We have a saying that’s developed around the office in the last few years: “sometimes the easiest decisions are the hardest ones to make.” When faced with these types of issues, being able to pull powerful and relevant data can be the best thing to make rationale, rather than emotional, decisions.

When it comes to sales, it’s difficult to fight the temptation to want to serve every potential customer that comes knocking.  We did that for years. It’s furthermore difficult to try to separate what we have been in the past from what we’re striving to become in the future.

When I first started Rainier Asphalt & Concrete 15 years ago, it was a one-man operation, and I served only residential homeowners. I had some good reference partners and my customers were usually pretty pleased, which led to a lot of referral business.  Over the years, though, the company changed and evolved, almost in an invisible way to me.

Within the last few years, I detected some changes in employee chatter. At our weekly production meetings and bi-weekly sales meeting, our employees were expressing discontent with the behaviors of residential customers.

Throughout the sales process, the estimators were reporting that they weren’t getting call backs after preparing a quote. The close rate didn’t seem very good. And projects that we were securing usually required a lot of customization and hand holding. The project managers weren’t enjoying the process.

After about two years of an ongoing discussion of “what do we do with residential work??!!” we finally decided that we needed to run a report in our Job Management System (JMS)  to help us with this decision. Here’s what we found: residential work contributed only 1.5% of our total revenues. And the “win-rate” in the sales process was only about one in ten, far lower than typical for our other customers.

Having this information, it was easy for us to make the decision to stop bidding residential work. There are some contractors who are really good at that niche, but it’s not who we are, nor is it who we’re trying to become.

In retrospect, we should have done this much earlier. In part, I think I had an emotional attachment to continue to do the types of projects like when the company was in its infancy. But we’ve changed. We’re not striving to become a $1 million company anymore. We’re striving to become a $10 million company, and we needed to change our focus so that we could dedicate our resources toward finding and serving the types of customers that will help us get there.

Without pulling that valuable information from our JMS, we’d probably still be stuck in “analysis paralysis.”