Sponsored content by Shawn Prince, VP, BizDev, Attentive.ai
The truth about manual property measurements in landscaping is stark: they are more than a mere inconvenience. Besides bogging down your sales team, it hinders revenue generation and costs your business far more than just time.
Here, we’ll explore the top five reasons why sticking to manual takeoffs is detrimental to your business’s growth and how Attentive.ai’s automation can transform your bidding process from the ground up.
1. Time-Consuming and Inefficient Process
Manual takeoffs are notoriously time-consuming, often taking an average of six hours per day, as revealed by our research with over 500 field service businesses. This laborious process can stretch over weeks, especially for large-scale projects like homeowners associations (HOAs). This not only delays your bid submission but also hampers your sales cycle’s velocity.
Such inefficiencies can equate to nearly 300 hours, or about one and a half months, of lost time per sales employee annually. This lost time is a missed opportunity for revenue generation and client engagement.
2. Inaccurate and full of potential errors
The manual process, often under time constraints, leads to rushed work and, consequently, inaccurate cost-based estimates. These inaccuracies can significantly impact your bid’s competitiveness and profitability. Additionally, manual takeoffs can result in underbidding and, ultimately, revenue loss.
The lack of accuracy can also damage client trust and your business’s reputation.
3. Hamper scalability
Manual processes inherently limit your business’s ability to scale. As you take on more clients and larger projects, the manual takeoffs become a bottleneck, hindering your ability to respond quickly to new opportunities. The inability to scale efficiently can stifle your business growth and leave you trailing behind more agile & tech-forward competitors.
4. Lead to massive strain on resources
In my experience leading sales teams, one cardinal sin I’ve always avoided is having sales professionals or business developers out measuring properties. It’s a gross misallocation of their time and expertise.
When your sales team or estimators are bogged down with manual takeoffs, they’re not engaging in what they’re hired for: selling and generating revenue. This misallocation of resources is a significant issue. Your sales professionals’ time would be better spent on client interactions and pipeline generation rather than on labor-intensive manual measurements.
At one point in my career, while at a facility management firm, we faced a similar challenge. We needed to accomplish more but weren’t in a position to hire an estimator. That’s when I turned to software solutions, initially for larger projects.
However, it quickly became evident that leveraging technology for efficiency wasn’t just a temporary fix but a strategic shift in how we operate. It’s about understanding the high-leverage tasks and redirecting your team’s efforts to where they truly matter.
5. Impact customer relations
In a scenario where you’re unable to meet bid deadlines due to the time-consuming nature of manual takeoffs, it often leads to client hesitation and dissatisfaction. Timeliness is a critical factor in maintaining good client relations, and delays can harm your business’s credibility and chances of securing future projects.
Enter Attentive.ai: A Game-Changer for Your Landscaping Business
Attentive.ai is revolutionizing the landscaping industry with its AI-powered property measurement software. Here’s how it addresses the above challenges:
How Automated Property Measurements Work
By a simple three step process- entering a property address, confirming lot boundary, and hitting proceed, Attentive.ai performs precise measurements built on the latest aerial imagery, saving up to 95% of the time typically spent on manual takeoffs.
More bids, faster turnaround, more wins. Imagine sending out 50% more bids, always being the first one out of the gate. That’s not just efficiency – it’s a clear path to making an extra $100K per business developer.
Enhanced Efficiency with Automated Blueprint Measurements
With Attentive.ai’s automated blueprint takeoffs, you significantly reduce manual workload and error, offering a seamless solution for handling complex projects. Attentive.ai streamlines the entire takeoff process, enabling you to focus on more strategic and revenue-generating activities.
For instance, at Maldonado Nursery & Landscaping, the introduction of Attentive.ai’s automated blueprint measurements marked a turning point for Jeremy Charo, their Special Projects Manager.
Before Attentive.ai, Maldonado’s process involved cumbersome steps of using PDF exchanges and extensive manual data entry, a method that was both time-consuming and prone to human error. Jeremy found that the automated blueprint measurements could effortlessly aggregate data, presenting it in various user-friendly formats. This capability was a game-changer in managing complex and varied landscape construction projects.
One of the most significant impacts of automating landscape construction takeoffs was their turnaround time with clients. This shift not only streamlined their internal operations but also enhanced their responsiveness to client needs, a critical factor in the highly competitive landscaping industry.
Improved Client Engagement
With fast, accurate, and visually impressive sitemaps, you can engage clients more effectively and secure bids more efficiently.
Efficiency isn’t just about doing things faster; it’s about intelligently directing your team’s efforts. It means shifting the focus from time-consuming administrative tasks to activities that truly drive business growth: deeply understanding client requirements, crafting creative landscaping solutions, and nurturing enduring client relationships.
Scalability and Productivity
Attentive.ai allows your business to scale up effortlessly, catering to more clients and larger projects without the need for additional resources. Now, you can handle more clients and take on bigger projects without stretching thin or having to expand your team.
Having the agility to respond rapidly to bid requests, spending more time on tailoring proposals in line with client feedback, and refining estimates is what gives a landscaping business its competitive edge.
Summing Up
With Attentive.ai, your sales team can:
- Slash the time spent on takeoffs and estimates.
- Boost proposal output, especially during peak seasons.
- Fine-tune your bids to avoid under or over-bidding
- Free up time for lead generation and nurturing customer relationships.
In summary, Attentive.ai’s automated property measurement tool – Automeasure, acts as a strategic partner in transforming your landscaping business. By incorporating AI across your workflows, you can reclaim thousands of wasted hours, improve your bid accuracy and speed, and ultimately drive revenue growth.
Sign up for a free trial today & measure your first two sites for free.
