IT
SMOOTHING OUT THE PRICING PROCESS FOR MERCHANTS AND BUILDERS
Volatile prices can play havoc with the quoting process, for builders merchants and their customers. Fiona Russell Horne meets a software company that is offering a solution to integrate pricing and increase efficiency.
T
he things that annoy builders and contractors are similar wherever you are in the world. That’s according to David Murray, CEO of Australian- founded software solution supplier Buildxact. “The pain point for builders we have found
in Australia, the USA and the UK is the quote process of getting the prices in. Especially at the moment, with prices changing all the time. Price and supply volatility is causing builders in the RMI sector and their merchant suppliers constant headaches. There’s no magic solution, but effective and constant communication can make the process so much smoother,” he says.
A key element of that pain point, Murray says, concerns time, specifically the amount of time that quotes can take. “This is particularly true for small builders who, being on site all day, tend to do their admin and quotes in the evenings or even at weekends. They might rather be spending that time with their partners or their children.”
Murray says that at Buildxact, they believe they can create huge efficiencies and time savings in the way that the end customer engages with the builder, and then how the builder engages with their merchant supplier via the Buildxact supplier portal. He adds that the builder customers that Buildxact deals with tend not to be the volume
housebuilders or the speculative developers. “Our builders are the ones who will go round to their clients’ homes, and help them through their extension project, the redevelopment of their existing homes, their garage conversions, the loft conversion, that sort of thing. They tend to be operating in their local community and have an understanding of their customers’ needs. They will ask their customer what they are dreaming of doing. What this means is that the builder doesn’t necessarily have a contract with a merchant that he uses for every job, because each project that he works on will be different. So, having real time pricing available when he is quoting on a Friday night allows him to be more efficient and more accurate in the process.” Murray points out that, on bigger jobs, such as for an entire house refurbishment, the on- paper quoting and tendering process could take as many as 30 hours. “With our specialist software, we can add in massive efficiency and get that time down to a little over an hour for that same whole house project,” he says. “The other thing that we can help with is when the builder and the supplier are working together on the same quote. It works like this: when the builder sends a request for a quote the merchant can see what else the builder is quoting for. He can then say, ‘hey, I noticed that you didn’t ask
me to quote for the bathrooms or the roof tiles. I’ve added those to the quote because you are going to need them.’ So, this turns the relationship between the builder and the account manager or the salesperson from a transactional, reactive one into a consulting partnership type of relationship. That can be a gamechanger for the merchant. It puts link-selling opportunities from allied sales right in front of the merchant’s salesperson, instead of being something that they know
August 2022
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net
25
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