You supply premium building materials to post frame contractors. Your pole barn construction supplies are the highest-quality, delivered on-time, every time. But instead of focusing on manufacturing the best wood trusses, or the most durable steel roofing, you’re spending time and money helping contractors with takeoffs. Stop working that way! If you’re interested in empowering your contractor customers with the tools to win more jobs – while cutting bid time from 3 hours down to 20 minutes, resulting in more money for you both – here are 5 reasons suppliers win more contractors with SmartBuild Systems. The industry’s ONLY complete design system for post frame structures.
Push Button Bids and Ordering
Before SmartBuild, contractors spent roughly three hours doing material takeoffs, manually adding quantities and pricing to an Excel spreadsheet to generate a bid. Short on time, contractors often looked to their suppliers for assistance with their takeoffs. Assistance that cost suppliers hundreds of hours, per year, entering data into their systems and translating it into internal part numbers
With SmartBuild, the supplier’s entire in-house inventory database is downloaded into their proprietary system. For those also manufacturing their own metal sheathing, trim, and trusses, their SmartBuild database includes their price quotes and color schemes. Additionally, SmartBuild creates an entire part-number system, as well as standard sales contracts and bid form templates specific to the supplier.
Authorized SmartBuild suppliers now have the tools to change the way contractors work! Once set up on your database system, contractors easily complete bids and orders with the push of a button because SmartBuild automatically:
- Populates the sales contract
- Compiles the bid and order using the custom database
- Calculates the price including materials, labor, and sales tax
- Builds a cut list for sheathing and trim
- Generates construction drawings
- Creates a description of the building
- Emails and prints a copy for the buyer on the spot
- Cuts bid time down to 20 minutes
Eliminates Errors
Prior to automating the core functions of post frame, suppliers often reported spending money and manhours correcting the errors inherent to manual data entry. Errors that not only cost time and labor but frequently resulted in the delivery of wrong window sizes or incorrect color schemes. As a precaution, suppliers routinely threw an additional $400-$500 worth of product on the quote, finding it cheaper than sending missing items via hot shot delivery.
Suppliers using SmartBuild reduce the error rate to less than 5%, saving time, money, and most of all, frustration.
Live Design Sessions
Before SmartBuild, contractors spent most of their time chasing leads, only to impersonally interview potential clients over the phone using an Excel checklist. They hoped to get the bid to the client within 48-hours, but the time-consuming, manual takeoff process tended to take closer to a week. Knowing that the best practice is to drop off the bid to the client in person, many contractors simply email the paperwork in an attempt to make up for lost time. Working this way, typically, results in a mere 15% close rate.
Suppliers using SmartBuild give their contractors the advantage of conducting live design sessions with clients.
With SmartBuild, contractors get leads and set face-to-face appointments with buyers. Telephone interviews and Excel spreadsheets are swapped for laptops on which they build the buyer’s structure, right before his eyes! The interactive process of watching their building come to life as a 3D graphic model – changing in real-time – drives sales with all the what-ifs imaginable:
- Structure size
- Framing
- Roof style
- Foundation
- Doors and windows
- Porches
- Cupolas
- Finishes
As the model changes, all the other components – including price and materials update automatically – allowing the contractor to leave a bid with the buyer before the meeting ends! Once they’re happy, the contractor pushes a button and SmartBuild does the rest.
More Business
With SmartBuild, contractors win more business. In fact, many contractors report deal close-ratios of up to 50% – a 35% increase from using a manual spreadsheet system. And when contractors make more money, so do suppliers.
It starts by suppliers licensing the SmartBuild software to contractors in exchange for purchasing commitments. As more contractors use SmartBuild to close more deals, they purchase more supplies directly through the database, increasing sales for the supplier. Plus, no longer wasting manhours helping contractors with takeoffs, correcting errors, or sending extra supplies via hot shot delivery saves an enormous amount of money.
And best of all, happy contractors talk, meaning the word-of-mouth advertising alone will have droves of them beating down your door for the SmartBuild System!
e-Modeler
Suppliers also win more business by embedding SmartBuild technology directly into their websites! By offering a 3D design tool to anyone and everyone, people flock to your website knowing they can:
- Design their own pole barn online
- Easily update the 3D model with a menu-driven set of prompts
- Create a materials list and pricing automatically
- Place their order directly on your website
With the SmartBuild e-Modeler, you’ll save time building estimates and money on commissions. Isn’t it time to compete with the big boys at a fraction of the cost?
We invite you to read how Graber Post Increases Sales (for Everyone) with SmartBuild Systems and contact us for more information or a live demonstration.
