Table of Contents
Purpose
Offering optional enhancements, beyond the contracted services on your proposals, can be a great way to increase revenue for your company. However, managing and following up on these optional services can be difficult on a one-by-one basis.
Using the Optional Services tool can be a great way to follow-up with clients and build simple sales pipelines for a single service.
📌 Note: The optional service must be available in all branches. Check out our FAQ section for more information.
How Does It Work?
Let's say you work in the maintenance division of a company.
As you, a salesperson or account manager, are putting together a proposal for a customer, you have the ability to add optional services to the estimate. For instance, an optional service could be fertilization or annual color change out.
While these optional services aren't included in the total dollar amount of the proposal, they can be used to upsell your customer base later in the contract.
Later in the year, during the contract period, the fertilization and annual color change outs will usually start being needed. For these optional services, the System Admin role can create mass work order opportunities for a specific salesperson.
This salesperson can then focus on reaching out to customers for this specific enhancement, such as an annual color change out.
The Optional Services tool, then, is a great way to create simplified sales pipelines for enhancements across the company!
How to Use the Optional Services Tool
📌 Note: To use the Optional Services tool, you'll need to collaborate with your sales manager and system admin as this process requires both roles.
Adding an Optional Service
Navigate to your estimate in the Opportunities module.
After clicking the estimate, you'll add your service and any items under the Optional Services section.
Your proposal, if using the correct layouts, will separate your services from your optional services. Look at the Summer Color optional service down below!
Notice how the optional service is not a part of the payment schedule.
While customers might not have been interested during the original contract signing, they may be interested as it nears closer to the season. Which could mean more work and revenue!
Mass Creating the Work Order Opportunities in Administration
The System Admin can then mass-create work order opportunities for all properties that have an active opportunity that contains the optional service. In this case, our Summer Color.
Navigate to Administration ➡️ Estimating tab ➡️ then the Optional Service Tool subsection. The New Optional Service Opportunity screen will appear.
From the Service dropdown, choose your service. ⚠️This service must be available in all branches. Aspire will search for all won opportunities that have that service listed in the Optional Services section of the estimate
Choose the sales rep who will be assigned these new work order opportunities.
Choose the start and end dates. The Start Date must be within the contracted Start and End dates of all the opportunities containing the selected optional service.
Last, fill in the Notes section. What you put in here will fill in Proposal Description 1 for the new work order opportunities that are created.
When you are ready to mass-create the work order opportunities, click Save.
You, as the system admin, can create an issue in Aspire to notify the selected Sales Rep of the sales pipeline and newly created work order opportunities.
These work order opportunities will become active within the Start and End dates with a bidding status of Approved. This means the opportunities have been estimated, but the clients still need to be contacted via email or phone number.
Creating a List for the Optional Service Sales Pipeline
A list can be created to identify the work orders of the optional service that were created for the sales rep to follow-up on!
Using the filter tab on the Opportunities list:
The Opportunity Name will equal the Service selected in Optional Service dropdown menu.
Sales Rep will equal the rep selected in the Optional Service dropdown.
You can then use this list to follow-up on potential leads for this enhancement work!
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: When would the Optional Service Tool be used?
A: Creating work orders using the Optional Service tool is ideal for seasonal services within contracts. It's common to add a seasonal color or fertilizer program as an optional service. In the summer time, you might want to create work orders for all the Fall Color optional services to prepare for the fall schedule.
Q: I don't see the service I'm looking for in the dropdown menu?
A: When a service has a branch or multiple branches assigned, it will not be available to use with the Optional Service tool. Having branches assigned would create difficulty in the branch assignment for the Opportunities.
Q: Can I use this for optional services within contracts and work orders?
A: The optional service tool only looks at optional services within contracts to create work orders.