The best place to look for new leads is often among existing customers. We periodically review our Job Management System (JMS) to help our estimators prioritize what relationships are worth rekindling. Storing job  data in a JMS also helps us preserve our customer relationships when estimators move on to other employment.

We completed such a JMS review earlier this month. We recommend our seal coating customers consider resealing their asphalt every three to five years. Our traffic paint customers might need to restripe parking lots even more often–especially after a severe winter. With a few clicks, I can see we completed 2,711 total jobs between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2011. But that’s too much data to give to our two estimators and say, “Here, call these guys back.”

We knew there were some more criteria we could use to have the JMS narrow results. We do almost daily work for utilities. We’re in frequent contact with these customers and don’t need to include our numerous jobs for them in the search results. We also decided to exclude jobs that were concrete only, as the kinds of concrete we place (mostly sidewalks) isn’t sealed. Adding these criteria narrowed our search to 1,353 completed jobs or cut the results by roughly 50 percent.

But 1,353 still seemed like a daunting leads list. We finally decided to sort the 1,353 jobs by the value of the work performed, not knowing what kind of frequency distribution we’d find. Not unexpectedly, we saw we completed far more little jobs than big ones. More specifically, there were just over 300 jobs valued at more than $5,000. That struck us as a pretty good place to start. We next handed the leads list to our general manger and asked that he rank the leads based on how much we’d like to pursue rework. Working for cantankerous customers at rock-bottom rates might not be rejected outright, but we certainly want to pursue repeat work for grateful customers willing to pay a fair price for the quality we provide. The general manager’s valuable time was leveraged by using the JMS to narrow results dramatically.

With our Job Management System, we can produce very specific output lists based on any combination of input parameters we collect in our normal course of business. Every specialty contractor that produces written bids is collecting the same kinds of information: bid date, customer, job address, description of work to be performed, price, etc. We’ve discovered tremendous value in storing such data in a Job Management System. Not only does the system help produce professional looking bids more quickly, it also helps us organize our treasure trove of completed work to pinpoint new opportunities.