SalesCentric Relationship Charts for Projects in Construction Industry
Here we will describe a scenario where Relationship Charts as a visual explorer of relationships can bring a substantial value to the end users of CRM working in the Construction industry.
“Building Products Suppliers have the most complex route to market; they must ensure their products are specified by architects, consultants and other professional service firms, converted into orders by the developers and contractors, and made available for delivery through the major multiple and independent distributors”.
This basically means that working on each project Building Products Suppliers have to deal with a big number of companies and people. While having strong relationships with these companies and people is very important and sometimes absolutely mandatory in order to get business, understanding all of these relationships even within one project may appear to be very hard even for a professional with many years of experience in this field.
The visual approach provided by Relationship Charts allows end users to easily grasp the entire picture of a project with all its participants and relationships between them. At the same time the new “Bring Related” functionality gives a new intuitive way to explore relationships for a particular participant and bring them to the chart step by step.
The rest of the document will describe a scenario “how to select a distributor using a Relationship Chart”.
Please be aware:
This is an example only – it does not cover the real business model in details.
Everything on the chart, such as types of entities (participants), the set of displayed attributes, the types of relationships, is configured in the Relationship Charts administrative interface.
All names used in the document are fictitious.
Scenario
Your company is a Building Products Supplier. You want your materials to be used for the new building on Knockwille Street 98. You already have information in CRM about who will be the architects and contractors, so now you need to decide who you need to speak to at these companies and who should you select as a distributor of your products for this project.
Let’s make these decisions using Relationship Charts step by step:
1. Create a new chart for a project
The 1st action is to create a new chart and bring the project to it. From now on you can visually explore the “project” relationships stored in CRM.
2. See who are in business now? (Bring companies that participate in the project to the chart)
Once the central entity is on the chart and we know that some information is already in CRM, let’s start using it: Select a project, click “Bring related” then select the Account and Building Role — to display the companies who participate in the project.
3. Check who are your architect contacts? (Display employees of the Power Architects Company)
Using the “Bring related” functionality again to add the employees of Power Architects. No doubt you will need to deal with some of them on this project, however it is not a problem that you do not know David Dominges personally yet. Let’s see all project participants first and then you might find one whom you know well and who will be able to introduce you to others.
4. Check who are your contractor contacts? (Display employees of the Contractor)
Bring the employees of the Contractor onto the chart. Looking at the chart you can see that there is a relationship between David Dominges and Jim Hanks: they graduated from the same University. Do you know Jim? If yes then he is the one who will introduce you to David and David will listen to Jim not only because of the former relationship, but also since Jim will participate in the project as well.
5. What projects have we done with this contractor? (Bring projects performed by the contractor to the chart)
We need to select a distributor for this project. It would be safer for us to involve a distributor who had already worked with this contractor before. So let’s take a look at what projects we’ve done with this contractor and what distributors we used at that time.
6. Select a distributor for this project (List the distributors who worked on the other projects and indicate that one of them will be the distributor for the new project)
Please follow the instructions below: –
Find out who was a distributor for the “Single Storey Building” project.
Build a relationship between the project and that company directly from the chart.
7. You’ve got the picture of participants in your project
Now you can easily see what companies and what people from these companies will participate in the project!
What’s next?
Do you think that charts may be useful for your vertical solution?
We are ready to provide you with a trial of our product, as well as customizing Relationship Charts for your vertical solution.
