Clean Scapes: From Excel to a Centralized Sales Pipeline

The company

Founded in 2005, Clean Scapes is the premier commercial landscaping service provider in Texas. In addition to Austin, where it is headquartered, it also operates in Dallas, San Antonio and Houston. The company provides its clients with landscape enhancement, maintenance and construction services. In 2020, Clean Scapes started using PriceTable to automate its sales process.

The Excel problem

Clean Scapes' original sales process relied on an Excel spreadsheet sitting inside a folder on the company network. The admin team updated pricing in the spreadsheet as costs changed. Each salesperson was supposed to grab a fresh copy before creating a new proposal, then plug line items into a customer-facing sheet that pulled prices from a hidden tab.

Over time, this broke down. Salespeople frequently forgot to download the latest version of the spreadsheet and used the copy already on their laptop, which had outdated pricing. "I don't have a way of finding out the exact numbers, but we probably lost quite a bit of money on deals because sales staff used wrong pricing on their proposals," says Enhancement Manager Homer Green.

The other issue was appearance. The proposals generated from Excel looked amateurish. "They looked like something you might get from your local pest control one-man operation," says Green. Whenever the team needed to present a large proposal to an important customer, the salesperson would spend several hours copying everything to Microsoft Word and formatting it by hand. That was time spent in the office, not out in the field selling.

What PriceTable changed

When Clean Scapes came across PriceTable, the centralized catalog is what sold them. Every product and service lives in one place, with current pricing that applies automatically to any new estimate. No more stale spreadsheet copies. "We also like that it lets us organize items into categories and sub-categories," says Green. "Our various departments specialize in different types of products and services, and this allows them to quickly find their own category when they need to make updates or additions."

"Within a few weeks of onboarding the sales team on PriceTable, we started to notice the difference. Our sales team started to spend more time on the field and to close more deals."
Homer Green, Enhancement Manager

The real-time sales pipeline turned out to be just as important. Before PriceTable, salespeople had to manually track each proposal they sent out, and things fell through the cracks during busy seasons. With PriceTable, each estimate's owner gets an email notification when the status changes, such as when a customer views or signs it, which lets them act immediately. "Our salesfolks no longer have to wonder whether a client has even looked at the estimate they were sent, because PriceTable lets them know," says Green.

Professional-looking proposals were a bonus. Salespeople discovered they could generate a company-branded PDF from any estimate with a single click, ending the copy-and-paste ritual from Excel to Word. "This means I no longer have to manually copy and paste stuff from Excel to Word and deal with formatting issues," says Homer, who also works in sales.

The results

Since adopting PriceTable, Clean Scapes has shortened its sales cycle from weeks to days. Management has real-time visibility into the pipeline, and the notification system has rescued proposals that were approaching their expiration date. "These proposals would have previously been simply lost, as we had no easy or efficient way of keeping track of them before PriceTable, which means people simply didn't," says Green.

With proposals and follow-ups tracked in one place, the team spends more time with customers and less time wrestling with spreadsheets.