The construction market swings widely, and making informed strategic decisions is vital for stability. Making business processes more efficient, profitable, and scalable also are top considerations. To address the complexities in this industry, implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system can help provide several meaningful benefits. While many accounting software systems offer basic CRM functionality, a robust CRM system can help companies build stronger customer relationships and gain valuable insights from across the organization. In this article, we’ll highlight six key benefits Salesforce for construction can provide.
In the construction and engineering sector, a modern CRM system can help boost productivity. Often, productivity has a strong correlation to profit. By streamlining processes, decreasing redundancies, and enabling scalability, a CRM system can help construction and engineering firms reduce burdensome tasks. For instance, implementing a CRM system can help you:
- Store and manage critical customer information all in one place
- Build stronger customer relationships (based on data-derived insights)
- Unify opportunities with demand forecasts
- Accelerate productivity from initial bid to project completion
- Serve customers and larger contractors faster
- Bring artificial intelligence insights to your daily operations
By leveraging Salesforce for construction, you can unlock the benefits of digital collaboration. Salesforce can integrate and compile back-office and on-site data to help support team collaboration and provide instrumental customer and business insights.
Quoting & Bidding Example
If your construction firm often serves as a subcontractor on larger construction contracts, bidding on jobs and tracking which contracts provide you with the most opportunities and net revenue are critical tasks. With Salesforce Sales Cloud, you can track each bid/opportunity you have with larger contractors along with the probability that it will turn into a closed-won deal. In addition, Salesforce’s robust reporting capabilities can help provide project managers with easy-to-understand reports and dashboards to quickly assess how much business your team expects to close in the next week, month, or year.
Further, construction companies thoroughly review and document the materials needed to properly complete a job. That information then can be supplied to your sales team to estimate the labor costs and associated job expenses to calculate a quoted cost. To help companies improve quote accuracy and sales processes, Salesforce recently introduced CPQ Salesforce (or Configure, Price, Quote Software by Salesforce). This tool can help companies provide accurate pricing that can include many different variables specific to each job. It also can help reduce the time spent going back and forth on configurations and quotes. It can save your sales team from manually researching and writing (or rewriting) each quote. CPQ Salesforce also provides a direct link to quotes within the CRM system that can be shared or exported as a PDF file. In short, CPQ Salesforce can help speed up the sales process for construction and engineering firms.
Considering the many benefits that implementing a CRM system can provide, here are six leading reasons construction and engineering organizations should review Salesforce:
- Centralize Your Data: With Salesforce, you can use one system to manage customer data. This includes information on current and past projects, bids, clients, suppliers, contractors, and partners. Having all this data in one place can help improve efficiency and provide access to relevant information anytime it’s needed.
- Accelerate Productivity: From initial bid to project completion, Salesforce can help you manage and track active and past projects efficiently. By reducing reliance on email silos and paperwork, you can enhance project schedules, budgets, and communication. This streamlined approach can help increase time savings and improve overall productivity.
- Improve Customer Service: Salesforce can link together data from different departments, such as sales and operations. By connecting this information, customer and sales information can be entered into a unified system and automatically routed where it needs to go. In addition, construction and engineering firms can track service issues, repairs, inquiries, and service calls in the CRM system. This automation can help reduce the possibility of costly human errors, enable reliable data sharing, and improve overall customer satisfaction.
- Enhance Visibility & Insights: Salesforce can help you generate real-time project reports, create sales forecasts, assess profitability, and gain valuable insights—all within a single platform. Construction produces a vast amount of data across various processes, such as inventory management, sales management, and customer retention. Salesforce contextualizes this information, helping to eliminate noise and extract critical insights for business operations. With Salesforce, you can make accurate sales demand forecasts, adjust raw material orders, and gain visibility into how your customers, partners, and vendors engage with your company. This extensive visibility into customer and project data can help inform your business strategy and resource allocation.
- Easily See Revenue Data: Uncertainty and lack of visibility into operational data can lead to customer dissatisfaction and complaints. Salesforce can integrate sales agreement data with revenue reports to help improve reporting and planning. By having accurate financial data on sales contracts over several years, your teams can better manage operations and maintain revenue stability.
- Scale With Ease: As your construction business evolves and grows, Salesforce can be easily configured to keep pace with your business needs. The platform supports key integrations that can work seamlessly with your existing systems, helping you make a smooth digital transformation along with the ability to scale.
According to data analyzed by the Salesforce Global Engineering and Construction Team, construction and engineering organizations that integrate information systems to create a single source of truth among customers, projects, employees, and third parties can see revenue growth improve by 3 to 5% and bidding costs drop by 15 to 20%. Salesforce for construction can help build better business outcomes across various functions—including sales, operations, and service.
The benefits of implementing a robust CRM system are clear. When you’re ready to review your technology road map, the Business Technology Solutions team at FORVIS stands ready to assist. We are a Salesforce partner providing analysis, design, implementation, upgrade, training, and support services for CRM and business technology applications.
For questions or to learn more, reach out to a professional at FORVIS or submit the Contact Us form below.