Glaziers, is your pricing strategy costing you money?

Is your pricing strategy costing you money?

Getting your pricing right can be complicated. Customers are price sensitive and everyone is looking for a good deal. Finding that sweet spot where you are consistently winning jobs while ensuring that you’re making a decent margin can be like walking a tight rope. You need to find the balance otherwise you’ll walk away with nothing.

How do you make sure you are winning the jobs you want while maximizing the profitability of the business? The easiest way to do this is through margin analysis, understanding your customers, your competitors and being flexible when required.

Build flexible pricing structures into your business with customer-specific price books and discount groups

Customer loyalty is critical to long term success and goes a long way towards helping your word of mouth. For your regular customers, making sure they are getting competitive pricing while maintaining a fair profit margin can be complicated and time-consuming. This is where software that allows for customer-specific pricing can help. Smart Glazier Business allows you to structure your pricing for each customer and build groups to quickly assign new customers to the appropriate pricing tier. Not only do you give consistent prices to your customers, you’ll be pricing jobs faster and more accurately.

Reward the right customers

You know the ones we’re talking about. They give you clear diagrams, communicate well, provide referrals and pay on time. Keep the key customers coming back with sharp pricing to lock in the high volumes. At the same time, you can be getting a bit more margin on the tricky jobs. This is particularly useful when you have a specialty or niche that gives you a competitive advantage that is hard to find elsewhere.

Understand your margins like never before

With lots of moving parts and variability in each job, particularly with custom glass, knowing your exact costs can be difficult. This is where a software system like Smart Glazier Business can help. By adding in all your costs from each supplier, your margins are calculated for every job as you add the various components, no matter who you’re sourcing from. Better yet, the inbuilt glass designer can add and calculate various shape and energy surcharges automatically to help ensure that complex designs are quoted correctly and you don’t get caught short on complicated jobs.

Powerful information for negotiation

When you know how much you can afford to trim on the job, you can find the sweet spot to win the jobs you want. Potential customers may be price sensitive on glass but not so worried about hardware and consumables. Smart Glazier Business helps you by letting you easily review past jobs so you can use that information to help with future quoting decisions. Knowing your customer is important, but without the detailed knowledge of margins you might be missing out on more than you think.

Get a new view with the supplier matrix

The supplier-matrix in Smart Glazier Business lets you compare glass job costing for the different suppliers in your system. This gives you the freedom to select the best supplier for each situation. This is not always driven by price as other factors may influence your purchasing decisions such as lead-times, location, accuracy, glass quality and cleanliness. The supplier-matrix can help you identify the best option to get it done on time, while maximizing your profit.

Focus your business on the jobs that matter

Taking this further, you might find that there are better uses for your resources and certain jobs that are particularly valuable. Turning away a job with low margins so that you can complete a more valuable one is only possible when you know what those jobs are. We’ve seen customers realize they are spending far too much time on jobs that they don’t get much out of. Armed with the insight provided by Smart Glazier Business, they’re not only faster and more accurate with their processes, they’re focused on the jobs that matter.

Ready to see more?

Customizable and flexible pricing to help you get the best margins from your work is just one of the many benefits of glass specific software. Smart Glazier Business can help you quote, schedule, order, invoice, report and manage your glass business more effectively. Our team would like to show you how it all works so let’s arrange a quick demo so you can see it in action.

Email us on info@smartglazier.com to get started or click the button below.