Revolusun

A comprehensive quoting and sales tool for one of the nation’s leading photovoltaic installers

The Challenge

Revolusun was looking for a way to expand their product offerings, and took it as an opportunity to invest in a modern web infrastructure to handle their estimates to customers, as well as a way to scale their sales staff.

There were a few problems the software needed to solve:

Lead Tracking

Lead tracking is an ancient business problem that likely plagued early Sumerian merchants. We were happy to hear of a shared philosophy with our clients in keeping the process as simple as possible. They simply needed to know where the customer was in their sales process. Being familiar with procedural processes, we pitched them the idea of a kanban board to track the breadth and depth of their sales. The needs differed greatly between those managing the sales people and those selling the services, so we created two separate views to accommodate the needs of each role.

rev-leads

Sales Managers are managing human capital in regards to how many humans are necessary to service and satisfy customers. The kanban visualization of incoming customer inquiries, and the capacity for each sales person in the system. This view allows the Sales Manager to make choices based on data such as the capacity of each sales person, to have an understanding of which sales person is moving through the pipeline, and who many need support.

Salespeople have a different set of needs, though it’s important to align both management and the sales staff on the objectives and structure of the sales pipeline. The sales person is largely managing time and customers, so their dashboard was designed around these needs.

Standardizing Estimates

A huge problem that many contractors have is the standardizing of accurate estimates. Many contractors build estimates on spreadsheets, and in that process, humans have the ability to screw up calculations or use the wrong spreadsheet when calculations are updated. There’s also the problem in updating the spreadsheets of an entire staff, which can be a minefield of communication orders to roll out important and expensive information.

By creating the estimates in a web application, Revolusun is able to control costs and proposals being delivered to customers in seconds without having to retrain staff or concern themselves over whether the information was distributed correctly.

Scaling Staff

Being able to distribute estimating and proposal information quickly, also allows Revolusun to scale their sales staff with ease and efficiency. From their application, they’re able to add and remove sales or admin staff with the click of a mouse. In less sophisticated businesses, managers would need to revoke proposal templates or spreadsheets, without any guarantee that former employees wouldn’t be able to copy or use proprietary business information.

Additionally, staffing up became much easier, in simply adding a new hire’s contact information to the application; setting up automated emails and allowing the staff member to create new quotes and manage their calendar.

Eliminating the probability of human error in calculations and communication across staff, preventing expensive mistakes