Setting up ServiceTitan’s Pricebook can be a time-consuming, arduous task for many of its customers, but the results pay off big dividends when built correctly.
“That's one of the reasons ServiceTitan is so powerful. It's built around the pricebook and of all the things your business does,” says Eyal Binshtock, ServiceTitan Director of Product Management. “If the pricebook is built correctly, it integrates and automates a lot of your other business functions.”
Recognizing the immense amount of time and effort customers still spend on setting up the pricebook, the ServiceTitan team embarked on a mission to simplify the process through automation. Combining its strong foundational core with AI-driven data insights, ServiceTitan plans to make its pricebook and other automated pricing tools easier to use than ever.
Pricebook is the heart of ServiceTitan. Everything connects to it; everything needs to work seamlessly off of it. Now, just like your heart, Pricebook is going to be able to beat seamlessly in the background without you even knowing it's there.”
“We're sitting on data gold mines in terms of what we can do with that within your business, and even across multiple businesses, to surface the most profitable, most efficient, most beneficial services, materials, and equipment, and then tying all those things together,” Binshtock says.
The product management director, along with three ServiceTitan teammates, painted the vision for Pricebook’s immediate and near-term future during Pantheon 2023, ServiceTitan’s annual conference for the trades.
“As you look at what we’re building today, our automated pricing tools and Pricebook Pro, we're now able to build the pricebook for you in a matter of minutes just by looking at your trade, location, and billable rate,” Binshtock says. “Those things are going to be magnified.”
Other features in the works for development include:
Supply chain automation that builds lists and links services
Estimating with automation to improve the selling workflow
Inventory and purchasing automation for leaner operations
Optimizing automation to learn from what’s working and what’s not
Pricebook automation to maintain pricing data in real time
Here are five new ServiceTitan pricing features to help take your business to the next level.
1. Price Insights
Price Insights, a new product available to users of Pricebook Pro, taps into all of the data contained within Pricebook Pro to calculate the average price for each service, then shows you how your price for a particular service compares to others in your region. It’s also one of the first Titan Intelligence features developed by ServiceTitan.
“One of the biggest questions I get asked is, ‘Am I priced right? Am I priced right in the market?’" says Margie Baker, a ServiceTitan Senior Customer Success Manager who works mainly with enterprise companies. “Because once you take out your margins, labor rates, and overhead costs, what's left? Your market complexity and your competitors—two things you have no control or knowledge over.”
To know if they’re priced right, contractors might try a variety of hit-and-miss tactics that cost time and money but produce few results. With Price Insights, you can stop playing the guessing game. Wing Lam, ServiceTitan Product Manager, Pricebook, explains how Price Insights works:
In the Pricebook Pro dashboard, click on the column “Regional Averages.”
Price Insights shows your service price, compared to the average price in your region.
Toggle up or down to see the minimum and maximum prices for that service.
“This is not meant to tell you exactly how to price it. Everyone's business is different,” Lam explains. “But this gives you a ‘confidence.’ It gives you a sense of where you stand compared to other people.”
Juliette Armour, Principal Product Manager, Data, says Price Insights calculates the average regional price for each Pricebook Pro service based on data analysis of ServiceTitan customers who’ve opted to share the prices listed on their invoices over the past two years. Then it calculates the region by overlapping services into a circular view.
“The regional average is calculated by taking the average price for that service across all the customers whose circles overlap with each other. This is calculated separately for each service,” Armour says. “Now, we are updating Price Insights daily instead of weekly.”
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2. Smart Start
While ServiceTitan does its best to assist customers through the onboarding process, and well after, Baker recognizes how overwhelming setting up the initial pricebook can be for busy contractors. The former multi-trades operations manager describes the process as “painful.”
“Once you figure out your time and your materials, then am I doing labor markup? Am I doing material markup? Do I want a PO markup? Now I have task after task after task inside the system…How long is it going to take? I have to constantly update it over and over again, and it just takes, what? Time,” Baker says. “Who has extra time every day?”
Lam says the Pricebook Pro team curated specific pricebooks for the HVAC, plumbing, and electrical trades, complete with product images, data, and recommendations, to help contractors save time, but it still took too long for customers to add items.
Powered by Titan Intelligence, Smart Start prompts new Pricebook Pro users with a few questions, such as what industry you serve and what state you operate in, then aggregates the data by customer trade, size, and region to determine what services, materials, and equipment are most used for that cluster of companies, Armour explains.
