How to solve the top 5 challenges of your building, construction and supplier business

If you’re in the building and construction industry or support or supply to this industry, you understand the challenges.

Your ongoing success is reliant on a strong pipeline of clients and projects.

However, the ever-increasing list of demands and the abundance of choices mean there’s a lot of pressure on you and your team to meet these high expectations to win tenders and secure orders. Then you also have to coordinate with so many other contractors, suppliers, builders and workers on each project to complete it successfully.

All of this creates many hurdles that your business needs to overcome.

The top 5 challenges faced by building, construction and supplier businesses

We’ve spoken to a few organisations recently to find out the most common issues they face.

Here’s what we found – see if any of these sound familiar (then check out our solutions, below).

1. An Uncoordinated Tender Process

The tender process always takes a lot of time, effort and money. It’s also difficult to make an accurate and objective decision about bidding, especially when you don’t have enough data or background to:

• Know if the project is high-profile
• Understand if the work ethics and values of the other company match yours
• Get the right team for the project

2. An inflated Sales Pipeline

Many construction companies supply multiple quotes to different contractors for the same project. Others tend to bid on several projects that they have minimal chance of winning. The result is an inaccurate sales pipeline that makes the tracking of opportunities and utilising limited resources much harder.

3. An Inefficient Sales Process

Sending multiple quotes to different contractors for a specific project usually doesn’t guarantee a win. Without a clear sales process, it can be difficult to ensure that you get the opportunity to work on the project you most wanted, on your terms.

4. Poor Relationship Management

There are many parties involved in each construction project, and these people can influence which tenders win. Not being able to maintain calls, attend events and constantly connect through emails can weaken your relationship with your network, which can cost you projects.

5. No Visibility Over Competitors

It’s difficult to build a strategy or adjust to the current industry trends if you have no visibility or proper tracking of your competitors and other industry members.

Is there an easy solution to all of these?

Actually, yes.

A bespoke Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Salesforce, when tailored to your building, construction and supplier business, can easily solve all these challenges for you. 

In just a single platform, a CRM can help you engage and win more projects, set up a comprehensive account management system and create more value for your business by improving your operations.   

Each challenge solved through a CRM software

1.Helps with tender management

A CRM system is an effective collaboration point for the tender process as it works on engaging stakeholders, organising contacts and managing the whole bidding process with a unique scoring system.

It also assists in making objective bidding decisions by giving a recommendation based on the relationship strength and operational landscape. 

2. Addresses the artificially inflated sales pipeline issue

With a CRM software in place, you can now gain visibility on the multiple quotes you’ve sent for a particular project – allowing you to monitor what is exactly in your pipeline.

3. Makes sales process efficient

A CRM system coordinates and supports your sales team’s efforts in attracting and converting clients through a standardised and comprehensive process. With this, you can ensure that you: 

a. win the jobs where you were specified
b. have the opportunity to win the jobs where you were not specified.

A standardised sales process will allow you to keep on top of where they are at in the opportunity cycle so you’re always in control.

4. Strengthen your partner relationships

Having all your connections and partners in a single CRM platform allows you to easily track and maintain relationships with your entire network, easily. A CRM software also provides you with valuable insights to know who you should be building partnerships with.

5. A CRM aids in competition analysis

A CRM platform, through its live dashboards and reports, allows you to capture info and assess how to best differentiate your services against competitors.

How CRM software works for you

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is the ultimate solution to transform your construction business.

Putting clients at the core of your business, a CRM software like Salesforce coordinates your entire organisation to solve all these top 5 challenges that are holding you back – giving you the opportunity to win more projects, retain customers and improve revenue generation.

Why Fullcrm?

We understand that the building, construction and supplier industry is a delicate blend of client management and partner coordination. Your success and profitability depends on your ability to manage multiple relationships at once to ultimately meet everyone’s needs.

This is where our Customer Relationship Management system can help you.

Through our Construction Accelerator service, we customise the power of the reputable and proven Salesforce platform directly to your construction business, so that whether you need lead management, pipeline CRM or project team management, the Salesforce CRM combined with our customised services will help you.