Thunderbolt Pipeline

Pros: Our company loves how responsive team is to our questions and concerns. Team has repeatedly gone above and beyond to make sure Thunderbolt is a software that meets all of our company's needs.

Cons: Anything we have disliked about Thunderbolt has been addressed appropriately by the Thunderbolt team.

For example, once we started using Thunderbolt on a daily basis we came across a time management issue when entering in Workforce Phases for each job. Instead of selecting the phase we needed for a job, we had to go through and delete each phase that didn't apply. Once we brought this issue to Team, they suggested bringing in a drop-down menu to select the phase we would need for any given job. This has helped us substantially.

Overall: It's incredibly easy for us to pull up Thunderbolt during our weekly bid meetings. Having all of our information for our bids in one place has been hugely beneficial.

Pros: Thunderbolt has become a powerful tool for our company. We send out over 100 proposals a month and have struggled at managing the status of each, which initially brought us to the product. Now every proposal is logged into a company wide system where we can update status, easily analyze hit ratios by customer, project type, project value, & margin. Thunderbolt also allows us to simply track monthly estimate volume and individual estimator performance.

Cons: Not much to complain about. Any tweak in search ability has been updated promptly by the Thunderbolt team.

It is refreshing to have a software tool that just focuses on one important piece of our business instead of the "jack of all trades" approach that we have found disappointing in similar software offerings.

Overall: Instant visibility on estimating performance.

Comments: Our company searched for quite a while to find a CRM software that was geared towards construction. We found limited options. Some of the big name sales softwares out there just feel as though they are geared towards large corporate firms and they stop at pipeline and sales tracking. The user experience is geared towards account reps and sales managers.

With Thunderbolt, we feel like we're using something specifically designed for Construction Professionals. The features and reporting we get follow our company's processes to a T - we use the CRM from the initial Bid Invitation right through to project completion. This is much more than just sales tracking. We now have a Customer Database, Bid Schedule, Pipeline (Pending Bids), Historical Data reports, and a Current Project list to help oversee operations. We're able to use this software to see what's happening with our Estimating team, Project Managers, and Field workers from anywhere, anytime.

Pros: Bid tracking

work in progress reporting

reports that tell you where you do the most work and make the most profit

Cons: There wasn't much i did not like. I've tried many software services similar to this and have been happy with my choice to use this service over the others.

Overall: Great product to help you determine what types of work your doing and helping you see where your doing the best at and the worst at. While initially there is a lot of data entry to get things up and running. I feel it is well worth it. You want to make sure and enter your final completion amounts on the project and final cost amounts on the projects as you finish them to get more data to help you see how you bid and how you finish. That is one of the features i really like. Take the time to talk to the team at thunderbolt, get it set up right, be diligent with it, and it will help you to see the big picture in your estimating and job profits. Like any software, there are bugs and little quirks here and there. but i can't emphasize enough how quick they are to respond and help or resolve issues. highly recommend. I have not had time to try out the scheduling and resource planning but if it is al usefull as the bid tracking i don't see how you can go wrong.

Pros: The ease of use especially remotely on my I Phone or I Pad is, for me, the basis of Thunderbolt's power.

Cons: The user interface could be sharpened. The content is accessible and easily inputted / viewed however it could be more user friendly.

Comments: We have primarily used Thunderbolt for its CRM features. We now a have a single repository of all proposals and customer contacts. It has been very helpful in enabling our company to grow and manage its expanding customer base. The ongoing support has been very responsive and we appreciate the pace at which new features are rolled out. If you are looking for a straightforward CRM and project management system that is easy to deploy and actually use, you should definitely consider Thunderbolt.