SnapCount Insights

Energy efficiency is BIG business. NAESCO reports that Energy Service Companies (ESCO’s) add $7 billion of business to the national economy every year, doing work in every state of the country. Government and business leaders are making building energy management a priority and are turning to ESCOs to make it happen.

In turn, ESCOs need expert subcontractors to secure and execute their projects.

For lighting retrofitters, working with ESCOs provides huge business opportunities. But to work effectively with them, you need the right strategies.

Most people would say having more business than you can handle is a pretty good problem to have. But it’s still a problem your business needs to deal with – and quickly.

Your team may be overstretched with current projects. Or the inability to hop on a plane to visit a customer site may leave teams struggling to handle certain geographic areas. The answer for most retrofitters is hiring subcontractors. But there are risks if you don’t hire the right partner.

For many lighting retrofit companies, the idea of landing a large, national account sounds pretty good. In reality, working with larger companies brings its own set of challenges.

During our recent SnapCount Retrofit Showcase we were joined by Lynn Hawkins, the CEO of Sustainable Turnkey Solutions, who has deep experience landing and managing such large national accounts.

Here are the strategies he recommends to help you secure large national accounts, using lighting retrofit software to set you — and the customer — up for success.

Throughout the past weeks, you’ve likely learned about the forthcoming user interface refresh that the SnapCount development team has been working to bring to life. Below is an in-depth dive of some of the new features of the SnapCount Ion Experience.

A detailed, visually compelling LED lighting retrofit proposal can do a lot. It can show how the retrofit will deliver the desired cost savings. It can highlight lighting quality and non-energy benefits like increased productivity and safety. It can spell out the potential impact on the customer’s carbon footprint. It can speak to the customer in terms they understand.

Ultimately a great lighting retrofit proposal can help make the case and win more deals.

But compiling manually collected audit data into deal-sealing proposals can be complicated, time-consuming, and labor intensive. Custom templates (like the ones in SnapCount) can help you more quickly generate sales proposals in a variety of styles, making your team more efficient and saving you both time and money.

There’s a new strategy in the lighting retrofitting business, and it’s changing how many — and how quickly — deals close.

The conventional wisdom has been that to increase the volume of successful sales, you must make more sales calls, complete more audits, and send out more proposals.

But does flooding your sales funnel always translate into more closed deals? Or does it just result in more time spent chasing lukewarm leads?

Most industries have seen their business activity impacted one way or the other by the pandemic, and lighting retrofitting is no exception. At the start of another year — one that’s likely to bring some of the same constraints and opportunities — we wanted to look forward by hearing from some of the industry’s leaders.

We spoke with David Errigo of Acuity, Brad Picht of Graybar, Gary Pellant of Building Resources and Tim Unruh of NAESCO about the trends from 2020 they believe will continue, and their predictions for 2021.

When SnapCount got started, we set out to optimize the way the retrofit industry wins and performs work. This required automating the many unique (and sometimes complex) workflows required by this specialized industry. Now, with hundreds of thousands of projects developed, won and completed by our valued customers, SnapCount is the most advanced and comprehensive retrofit solution in the industry.

At some point the owner of nearly every growing business realizes that skill may be what got you here – but smart business practices will be what keeps your company growing.

How you approach lighting audits is a great example of this principle. While knowing the basics of how to produce a solid audit is typically the starting point, implementing audit best practices can elevate your entire game.

So, how can you make sure you “wow” the client during the lighting audit? Focus on these three things: lighting audit accuracy, professionalism, and growth potential.

There is rarely a perfect time for a business to take on an operational overhaul; most are perpetually in 'fix the plane while we fly it' mode. However, the 2020 slowdown in the commercial lighting retrofit business due to the pandemic may have had a small silver lining: the opportunity to take on a long-overdue retooling of a retrofit business operation.

We spoke to two companies that did just that.

To discuss what made 2020 the perfect time to transition to a new software to retool their businesses, we spoke with Brad Dulle (Director of Engineering) and Frank Agraz (Senior Director, Strategic Initiatives) from Eco Engineering, along with Dimitri Papadakis (Chief Operations Officer) from STS Lighting Services Inc.