You DON'T Need To Dismiss Every Unsold Estimate

What's going on, everybody? It's Richard Kohberger here. The blue collar nerd scenario. You've offered a customer three estimates. Let's say good, better and best, and they went with one. They went with your middle option. They took the better. So great. Of course we mark that one as sold. And now what some people will do is they will now manually dismiss the good and best options. And this practice is something that we in the biz like to refer to as a waste of time. You do not need to do that. Now, from what I've gathered, there are three main reasons why some people think that they do need to do that. Number one is that they think they need to dismiss them in order to make sure that they don't get followed up on. Number two is that they think those estimates hurt the text conversion rate somehow. And number three is that they think it just keeps a neater, cleaner account. So let's address all those one by one. But first, in order to understand why dismissing of these estimates isn't necessary. First, first we need to understand the difference between an estimate and an opportunity. So when you create estimates on a job, those estimates are grouped together under one opportunity. So let's go back to our example. We made three estimates. That's good, better and best. So three estimates, but only one opportunity. So when a customer buys one of those, when they move forward with our better estimate, then it's true that we still have two unsold estimates, but the opportunity itself is converted. The opportunity is marked as one. That's one as in the opposite of loss, not the number one. Okay, now that we understand that, let's address the follow ups issue. So when a customer has bought the better option, obviously we don't want to follow up with them later and say, hey, do you want to buy the good and the best? They're already done. They already bought something. So how do we make sure that doesn't happen? Well, on the follow ups tab, we have this handy checkbox right here at the top that says exclude opportunities with any sold estimates. Check off that box and the problem is immediately solved. Our three estimates are good, better and best, where one opportunity and one of those estimates was sold. So now the other two estimates within that opportunity, the good and the best, they're not going to show up anymore if we have that box checked. You're also able to filter out any one opportunities when you're setting up marketing pro audiences. Okay, great. So problem solved. What about tech close and conversion rates? Well, we don't have a problem there either, because close rates and conversion rates are based on opportunities, not estimates. And if we go into reporting, we can see that. So if you hover over any KPI, it's going to tell you how that KPI is calculated. So here I'm hovering over close rate and I see that close rate looks at the number of closed opportunities divided by the number of sales opportunities. Let's take a look at conversion rate as well. So first of all, you'll notice we have two types of conversion rate here, Opportunity conversion rate and total conversion rate. This is a nuance that's kind of important to understand. So when you have estimates grouped together, that's grouped together under a opportunity and that's opportunity, like the entity, you can go in servicetitan and you can look at open opportunities. Now also, certain jobs are going to be marked as opportunity jobs. So for example, I'm from the H Vac world. I always use H Vac examples because it's what I know, a no cool call. When somebody calls us and they say their air conditioner's not working, we're always going to be considering that an opportunity job, the technician can definitely sell something there. But maybe I also have a warranty repair job type. Well, I'm going to mark that job type as a non opportunity because I'm not expecting my technicians going to sell something there. So the opportunity conversion rate, KPI, that excludes any jobs that I said this is not an opportunity, don't worry about it. But total conversion rate is just that. It's the total conversion rate, including jobs that I said weren't an opportunity. That's just a quick sidebar, a quick tangent, trying to make sure nobody's getting confused because we're kind of talking about two different things that are named very similarly. So there's opportunity jobs, but there's also opportunities, the entity where you have estimates grouped together under an opportunity. So if I went out to a no, cool, that's an opportunity job. And then I made three estimates. Now I've got an opportunity that I've made under that opportunity job. Right? So two related but different things. Are we everybody clear? Hope we're clear. Okay, so I'm going to hover over this. And it tells me that opportunity conversion rate is the count of converted jobs divided by the count of opportunity jobs. Okay, so it's saying converted jobs, not converted opportunities. So then we need to understand what's a converted job. It tells us a converted job is a job where the invoice subtotal is equal to or greater than the sold threshold. So in Servicetitan, under your job type settings, you can set the sold threshold for a job type and that's the dollar amount where you're saying, okay, anything this amount or higher, we're giving the technician credit for converting that job. So typically you're going to set that at $1 above your diagnostic fee if you have one of those. Because of course, if all they collected was the diagnostic fee, yeah, they technically collect. But do you want to give them credit for converting the job? Probably not. But back to the topic at hand. If a technician sold any estimate on that job, then the invoice subtotal is going to be over your sold threshold. So your conversion rate is going to look correct without you dismissing those other two estimates. They don't matter. Okay. And then the third major reason that I see people cite for doing this practice of dismissing the other estimates when they've sold one is because they just want a cleaner looking account. This one gets a little bit more into subjective territory. I don't know that I agree that dismissing those estimates makes your account any cleaner. Because a dismissed estimate isn't gone, it's still there, it's just in a different status. So whether you see those dismissed estimates or not is usually just a matter of how you have your filter set. And we've already seen that you can filter out one opportunities on the follow ups page and in Marketing Pro, which are probably the most important places where you would want to be able to filter those out. And you can do that without having to dismiss extra estimates. Really the only place I can think of right now that you can't really filter them out is the location page, like the customer's location. If you look at the estimates that they have on that location, you'll be able to see that you sold one in the opportunity. But I don't think there's a way to filter them out right now. But is that a problem? I mean, I don't think so. I certainly don't think it's a big enough problem to warrant doing all of this extra work, this tedious work that's hard to enforce, dismissing all of these extra estimates. But, you know, that's up to you. I'm not here to judge. Well, I am here to judge. I am judging you. If you think that's worth it. I think you're wrong. Time wasting. Police. Pull over immediately. No, I'm just kidding. You're free to waste your time if you want to. Now, at this point, you might be thinking But Richard, what's even the point of having this dismiss functionality if it's completely pointless? Whoa, now, hold on there, partner. I never said it was pointless and that you ever put words in my mouth like that again. The ability to dismiss opportunities and estimates is very important. That is how we make sure that if a customer has made it clear to us that they are not going to be purchasing any of our estimates, that we don't keep following up with them about it after they've asked us to stop. So something I want to make clear here, you can dismiss estimates or you can dismiss entire opportunities. So a scenario where you might want to dismiss just a single estimate. Let's say you went out, you saw a very old system that wasn't working, and you gave the customer three replacement options and one repair option. And then they said to you, yeah, you know, I'm definitely not going to go the repair route on this, but I do want to get some other quotes from different companies as far as replacement goes. I. Okay, then we would want to dismiss the repair estimate because the customer's already told us they're not going to go with that. So there's no point in following up about that. But we don't want to dismiss the entire opportunity because there's still other estimates in there that could potentially still be sold. Okay, now a scenario where you would want to dismiss the entire opportunity. Let's say you left a customer some estimate, so that's an open opportunity. And you follow up with them about that opportunity and they say, look, you know, I went with a different company. I'm sorry, there's just no chance that I'm going to be buying this from you. Please stop following up with me. Okay, well, you can't win them all. That person's made it very clear that they're not going to be purchasing any of our options. They've asked us to stop following up and we need to do that. And the way that we can make sure we do that is by dismissing that entire opportunity. Estimates that are within a dismissed opportunity will no longer show up on the follow ups page. And of course again, dismissed opportunities can be easily excluded from marketing pro campaigns. Anyways, that's all I got for today. Hey, we talked about conversion and close rates in this video and those are two different KPIs and it's important to understand how they're different. So if you currently don't understand the difference, then I highly suggest you check out this video right here. Appreciate it. Peace.