DS|Manage360’s Sales & Estimating component offers landscape professionals like you a better way to manage your entire sales process, and to prepare accurate and profitable estimates using the methodology of your choice.

Improve your sales by using Sales & Estimating to:

• Manage every phase of your company’s sales pipeline
• Identify and focus on your best sales opportunities
• Grow your revenue
• See both the big picture and the status of each individual job and prospect
• Identify bottlenecks in the process
• Analyze the sales performances of each salesperson and the company as a whole
• Schedule your appointments using tasks
• Track your sales goals
• Manage your follow-ups

Click the “Increase Your Sales” tab above to see the detailed capabilities that Sales and Estimating offers you for managing your sales.

Prepare estimates that are profitable, using the methodology of your choice
In a professionally-run landscape business, one of the biggest challenges you face is to prepare estimates that are simultaneously fair, competitive and profitable. As your business grows, so do the complexities of each project. There’s a lot to take into account: overhead recovery, costs of material, labor, equipment and subcontractors, fluctuating price lists, and more. Any system that automates such a complex estimating process has to be both comprehensive and flexible.

Sales & Estimating gives you the ability to take all of these factors into account when preparing any estimate, at any stage of your business’s growth. Not only can you select the overhead recovery model that best suits your business today, but you can adopt a different recovery model in the future when your business changes.

Improve your estimating by using Sales & Estimating to:

• Recover your overhead by choosing from one of many available overhead recovery models (MORS, SORS, OPPH)
• Follow the industry’s best estimating practices
• Calculate all of your costs
• Establish your break-even point and know your profit on each estimate so you can estimate aggressively and competitively
• Maintain a reliable centralized cost book
• Use kits to quickly create, and to ensure the consistency and accuracy of, complex construction estimates.
• Use material takeoffs to base your estimates on your DS|Design drawings
• Prepare custom proposals with your own customizable terms, warranties, introductions.
• Generate crew sheets from won estimates
• Capture hidden costs like travel time, load/unload time, site, access, and site clean-up under General Conditions

Click the “Improve Your Estimating”  tab above to see the detailed capabilities that Sales and Estimating offers you for preparing estimates.

Sales-Related Features and Benefits

Manage your entire sales pipeline
Organize all of your company’s prospects and customers by sales phases that you define. Set start and due dates for each sales phase, and use this organization of your pipeline to quickly identify stagnant leads, bottlenecks and best opportunities. With the ability to see the exact sales phase for each and every contact, you can push more sales through the pipeline.

Make realistic sales projections
Minimize the guesswork in your sales projections by setting the probability and projected revenue for each lead. Setting and monitoring the predicted revenues from each sale lets you make more accurate sales projections and analyze the results to achieve greater accuracy in future projections.

Do win/loss analyses
When you have your entire sale pipeline at your fingertips, you can track the outcomes of all of your leads and determine how to improve your closing rates. Analyze closing rates by sales person, lead source, sales phase and division.

Do global lead searches
If you’ve ever lost a sale because the contact information was misplaced or buried, you’ll appreciate the ability of the Sales & Estimating software to allow you to do instant searches by name, phone number, company, or address. Retrieve leads from the system quickly and you’ll ensure that all inquiries receive the timely responses that they deserve.

Customize your lead list
The busier your company gets, the more you need a way to organize just your leads. With Sales & Estimating, each salesperson can view his/her own leads. You can also focus on today’s leads, and identify all overdue leads.

Track your referrals
Identify your lead sources and add a referral name to each lead in your system. Done properly, referral tracking can boost your sales by helping you to identify and cultivate your most effective marketing channels and your best customer referrals.

Estimating-Related Features and Benefits

Kits
The ability to prepare kits is one of Sales & Estimating’s most powerful time-saving features.  Instead of calculating the costs and requirements for each piece of each job each and every time that you do an estimate, you can simply create kits in the software.  Kits are just pre-defined groups of all of the labor, material and equipment required for each construction piece that you regularly quote on.  Simply select the kits that you need for any new job, drag them onto your estimate, enter the desired square footage, and Sales & Estimating does all of the labor, material and equipment cost calculations for you, automatically.  It can reduce your calculating time from hours to minutes, every time that you prepare an estimate.  It also takes the complexity out of the estimating process and ensures a level of consistency between estimates (and estimators) that you just can’t achieve otherwise.

Centralized Cost Book
To be able to prepare accurate estimates, you need to be able to have reliable prices at your fingertips. With Sales & Estimating, you enter all of your costs and prices into one central, consolidated cost book. That includes all material and plant prices, and all labor, equipment and subcontractor costing. By maintaining this centralized price list, you gain the confidence that you’re always basing your estimates on accurate, up to date and consistent figures. No more digging, searching or guessing.

Simplified setup
The system facilitates the setting up of your price list by allowing you to download plants directly from an online plant database, and to import price lists directly from suppliers. Setup time is quick when you don’t have to manually type in every plant name or supplier price list.

Account for all direct costs
Incorporate additional costs such as labor burden, warranty costs and purchasing taxes into your estimates, to ensure that all direct costs are being passed on to the customer instead of eating into your profits.

Use the most appropriate overhead recovery model
Set the correct overhead mark-ups for all materials, labor, equipment and subcontractors, based on your budget numbers. This ensures that all overhead costs are built into every estimate, and allows you to determine the break-even point and calculate the net profit.  Sales & Estimating supports all the proven overhead recovery models in the industry today, and allows you to choose the one that best suits your current situation. Choose between:

• Multiple Overhead Recovery System (MORS)
• Single Overhead Recovery System (SORS)
• Overhead recovery on Labor only (Overhead and Profit Per Hour, or OPPH).

Automatic takeoffs
Using Dynascape Design allows you to automatically label your design from your cost book and then do a material take off directly into an estimate. Within 2-3 minutes of design completion, you have your proposal ready to be sent to the client. You can manage changes in your design and produce a new proposal easily and quickly whenever the client requests any revisions.

General Conditions
If you’re doing cost-based estimating, how do you recoup your costs for all of the extras of a job, like permits, bins, travel times, site access, load/unload time, site cleanup and so on?  With Sales & Estimating, you can capture these hidden costs under the category of General Conditions, to make sure that you don’t lose any money on these essential but often overlooked items, whether you choose to show them on an proposal or not. 

Group your estimate
Organize your estimates into work areas in order to give your customer prices for each element of the job. When necessary, this allows any complex job to be broken down into manageable phases.

Flexible and editable
Easily modify any item description, quantity, unit cost, price or profit. Make adjustments to your estimates quickly and intuitively.

Analyze your estimating process
View the profitability of each estimate and analyze your estimating process by designer or by estimator. Being able to review your process is the best way to correct mistakes and improve the accuracy of all future estimates.

Field reporting
Generate automatic material lists, purchase orders and daily worksheets for your crews, to save time and ensure that they have everything that they need, on time, every time. Use your estimate to instruct your crews properly on what needs to be done, what time is allocated, and what equipment is required.

Generate proposals
Quickly generate proposals based on your estimates. You can customize the terms and conditions, and use notes to outline details of each project. By generating your proposals automatically, you can submit more quotes and ensure that each proposal has the appropriate terms based specifically on that project. Flexible print options allow you to show the information that you and your customers require.