Project Sales Management – Build Sales and Monitor Performance

Construction Sales, particularly in Ireland is a very competitive marketplace. Having the knowledge and the information to make timely, strategic sales decisions enables manufacturers and construction firms to get the upper hand on competitors during tender bids and sales negotiations.

Sysco’s Construction and Manufacturing CRM is designed for and by manufacturing companies and construction firms across Ireland and contains the expertise and the processes that unify prospect qualification, project sales development and management, long and short tail opportunity development, stakeholder engagement and sales reporting functionality. It helps Sales Directors and Business Development Managers to solve these common problems:

• Are we focusing on the right projects and opportunities?
• How can we better manage our project pipeline?
• Where are we winning and where are we losing business to competitors?
• Where will the next big opportunity come from?
• How can we develop more projects from existing accounts?
• Are my relationships with project stakeholders better than our competitors?
• How can my sales team work better on the road?
• Can we integrate our stakeholder and project management with our manufacturing resource planning software?

In this blog series, we’ll take explore how Sysco’s solution for Manufacturing and Construction firms can accelerate sales and produce better returns on the time your sales teams and bid managers are investing in opportunities.

Are we focusing on the right projects and opportunities?

At times it is very difficult to know if the project or opportunity you are bidding on is the right fit for your business. With Sysco and the power of Microsoft Dynamics you can start to retake control of your project sales pipeline. The key to answering this question lies in the Qualification of Prospects at an early stage.

Our solution assists Sales and Business Development Directors develop and identify new prospects, tracking individual enquiries or commercial enquiries by stakeholder referral (word of mouth) or by CIS / Glenigan Tender request.

Identifying and Managing Prospects

Sysco’s CRM for Manufacturers and Construction Firms identifies business prospects and tracks them throughout a project development process. Lead Scoring and Lead Status indicators help to validate sales potential during the sales process.

• Is the prospect visiting key areas of our website?
• Is the prospect engaging with emails they have been sent?
• Are sales teams having successful follow up calls with prospects?
• Are sales teams following up with prospects in a timely manner?
• Can I find the ‘sweet spot’ in terms of following up with a prospect based on previous engagements?

Sysco’s solution records every engagement made with a prospect from initial origination of the sales enquiry through to estimates, quotations and to final contract stages. Secure document management means that tender responses, estimates, quotations and signed contacts can be safely stored against each prospect / contact entity in the system.

When these elements are taken into consideration, the results are proof of themselves. Gordon McCaw, National Supply Chain and Partnership Director at Metal Technology is an end user of the system and said

“Sysco’s Construction CRM and its management by our teams has allowed us to track opportunities more closely, effectively and efficiently, which has ultimately improved our sales…”

Not all prospect qualification comes in the form of web site visits or direct enquiries however. The main stay of many manufacturing and construction sales come from Tender based applications which Sysco’s solution is customized to handle perfectly allowing sales teams to input suitable tenders as prospective business from multiple sources such as the CIS or Glenigan’s Tender Database. This combined with a structured sales process that ensures specific actions need to be carried out prior to escalating to the next step in the sales process.

Creating a business process that works for you

Sysco’s expert knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics ensures that the sales and prospect qualification process is tailored to work with your own business, not the other way around. It is not based upon mass input of unnecessary details – you only input the data that matters most to you and your sales teams such as official tender reference codes, budget approval or optionally, automate and auto-assign internal number conventions to keep a structure to the qualification process.

You can also maintain key accounts and contact records by assigning new tenders or requests to existing accounts within the system. Chart which accounts earn the most revenue and focus on those accounts.

Beyond data entry, individual quotation requests or commercial tender bids for the construction industry often involve different business entities.

For instance, if you are operating within a group of companies and are manufacturing a range of different products you can configure Sysco’s CRM solution to notify product sales managers within those sister companies to review new prospects and investigate projects at a ‘sub-prospect’ level.

The next step in identifying and qualifying a prospect or a project is to engage the stakeholders within that project. Sysco’s solution allows you to add Stakeholders to a Prospect, a Project and an Opportunity with the choice of engaging exclusively via a web interface or by using the tools and applications which many sales teams use on a day to day basis such as Microsoft Outlook and Office 365.

Engaging stakeholders using a unified product platform gives sales teams one version of the truth, that is to say a single source of prospect, accounts and project insights. This enables better visibility of the project and the prospect for whoever engages with them. This becomes especially useful if you have a high turnover rate of staff, staff who are hot-desking or are using agency temps. With Sysco’s CRM for Manufacturers and Construction Firms you can create and deliver personal experiences no matter who a stakeholder talks to within your construction sales or bidding teams from any device – mobile, desktop or tablet.

Subscribe below to receive notifications of our next article release where we will cover how you can better project pipeline across project data management, project type, sales activity management and stakeholder management.