently average the same amount of revisions for their quotes. If, for instance, salesperson A is averaging five quotes per customer they deal with and salesperson B is averaging two, then it is likely that salesperson A is not carrying out their duty as efficiently as they should.
Ideal Profit vs Actual Profit
It is important when evaluating your quoting process that you take ideal profit and actual profit into consideration.
- Ideal Profit: The profit you expect to make on a job based on the quote that is given to your customer.
- Actual Profit: The profit you actually make when the job is finished.
While it is essential to the longevity and success of your business that you keep your customers happy by walking them through the quoting process quickly, it is equally important to your success as a business that your quotes are thorough and accurate. If your salespeople are getting through their quotes quickly, but are misquoting the job, you are going to lose on actual profit. For instance, if salesperson A gets a quote finalized after three revisions, but leaves out vital components such as cabinet spacers, your actual profit will be decreased. If salesperson B needs five revisions to get the quote finalized, but accounts for everything, then the actual profit from their sale will be higher than salesperson A’s.
Finding the Problem
Once you can locate the problem in your kitchen quoting process you can set out to fix it. However, it is often tough to know where to start looking.
To find the problem, you will need to locate any drastic changes from one revision to the next. This signifies whether or not your quoting process is efficient as it could be. To ensure that this does not continue to happen, it is important that you find out why these drastic changes in quotes are occurring. For instance, if one quote increases or decreases $4000 from the first version to the second, there could be a huge lack of communication between your salesperson and the customer.
Conclusion
When making your kitchen quotes more efficient, you have to get to the source of the problem. Drastic changes in the quoting process mean that you have a flaw somewhere in your sales plan. However, if you can find the flaw, you can fix the problem.
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