Two metrics for sales teams to track

15 July 2021

Commercial construction projects take a long time, so it’s pretty reasonable to worry about how you measure a sales funnel that takes years to complete.

From the first pencil line from the architect, through to practical completion  – which could be 3 or 4 years later – chances are, people in your business have moved on and the way you approach your work has changed. 

To make sure you are changing for the better and taking full advantage of all your opportunities, it’s key that you keep an eye on (and look to improve) your spec rate and your spec-to-sales rate. 

Measuring your spec-rate:

Your spec-rate is the amount of times you have been specified in the types of projects you are targeting. Measuring your spec-rate is a pretty straight forward formula.

To get these numbers, you’ll need to do a bit of research.

1) Define and measure your segment

First you’ll need to workout your target segment and find the total amount of projects in that segment. Perhaps there are some project types that really benefit from your product range, or a competitive edge you are looking to gain in a certain geography. There’s no hard and fast rules about a segment – but some good constraints to consider would be…

Time period: e.g. Last 12 months

Location: e.g. all Australia, NSW etc. 

Project category: Education, Commercial, etc.

Once you’ve defined your target segment, you can use a tool like EstimateOne to find how many projects are in that segment. (you can learn how to use the filters here to create your segments). 

2) Find how many projects you’ve been spec’d on

There are a couple ways you can do this – you could go through your leads records and count the amount of projects you’ve been spec’d in. Alternatively, you could use EstimateOne’s Spec Search to find the project’s you’ve been spec’d in. You can learn how that all works here.

If you’re keen to get all the projects you’ve been spec’d in emailed to your inbox – have a go at our Speci-Finder feature. Just pop in the key words that are of interest to you (a product, a brand, etc) and we’ll email you all the projects they feature in. 

3) Use the formula:

Now you have your two numbers, just divide one by the other and you have your spec-rate. Your spec-rate might be different from your market share – remembering that market share is best measured through actual sales, and there are many steps between specification and sale. 

You can use this number to determine how successful your pre-tender business development is. As with all key metrics, the higher this is, the better we’re going. You might also compare your specification rate to your market share to get an indication of how well your post tender teams are performing. 

Measuring your Spec-to-Sales rate:

Your Spec-to-Sales rate helps you work out if you’re taking full advantage of all your opportunities. At its simplest, it’s a measurement of how many projects you’re specified on during the tender time you end up converting to sales. 

When put together you start to see the makings of a very basic marketing funnel, where you’ve got two key check in points to routinely check on the health of your sales funnel. . 

We hope you’ve found this useful. If you’re on EstimateOne and you need a hand setting yourself up to take advantage of the data available, or set yourself up with Speci-Finder we’d love to hear from you. If you’re yet to start using EstimateOne, but think this could help your business, sign up for a free account with us and check out our features.