“It just takes all of the manual work out of the equation, using the wisdom of the crowd to load the Pricebook Pro content that is most relevant to you,” Armour says. “With the most recent update, we now include estimate and proposal templates in Smart Start. Based on the Pricebook Pro content that Smart Start has loaded for you, we assemble good-better-best proposal templates so your technicians can start using them out of the box.”
3. Dynamic Pricing
Updating your pricebook consistently, and in real time as prices go up or down, also takes time, Baker says. And even when you do stay on top of this task, the number of items in your pricebook expands exponentially, which forces techs to scroll through until they find the item they need.
“Then what happens? Your technician can't find what he was looking for. Awesome. So they type in ‘miscellaneous,’ make up their own price anyway, and you bang your head on the keyboard,” Baker says. “Does anybody here not work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year? No. Your pricebook should do the same for you.”
Lam says ServiceTitan developed its Dynamic Pricing tool to help you keep your prices up to date and your profit margins protected “with as little work as possible.”
Dynamic Pricing allows you to adjust pricing for flat-rate services based on multiple factors, such as after-hours jobs, add-ons, membership discounts, and more. You simply set your own rules based on your company’s billable rates, markups, surcharges, and custom modifiers.
While Dynamic Pricing is available to core ServiceTitan users, Lam says only about 20% of ServiceTitan customers currently use it.
“So, one out of five customers are currently using Dynamic Pricing. This is a huge game changer,” Baker emphasizes. “It's living inside of your pricebook right now, and it's here to help you. This is going to automate your pricebook in ways you could have only hoped for two, three, or four years ago.”
Dynamic Pricing is also a great example of gaining an edge with pricebook automation, Binshtock says.
“If you set up the automation to automatically update costs, you've set up a pricebook that starts to manage itself today,” he says. “If your vendor updates its costs overnight and you have updates automated, it'll update the costs in your materials and equipment lists. It'll update the service prices that have those items linked to them. That can all happen overnight while you're sleeping, and your technicians are out selling at the right price in the morning.”
4. Configurable Services
Configurable Services, a brand new feature being developed by ServiceTitan, provides a pop-up tool that allows users to quickly select from a variety of products that best fit the job at hand. Using the power of Titan Intelligence and AI, Configurable Services completes the task by automatically surfacing the products that match the criteria in your pricebook.
Armour says the TI algorithm that powers Configurable Services is called generic material mapping. It looks at the name and description of each material in your pricebook, then uses that textual data to map that material to one of 1,600 Pricebook Pro generic materials. The system then chooses the top 10 materials determined to be the most likely matches and surfaces those in the quick-add list.
“The algorithm will get smarter over time as it learns from your technician selections, and this feature requires zero manual setup,” Armour says. “Titan Intelligence will map all your materials for you, so you can get back to the more important things.”
Currently in beta testing, Configurable Services also integrates with Dynamic Pricing so when you make that service or product selection, it also changes the pricing for you, Lam says.
“Now you're seeing a consistent margin across your jobs because it knows which item you're using for the actual task,” Lam says.
Baker also points out how the new feature will track consumables used on installs more accurately, which also protects your profit margins. And apprentices and younger techs can access the same search results as more experienced techs with individualized mapping results.
“I can't wait. I think it's going to have such a huge impact,” Baker says.
5. Smart Proposals
Another new feature in the works is Smart Proposals, which automatically generates proposals for you based on knowledge from industry experts combined with the power of your own data. It uses that information and data to automatically create a good-better-best proposal template customized for your specific business.
“If you have historical data, we use that and look at your invoices and opportunities from the past two years to see the most frequently created items in your estimates and proposals, then aggregate that data into templates based on your pricebook, and based on the way that you sell,” Armour explains. “If you don't have any historical data, that's fine too. We lean on knowledge from our industry experts to add generic pre-built templates for your industry based on the Pricebook Pro content that you loaded into your pricebook.”
In the future, the team plans to aggregate data from across all of ServiceTitan, using material and service mapping algorithms to find the best proposal templates based on performance history, average ticket, and conversion rate. Job-specific proposal recommendations may also be coming soon.
“With Smart Proposals, we want to be able to create the right proposal for the right job on the fly, so we want to get proactive about that,” Binshtock says. “When your technician is at the job, the easiest thing for them to do is just turn the iPad around and show that proposal that we've built based on the technology.
“There are so many learnings within your individual shop, and then multiplying that across all the shops…the technology will continuously learn and improve based on that,” he adds. “I think we have the opportunity to reach new levels in terms of conversion rates, ticket sizes, and back office efficiency.”
