Anyone who’s ever hired a contractor or maintenance company knows it can be a struggle to get service on smaller jobs—much less quick, high-quality work.

That’s something Tim Petersen, licensed builder, and founder sought to change with First Response Maintenance Services. A high-quality maintenance and building solution for small-to-medium commercial buildings, First Response specializes in taking on the small jobs that most competitors aren’t interested in.

Tim knew that growing a business like that meant the management team needed a way to keep a pulse on sales and other key performance markers. We talked with Tim to learn more about how First Response Maintenance Solutions uses Databox to do just that.

The Challenge

When Tim first founded the company, they were small. It was easy for management to maintain a good sense of performance and how things were going. As the company grew, though, that started to get a lot harder.

“We were flying blind,” Tim said. “We were really small and from a management perspective, you can touch and feel everything. As the company’s grown, you can’t control things to that level.”

Without a clear, centralized view into KPIs across the company, Tim and the team spent a lot of time logging into and out of several different tools—just to get some sense of performance.

Tim knew they needed a more efficient way to shed more light on sales, marketing, financial, and all kinds of performance across the company.

Here are the challenges First Response Maintenance Solutions faced:

• Gain insight into KPIs: According to Tim, First Response was largely flying blind as they began to grow, with no clear or efficient way to view their performance against goals.

“I needed to find something that could give us the KPI data that we need across the business, that had the ability to talk to the main systems that produce data in our business.”

• Increase sales performance: Without adequate visibility into sales performance, the team had no benchmark and no mechanism for improving the numbers that they couldn’t see or measure effectively.

“Previously we were sort of flying blind. We didn’t really know exactly what our [sales] numbers were.”

• Bring distributed data into a single hub: While most of the tools First Response uses for sales and marketing have their own internal analytics, Tim needed to spend less time bouncing around them.

“We need to have systems that communicate and are efficient, so we don’t lose a lot of time in administration and processing information across different systems.”

The Solution

When Synx, a HubSpot Diamond Solutions Partner company introduced the team to Databox, Tim knew it was exactly what they needed. They got to work connecting all their data sources and building out the dashboards they needed.

They connected HubSpot Service, LinkedIn Ads, JIRA, PayPal, Instagram Business, Google My Business, Google Ads, Google Search Console, Google Sheets, Xero, Drift, YouTube, Facebook Pages, Seventh Sense, Google Analytics, Wistia, HubSpot CRM, and HubSpot Marketing.

“These systems all have their own KPIs, but the benefit of Databox is that it’s all in one place,” Tim said.

Now, the team uses leaderboards and sales dashboards to motivate even better sales performance and stay up to date on their 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.

First Response’s Top Integrations

Here are the solutions First Response found with Databox:

• Gain insight into KPIs: The whole team now uses Databox to monitor everything from sales pipeline to Google Ads performance and financials. Each team member also tracks their individual KPIs.

“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.”

• Increase sales performance: According to Tim, they use sales leaderboards to keep reps motivated and avoid tunnel vision toward the big deals. It also helps to spur a little constructive competition.

“One of the biggest benefits I’ve seen with Databox is it encourages people to work really hard to make sure that we’re still winning the little jobs, rather than waiting for the big jobs to come in. It’s helped build relationships. It’s helped build repeat business. It’s helped keep people employed, particularly through COVID last year.”

• Bring distributed data into a single hub: In one place, Tim and the rest of the team can all access any data point they want. They can check on financial metrics, identify top customers, and ensure they’re producing enough pipeline to hit their revenue targets.

“We can check each month that we’re making money. We can measure how quickly our invoices are getting paid and who our good customers are. We look at the pipeline to make sure we’re putting enough in at the top of the funnel and the Databox pipeline graphic is really good for that.”

The Results

“It really did drive results positively,” Tim said.

According to Tim, it’s been about 18 months since they completed the setup and started implementing Databox in earnest—starting right around the time a global pandemic threw a big wrench into operations. Despite that, First Response Maintenance Solutions has grown sales by 55 percent year-over-year. The visibility of KPIs throughout the company has increased by 70 percent, and the number of goals they actually achieve has grown by 40 percent.

“Having the reports all in one place, you’ll actually look at reports you didn’t know you need to read,” Tim noted. “And you look at it and think, ‘I didn’t even realize that was a problem’ or ‘That’s doing better than I thought.’ You can make decisions that you probably wouldn’t have in the past.”

Here are the results First Response saw using Databox:

• Gain insight into KPIs: Instead of spending a ton of time jumping from one tool’s analytics suite to another (and back again), Tim and the team can spend 5 minutes and get an overview of the company’s entire, end-to-end performance.

“It’s handy having all that information in one place. In 5 minutes, you get a whole overview of how your business is performing, without having to log in and log out.”

• Increase sales performance: Despite a global pandemic, First Response’s sales grew by 55 percent in 2020, thanks “in large part to the visibility into our performance that Databox enables.”

“During COVID last year, our sales went up 55 percent. A big part of that is sales really started getting up and running with Databox in January 2020—just having all that information because if you don’t have it, you don’t know to keep pushing.”

• Bring distributed data into a single hub: Having all their KPIs centralized in one hub makes it easier for Tim to access, trust, and make decisions based on the data in front of them.

“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.”