The EstiMate Software Blog

You may or may not know that EstiMate was born out of my own frustration when I was running my basement sign shop from 1993-1999. I had grown up in the sign industry, in my mother’s own basement sign shop, and throughout the late 70s and all of the 80s I watched her struggle to price her work. The phone would ring, she would answer and listen to the customer’s description of the sign they wanted made, and then she would say: “just a moment, let me go figure that.”

She would drum her fingers on the desk for a while, all the while staring at her “calculator on the ceiling,” and then she would get back on the phone and say, “that’ll be $500.”

Sound familiar?

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Setting The Scene

I live in a really beautiful part of the country — near Asheville, North Carolina — on a relatively rural road with gorgeous views of the backside of the mountains in Bent Creek that I can see from my bedroom window every morning. The other day, I was heading out to the grocery store when I passed a coroplast sign in the front yard of a small home.

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Are you concerned about the economy? Is business slowing down? A recession is a scary time for all businesses, and often it is hard to see the forest for the trees when making business decisions in a difficult economic climate.

At a time like this, it’s absolutely critical to be working with the best tools you possibly can to squeeze every ounce of profit out of each job that comes your way. Estimate 2 offers you extremely powerful features that allow you to identify the type of work you do that’s most profitable, and focus on that in your marketing.

You see, here’s a secret: when you do less of your low profit work and more of your high profit work, you make more money effortlessly and automatically. Estimate 2 gives you the tools you need to identify this type of work and give it your full attention.

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Good, Better, Best Pricing Is A Great Way To Upsell Customers

One really cool trick with EstiMate is to offer good, better, best pricing scenarios to your customers.  If you couple good, better, best pricing with decoy marketing you can usually capture more dollars for your work.

EstiMate makes good, better, best pricing very easy to do. In a nutshell, what you’re doing is presenting three levels of pricing to your customer — the “good” level is, essentially, what they came for. The “better” level can be used more as a stepping stone to the “best” level, which is what you want to sell them.

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EstiMate Software has partnered up with J.D. Iles at the Signs Never Sleep blog to give away a free copy of the EstiMate Enterprise Edition – a $699 value – in mid-April.

To enter the contest, hop over to J.D.’s blog post about the contest and add a comment to the post (that’s how to enter). He will then randomly select a winner sometime after 4-13-09 when the contest closes, and we’ll contact the winner with download and unlock instructions.

Good luck! I look forward to welcoming the winner aboard!