Flooring Experts Share Tips You Need to Know to Boost Efficiency
RollMaster Flooring Software is made for flooring professionals by flooring professionals. Our team spends every day in flooring stores of all kinds and sizes. From small mom and pop shops to huge multi-store operations, we know how to make every department of your flooring businesses more efficient and profitable.
We’ll be covering the following topics that our team gained from years in the flooring industry. Read on to the end for a digital download of our best efficiency tips!
- How Do I Increase Sales For My Flooring Business
- Track Jobs and Margins with Flooring Software
- How Do I Save on Sales Tax?
- How Can I Provide Better Estimates Than My Competition?
- How Do I Make My Warehouse Work Better For My Business?
- Optimizing Your Warehouse & Inventory
- Stop Profit Leakage
- How Do I Manage The Money For My Business?
- How Can I Plan For Future Growth with Flooring Software?
- How Can I Find And Keep New Clients?
- Why RollMaster Flooring Software?
How Do I Increase Sales For My Flooring Business?
It all starts with empowering your sales team. Your sales team is the number one key to growing your business! With increased sales, each part of your business is able to expand. But, awesome sales teams don’t happen overnight. Effective incentives, tools, and management is needed to help this critical part of your business thrive.
A clear commission structure is a key to motivating your sales team to achieve success. Your sales reps should never be in the dark on their commissions or be allowed to feel like they don’t know how commissions work in your business. A good commission structure is both dynamic and scalable. Commissions are best tracked through flooring business-specific software, taking job costs into consideration.
Pro Tip: Use incentives based on gross profit to focus on what helps the company the most!
Track Jobs and Margins with Flooring Software
Managing an effective sales staff requires more than goal-setting and team-building with their managers.
Your sales team should have access to technology that allows them to monitor their job costs and margins. This allows them to work on increasing margins while they increase their commission at the same time!
Giving your sales reps these tools allows them to be more in control of their work (and their take-home pay)! But, that doesn’t mean that management’s job is done. It’s still important for business owners to measure how effective their reps are for their business. Tracking and comparing close rates and margins for each sales rep is key. Slicing and dicing detailed data to make comparison by the team member, customer, vendor, category, and product also helps to spot weaknesses.
We built RM Analytics powered by Tableau which allows you to track big business data in a snap with clear, easy to read charts and graphs. This kind of data visualization used to only be available to huge corporations but is now affordable for businesses of all sizes.
In one instance, a dealer found a sales rep had stopped selling labor! Using visualized data, they quickly spotted the drop off in labor sales. They were able to quickly remedy the situation.
How Do I Save on Sales Tax?
All businesses must keep in mind sales tax. Sales tax varies dramatically based on state and county laws, and must be done properly to save as much money as possible. If your state allows you to – use tax! Many flooring software options don’t handle tax, so this should be a consideration before using a new software.
In a recent instance, RollMaster Software’s Expert Staff was able to help a business owner switch to “lump sum billing”. This saved her over $20k in tax remittance!
How Can I Provide Better Estimates Than My Competition?
It all starts with an accurate estimate. When done incorrectly, a bad estimate trickles downhill and affects all other departments frustrating staff and clients. A good estimation helps win the sale, and boosts the accuracy of all departments in your organization – from the warehouse to installation to accounting.
The most accurate measurements are done on location with a tablet and a laser measuring tool. Not only does it increase your professionalism in your client’s home, but pinpoint accuracy helps you give your clients the most precise estimate.
Using MeasureSquare in conjunction with RollMaster Software provides the best blueprint take-off program, seamlessly integrated into your core business software. Speed up your bidding process with best-in-industry accurate measurements, and give all departments access to crucial real-time data.
How Do I Make My Warehouse Work Better For My Business?
Optimizing Your Warehouse & Inventory
Mistakes in the warehouse can be extremely costly for flooring businesses! Making sure you have an efficient, optimized warehouse, and detailed inventory information can help you save both time and money.
Inventory software that is integrated with information on sales history, lead times, and open orders allows you to have a clear understanding of your warehouse and helps you bring in new products at the right time.
Create a “Culture of inventory.” Make sure your staff knows how important accurate inventory management is, so they’ll know to take it seriously. This means running physical inventory on a regular basis, and having upper management participate to reinforce its importance.
Make managing inventory easier with wireless warehousing! RollMaster Software is integrated with the latest Android Barcode Devices to allow your team to be as mobile as possible. Update inventory, shipping, and receiving in real-time, without needing to run back and forth to the office.
