For energy brokers, it’s easy for administrative tasks to overtake time spent on sales.
There’s so much for energy brokers to do in order to sell—update pricing, contact suppliers, negotiate, create contracts. After all that, how do you find time to reach new customers or engage with your current ones?
In this post, we will discuss three ways you can streamline your business so you can get out and increase sales.
1. Standardize the Processes
One the toughest day-to-day challenges that energy brokers face are irregular processes. The market is always changing and each supplier does things its own way, all of which requires a lot of time and resources from the energy broker.
In a given day, an energy broker will need to check pricing from each supplier, create contracts, and maintain supplier relationships. The list goes on…
It all takes time from energy brokers—time they should be spending selling energy, not pushing papers.
While you can’t make all suppliers follow the same processes, there are tools available that help you standardize these processes.
Platforms like our Energy Engine will get you instant pricing from all suppliers, so you don’t need to manually check pricing. It also helps you instantly create contracts suited for each supplier so you don’t need to worry about each supplier’s different processes.
2. More Suppliers
While maintaining more supplier relationships traditionally requires more resources from energy brokers, having more options is always an advantage.
Not only will you have more pricing options—which you can extend to your customers—you can also gain access to more opportunities.
3. Strategic Partnerships
For most brokers, especially independent energy brokers, the paperwork and everyday processes take up too much time: you spend so most of the day making calls to suppliers, updating pricing, and writing contracts that you don’t have time to build out your customer-base or maintain your existing relationships.
This is where a strategic partnership comes in. You can find a partner who will take on the bulk of the back-end responsibilities so you can get back to getting more customers.
A good partnership will provide you with these advantages (at a minimum):
- Supplier-side support so you can more effectively communicate with suppliers and close deals faster than ever.
- Streamlined pricing and contract creation from suppliers.
- Transparency
The third point is worth digging into. There are quite a few partners for energy brokers, but it’s important to ask if those partners actually support you or if you’re just a means for their cash flow.
A transparent relationship is key because many so-called ‘partners’ will make sure to win big, even if you lose out.
But a truly transparent partnership can help you dig out of the paperwork and grow your business.
Bringing It All Together to Increase Sales
How you improve your sales will depend on your biggest challenges, but building a business platform that streamlines your everyday tasks is essential for driving sales.
For energy brokers, the mountains of paperwork, phone calls and negotiations become the biggest barriers to reaching new customers—once you’re done with all the administrative work, there’s little left for customers.
That’s why strategic partnerships and smart processes help build more successful energy brokers.
At BOX, we provide the services to help brokers meet the tough demands of the industry.
Our Energy Engine platform helps companies streamline sales with instant pricing and simple contract creation. Our support team will help you get special pricing and communicate with all suppliers, so you’re not caught up with the diverse processes of each supplier.
As a partner to energy brokers, we also pride ourselves with aligning our interests with yours: we never pad our prices, we’re not owned by any suppliers and we don’t sell direct to customers. All of this means that we provide a true partnership: we only succeed when you do too.