When First Response started to grow, the team struggled to make sense of their performance. That’s when Tim Peterson, decided to use Databox to centralize sales, marketing, and financial data. This decision played a pivotal role in their success.
Anyone who’s ever hired a contractor or maintenance company knows it can be a struggle to get service on smaller jobs – let alone quick, high-quality work.
As a builder and contractor, Tim took on this challenge when he founded First Response – a maintenance and building solution for small-to-medium commercial buildings.
Drawing from his experience in both commercial and residential builds, Tim had a clear vision. First Response would focus on the often overlooked “little jobs” that most competitors dismissed or were uninterested in.
In the early days of First Response, Tim mentioned they had a small management team. ‘You could touch and feel everything; there was a gut feeling of how everything was going,’ says Tim. But as the company grew, the team found themselves spending a lot of time jumping between tools, trying to make sense of their performance. This meant that management struggled to keep an eye on sales figures and had no clear way to track performance against goals. ‘We didn’t really know exactly what our [sales] numbers were,’ Tim admits. To grow more efficiently, Tim realized he needed a better way to shed some light on sales, marketing, and financial performance across the company.
In Tim’s previous role, the company had a dedicated department responsible for consolidating data into reports. But, at First Response, things were different – they didn’t have the resources to handle data the same way.What Tim needed was a solution that could bring everything together: “I needed to find something that could give us the KPI data we need across the business, that has the ability to communicate with the main systems producing data in.” When Tim spoke with Synx (a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner), they introduced him to Databox. Immediately, he realized that Databox was exactly what he needed. It could pull data from different tools and present it all in one view. Tim explained, “These systems all have their own KPIs, but the benefit of Databox is that it’s all in one place.”
With Synxs’ help, Tim and his team connected all their tools to Databox. In the first month, their main focus was on building dashboards for different parts of the company. They gathered data from HubSpot CRM, marketing channels, and Xero, to visualize the entire sales process – from website visits to meetings to new customers.
Tim explains, ‘We track sales KPIs from HubSpot CRM—the whole process from proposals to new customers and meetings. We track our marketing performance from HubSpot. How many people are visiting the site, impressions… We track our Google Ads performance. We track financial stuff from Xero. And we track our individual KPIs.’
Now, Tim and his team use sales dashboards to motivate better sales performance and stay on top of the pipeline. They use marketing dashboards to get a quick view of campaign success, and financial dashboards to gauge the health of the business, forecast revenue, and more.
Tim explains, ‘It’s just handy having everything in one space. Just swipe left and right and you have a whole overview of how the business is performing instead of having to log in to different accounts and platforms.’
‘From a sales perspective, it’s been a difference’ Tim says. By giving everyone in the office access to performance data, Tim mentioned there was more of a team focus. ‘It was good that the people could log in and see how they’re doing compared to peers’ Tim adds. He continued to explain that this visibility meant people became a lot more proactive about asking for help and sharing ideas.
Not only did this benefit the teams, but managers and directors could now see the numbers in real-time. At any given time, they could pull up a dashboard on their phones and get a better sense of how they were performing.
Since implementing Databox, First Response saw a 55% increase in sales year-over-year.
Tim explains that it was in January 2020 that the sales team started to use Databox more frequently. Having all of their data in one place is what helped them to grow during the pandemic. He adds ‘With the way our systems work, teams have to generate revenue over and over again. So if they did well one month, they can still be at the bottom of the leaderboard the next month’. He explains that the sales dashboards in combination with the Slack messages, encouraged team members to work harder. It fostered healthy competition amongst peers and encouraged them to push for more sales.
‘It really did drive results positively,’ Tim says.
Tim credits much of their success to Databox, emphasizing the platform’s role in providing more visibility into their performance.
“Just having everything in one place and having really crisp, clean data. It’s really clean and up-to-date, it’s drawing information from multiple sources and putting it in one place for you. You’re not relying on someone writing a report and giving it to you—it’s coming straight from your sources.”