Perils of the Construction Software Sales Cycle

By Sheldon Needle

Of all of the products one can buy, purchasing construction software is possibly the most complex and problematic.

Think about it. When it comes to purchasing construction project management software for your construction company you have to truly understand the requirements for all phases of your business. Not only do you need to understand them, ideally you should also understand how the various applications tie together both from a business operations perspective as well as an accounting perspective. Exactly what data should be sent to what applications beginning with an estimate, a bid, then creating a job ledger with the specific cost details needed for the customer, and how and when data should be updated as a result of change orders pending and approved.

Beyond that users must think about how to properly set up their system with respond to their chart of accounts, cost codes, divisions and how they want to be able to access records and data in their system.

Some of the challenging questions that must be answered are:

• What are my priorities in order to meet essential business goals?
• Will staff support putting in new software?
• Will new staff need to be hired with better skills?
• What cost tracking conventions will be used?
• What will be the long term costs of maintaining the system?

All this may be roughly understood but translating the details of that into the ability to evaluate prospective construction software vendors requires a lot more than perusing sales literature and listening to a salesman.

Here are some of the hurdles you can run into along the way.

One size fits all. Some sales people see all prospects as the same. “They are contractors, we sell contractor software so what’s the problem? We have hundreds or thousands of customers. We can make them happy!”

How well does the salesperson know his or her product? How much experience do they have in the industry? Turnover of sales people is high in the software business. They come and go and many of them never really learn their product well enough to answer your questions properly. At the same time, a salesperson who is able to master a slick demo can come across as knowledgeable. It is not unusual to find companies who base their buying decision more on how much they like the salesperson instead of product capabilities. Conversely, an incompetent or inexperienced salesperson can make good construction software look terrible.

Ideally on a sales call, there should be both a person who is assigned to your account and the sales representative and another person who is the technical representative there to answer product specific questions. But that won’t happen if you are a small company because the vendor will not want to invest two people for a small prospect.

Project managers. Once you buy the software it has to be set up and installed. You could purchase a pretty good system and still have it fail if the project manager does not know his product well or understand your type of business. Setting up a General Design-Build Contractor can be greatly different than setting up a specialty contractor with a service department. Be sure the project manager has experience implementing systems for your type of operation.

Pricing games. Prospective buyers often waste a lot of time looking at software that ultimately will be too expensive for them. Salespeople often don’t want to be upfront with the total system cost because they might scare you off. So they will low ball the price and gradually move it up in hopes that you will fall in love with their system by then. In the meantime, there can be dozens of sales calls and back and forth when that the product was never a realistic candidate for you to begin with.

Are you worth their time? I sometimes hear from buying prospects that certain vendors are not responsive to them and show no interest in them a buyer. In those cases, the vendor has likely decided that they are not going to spend enough to make it worth their while servicing them. Or they may think they lack the profile of a serious buying prospect. What are those characteristics?

• Has set a budget
• Have a committee working on the project
• Management is involved
• A “software champion” is present to guide the project on the buyer side
• Is coming off software that is not too far removed from what they are looking at buying
• Has adequate resources to train, implement and operate the system properly.

Assuming all these criteria are in place, things can still go awry when software decisions are put off indefinitely due to indecisive managers or failure to justify the purchase to management.

Summary
The more a construction software buying prospect understands about the software sales process and possible pitfalls, the better able they are to avoid wasting their time and the vendor’s time, by thoroughly evaluating their requirements and their company’s commitment to buying a better software solution.

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