Today more than ever, fabricators realize that getting more quotes out can pay huge dividends. How big? Well, even factoring in a conservative success rate can increase sales by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Here’s an example: Say that you typically put out five quotes a day using Excel with the average quote being $800. That’s $4,000 a day, $20,000 a week, or $1,040,000 a year. At a 25% success rate that’s $260,000. Not too bad.
But what if you were able to put out twice as many quotes? That’s the idea behind SecturaSOFT. That’s $520,000 in yearly sales. In fact, many fabricators are seeing average quote increases of three times; or what would be $780,000 in our example.
“Shops are always trying to increase throughput but are usually doing so downstream and missing the true bottleneck,” said Stropes. “Most organizations pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to add additional operations to attract new customers. However, they are missing out on a huge growth opportunity within their frontline estimating department.”
The Power of Automation
So how does the average fabricator double or even triple the number of quotes that go out the door? The answer is by democratizing the quoting process through automation. With SecturaSOFT material costs, machine run-time, operator costs, secondary operations, and more are automatically factored into quotes. This allows even novice estimators, and/or others throughout the organization, to generate winning bids all in a fraction of the time. SecturaSOFT allows you to leverage the availability on non-estimators during slow times while allowing your sales staff to be even more efficient and effective.
Using the previous example, say we triple those five quotes to fifteen by turning quotes around in hours or minutes rather than days. A company’s win rate will rise dramatically as you are beating the competition to the punch and blocking their ability to turn a quote. Now rather than a 25% success rate, you’re able to double or triple that number. This creates a compounding ROI from $780,000.00 to a $1.5 million – $2.3 increase in business without additional machinery.
But can a typical fabricator effectively handle this extra business without adding equipment and resources? “Fabricators love equipment, and so do we,” said Stropes. “But adding equipment isn’t the only solution. Remember, if it’s taking days to turn quotes around, you’re removing days you could be getting started on a job. If you can turn quotes in a few minutes and get a jump on jobs by days, your throughput increases saving months on production time each year. Combine this and the removal of hours of manual entry of jobs into your ERP, and you’ll soon realize significant growth.”
The Lifeblood of the Business
Regardless of anything else, sales are the lifeblood of your business. They keep the lights on, keep machines running, and pay employees and investors. If you want to grow your business, arm your estimators and sales staff with the best technology.
Contact us to learn more.
