“Every Monday I come in and I ask Dave what's been sold in the last 10 days.”
Operations lead
Solar and heat pump business, Scotland
Background
This is a large install business covering the whole of Scotland. Solar and batteries are most of the work, with heat pumps and several types of insulation alongside, and they cover the whole country. They run their own call centre, a large field sales team and a department per product, and were handling roughly a thousand leads a week. They'd tried Payaca once before, in 2021, when it was mainly a quoting tool.
The challenge
They'd moved from Google Sheets to Helios about two and a half years earlier. It saved some time but never got everything in one place: leads, appointments, sold-job paperwork and job files each lived somewhere different. Only 40 people were on Helios, and none of the engineers.
Why Payaca
Helios was getting more expensive than they'd planned and still didn't do what they needed, and the provider was trying to change their contract. They wanted one system that sales, the office, the call centre and the people on site would all use, with control over who sees what, and it had to connect to the dialler they already ran.
A CRM only half the business used
On paper they'd left spreadsheets behind. In practice a sale still touched four or five tools. A lead came in through one CRM and went to the dialler, the call centre booked it into a shared calendar, and the rep uploaded the signed contract, photos and design through an online form. Then the office set up the job in Helios and made a Drive folder for it.
Engineers weren't in the system at all. Reps couldn't see why one sold job sat for two months while another went in the same month, which caused friction in the office. Service plans ran on a separate direct debit tool, and the compliance manager reckoned around a hundred past customers who weren't on a plan were just lost in the system.
“It's so much easier than the old system. The hard part was pulling the data through, and that was shocking.”
Compliance manager, during onboarding, on moving the team off Helios
Five weeks, at full volume
There was no quiet period to switch over in. Leads, sales and installs had to keep moving the whole time, so the job data came out of Helios and into Payaca in the first week, while the team kept selling.
Four onboarding sessions covered the build: pipelines per department, proposal templates, the roles and permissions the sales and call centre teams needed, and the forms their reps fill in on site. They went live at the end of June with the dialler connected, so call centre outcomes now move jobs in Payaca and Payaca stage changes update the dialler.
They signed for 60 users. By early July they'd taken 100 seats, and in August they moved up to Scale Max. The change wasn't instant for everyone, and nobody pretends otherwise. By late summer the operations lead running the rollout put it simply: "A lot better now that they're starting to get used to it."
How a job moves now
Every new enquiry gets an automatic text, which runs to between two and three thousand a month. The call centre works the lead from the dialler, the appointment is confirmed, and the customer gets a text confirming their appointment. When someone heads out to the property, the mobile app texts the customer that they're on the way.
Proposals go out from Payaca with options built in, so a customer can see a system with or without a battery in one document. Once one is accepted, automations move the job to the next stage and invoices sync to QuickBooks. Across the account that's over 20,000 automated actions a month.
The roles matter too. Sales reps see their own jobs and none of the cost prices or margins. Managers see the whole pipeline. Only admins see profitability.
Monday mornings
The operations lead who runs the system starts each week by asking Agent Dave what's been sold over the last ten days, then checks it against where he got to the week before. Accounts pull monthly sales from analytics, and custom finance dashboards are being built so they can stop trimming exports in Excel.
Between 150 and 200 proposals are now accepted in Payaca every month, and around 350 invoices go out, nearly all of them syncing straight to QuickBooks.
The results
Between 80 and 100 people working in Payaca, against 40 on their old CRM, with field staff on the mobile app.
Over 20,000 automated actions a month.
Between 150 and 200 proposals accepted a month, and around 350 invoices a month syncing to QuickBooks.
Grew from 60 seats to 100 in their first weeks, and moved up to Scale Max within three months.
What they use in Payaca
- Pipeline management
- Interactive proposals
- Mobile app
- Automated communications
- Workflow builder
- Invoicing
- Xero & QuickBooks
- Open API
- Agent Dave
- Analytics dashboard
Looking ahead
Next on the list are finance dashboards built for their accounts team, and a look at Glow, Payaca's own solar design tool, so reps can design and quote without leaving Payaca.
Map contains OS data © Crown copyright and database right 2023.
We've left out the customer's name and identifying details. The story, quotes and figures come from their own account and conversations with our team.