November/December 2021

CRM Systems
Continued from page 46
been confirmed for installation but also those that
have been put on hold or have been cancelled,
supporting effective cashflow forecasting.
It’s Status Progression tool also allows them to
manage the lead to sale pipeline, establishing
process and automating tasks.
“We’re now tracking those enquiries,” Simon
continues. “If they haven’t been touched in three or
four days by the sales team, we’re going back and
revisiting them whether that’s an email or picking
up the telephone. They aren’t being lost.”
In addition to allowing installers to map their
lead-to-contract process, Business Pilot’s Status
Progression Tool also allows them to do the same
for contract-to-delivery, something which has
been instrumental in supporting Three Counties
Window in navigating its way through the home
improvement boom.
“We’d done a sort of ‘time and motion’ study to
try and understand our processes from the point
at which we had the contract in our hands to
installation. It turned out that we had 44 or 45
processes – far more than I thought – to get a
contract to installation,” Simon continues.
“Multiply the time involved by however many
contracts you do in a month, and you see very
quickly how much time was going into a very basic
but overly complex process. We were just touching
the same bits of paper time and time again and
entering the same data over and over because
all these spreadsheets didn’t talk to one another.
Business Pilot has changed that. Everything’s in
one place and it happens automatically. We’re
busier than ever before but we have more control.
We’re a better business.”
Contact Business Pilot:
0333 050 7560
www.businesspilot.co.uk
@BusinessPilotUK
'WINDOW PEOPLE' AT THE HELM
Total Installer talks to Business Pilot’s Ryan Schofield...
Alongside his role as a director and
founding partner of cloud-based
CRM and business management tool,
Business Pilot, Ryan Schofield retains his ‘day
job’ at installation company, Thames Valley
Windows. As a result, he knows only too well
the challenges installers face on a daily basis.
“We’re window people, not software people,”
Ryan says. “If we see value in something, for
us and our customer base, we will bring it in [to
Business Pilot]. We’re not looking to introduce
things just because they look good.”
Game-changing email function
One such development, billed as a
communication game-changer, is Business
Pilot’s recently unveiled email integration
system. Automatically pulling emails into the
CRM and assigning them to a lead or job, this
new feature creates a ‘clear and instantly
accessible audit trail’, with significant benefits
for users, as Ryan explains:
“How much time do you spend looking for
emails?” he says. “We know it’s a nightmare and
when you’re running an installation business with
lots of people in your team and lots of jobs on the
go, emails, [which have] disappeared or not been
shared properly, can have a massive impact on
your business and installations.
“Our new email integration genuinely puts an
end to hunting for lost emails or asking round
the office to see if a colleague sent them in the
first place! A unique email is assigned to each
lead or job as soon as it’s created. You can copy
and paste it into your preferred email client in
the ‘cc’ or ‘bcc’ box, or send direct from within
Business Pilot.
“Either way, you get an instantly accessible and
shared record of each email correspondence
within the CRM. You, and anyone in your team
can see exactly where each job is, what was
said, and even automate those emails that you
send on a regular basis through integration with
our Status Progression tool.”
It’s this kind of detail that can make all the
difference in the current climate of high demand
and low supply.
Obviously, when it comes to the latter, if products
simply don’t turn up, there is not a lot you can do,
but Business Pilot can soften the blow.
Rescheduling jobs is quick and easy with
the Schedule Board’s simple drag and drop
amendment function, while a traffic light
system clearly displays delivery status. In
addition, the email integration system’s
template facility can speed-up vital
communication between all parties involved.
In busy times such as these, it might be easy
to lose track of profitability, but Business Pilot
makes it easy to keep on top of this too.
“Just by clicking a few buttons, I can see our job
costs and generally speaking, when I compare
those back to our management accounts, they
are pretty close,” says Ryan.
“So, in a much more user-friendly way, I can
have visibility on the profit and loss of the
business; the products that are performing, the
products that are not, even the performance of
individual sales people...
“Ultimately, our aim is to help make your
business more manageable, more scalable and
more efficient,” adds Ryan. “That, in a nutshell,
is what we offer.
“Our ongoing development is based around
providing our users with the best possible tools
we can, to tackle the challenges of our industry
and make their day-to-day lives as smooth and
easy and efficient as possible.”
48 T I NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2021 PRACTICAL CONTENT FOR THE GLAZING INSTALLER & HOME IMPROVEMENT SPECIALIST