Stop Profit Leakage Now
Proper budgeting and job costing can help businesses see flaws in their process, and ultimately help your business become more profitable by stopping profit leakage.
There are two key things to consider: the profit you expected when you sold a job, and the actual profit you received. For example, if your focus is on apartment or builder business, you need to know what you budgeted when you wrote the sale for the Unit or House, and where you wound up at the end of the day. This will help direct you when looking for profit leaks.
Take a look for the following:
- Are certain sales reps always overpromising and under delivering?
- Are certain customers hurting you with last minute changes, prep, and trip charges?
- Does one particular installer need more floor prep and patch than others?
Pro Tip: Fixing problems like these allows you to grow your bottom line! Our sales dashboard allows you to run highly detailed reports to look for ways your business can boost profits.
How Do I Manage The Money For My Business?
Accepting credit cards is critical for all businesses, as it’s one of the most common ways consumers pay for goods and services. But, utilizing credit card payments can be expensive for flooring businesses both in time and money spent.
Businesses can save money on credit card processing by making sure they include credit card fees in the job cost. These fees can really add up, but when they’re analyzed properly, and built into your cost then it can be a win-win!
Businesses also have a huge opportunity by saving money with the level three transactions. It can be .3%, for example if you have 1 million in sales that could have been level 3, but you didn’t have an integrated provider running level 3, then you wasted $3000!
RollMaster partners with Gravity Payments to make credit card processing smooth and efficient. This can save your business valuable time by eliminating double entry into other software, and reducing the need for reconciliations.
Opt For Deferred Financing. Many flooring companies don’t utilize deferred financing the way many furniture, mattress stores, and car dealerships do! Adopting the “finance first” mentality can be a huge benefit for flooring businesses as it tends to lead to bigger sales and a somewhat easier job for sales reps. Our data analytics pros have found that extended financing increases the average ticket by 50%!
How Can I Plan For Future Growth with Flooring Software?
Financial knowledge is power, and there is no area where this is more clear than in business financials. Having clear and accurate information on the financials can make or break a business! The top three things a business should keep track of are the following:
- Revenue and gross profit
- Staff Productivity
- AR and Inventory
See the whole picture with accurate data. Having up to date information is key, and monitoring changes is essential. It’s no longer necessary to run the business with spreadsheets. Data Visualization lets you see the whole picture with intuitive charts and graphs. When you’re just starting to keep track of this information, it’s helpful to jot down the specific question you are trying to answer. This will help you focus on the relevant information without getting bogged down in data.
Work as a team with Integration. Keep in mind that the front office and back office are part of the same business! Many flooring companies have their accounting distanced from the rest of the business, so much so that they’re completely disconnected. Utilizing one integrated software like RollMaster allows the entire company to have the information that they need when they need it.
Overwhelmed by financial information? RollMaster customers can benefit from our Virtual CFO – our talented flooring virtual accountants can help get you on the right track! We also offer the ability to automatically email reports to key staff. To properly address a situation, you need the right data, in the right presentation, at the right time.
How Can I Find And Keep New Clients?
Marketing is becoming more important for flooring businesses to stay competitive. The latest in flooring software is Marketing automation!
Automated marketing efforts saves your business loads of manual work, helping you grow flooring sales online. With a set it and forget it approach, you can bring in more jobs from existing customers, while welcoming new faces too. Keeping your business name at the top of prospect’s minds with customized email and text marketing can make a huge difference when it comes to actually making the sale! This is especially true for big ticket sales, as they tend to be more relationship based.
Segmenting, or grouping your clients together into similar categories, helps bring in consistent sales! It allows you to target specific clients for new promotions. For example, you could create a segment of people who purchased carpet a year or more ago and send them a carpet cleaning reminder!
We partnered with Creating Your Space to create the Digital Marketing Hub. This helps our customers create segmented as well as personalized email and text campaigns that allow them to build relationships with their prospects and clients with low effort! Without integration into your sales software, building these segments would need to be done by hand, which takes a lot of time and effort.
Why RollMaster Flooring Software?
RollMaster’s industry-leading cloud-based software automates every process within your busy flooring operation, giving you the tools you need to bring your business to the next level. One of the ways RollMaster makes business operations easier is by integrating all your flooring software needs into one place.
RollMaster’s integrations use a unique API to seamlessly connect with the operational tools flooring businesses rely on, such as accounting and estimating software and marketing platforms. These integrations benefit every level of your business, from simplifying warehouse tasks to making big business decisions much easier.
