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Kiera Abbamonte on March 26, 2021 (last modified on January 10, 2022) • 6 minute read
Anyone whoâs ever hired a contractor or maintenance company knows it can be a struggle to get service on smaller jobsâmuch less quick, high-quality work.
Thatâs 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 arenât 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.
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.
âWe were flying blind,â Tim said. âWe were really small and from a management perspective, you can touch and feel everything. As the companyâs grown, you canât control things to that level.â
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 toolsâjust 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:
âI 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.â
âPreviously we were sort of flying blind. We didn’t really know exactly what our [sales] numbers were.â
âWe need to have systems that communicate and are efficient, so we donât lose a lot of time in administration and processing information across different systems.â
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.
âThese systems all have their own KPIs, but the benefit of Databox is that itâs all in one place,â 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.
Here are the solutions First Response found with Databox:
âWe track sales KPIs from HubSpot CRMâthe 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.â
âOne of the biggest benefits Iâve seen with Databox is it encourages people to work really hard to make sure that weâre still winning the little jobs, rather than waiting for the big jobs to come in. Itâs helped build relationships. Itâs helped build repeat business. Itâs helped keep people employed, particularly through COVID last year.â
âWe can check each month that weâre 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 weâre putting enough in at the top of the funnel and the Databox pipeline graphic is really good for that.â
âIt really did drive results positively,â Tim said.
According to Tim, itâs been about 18 months since they completed the setup and started implementing Databox in earnestâstarting 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.
âHaving the reports all in one place, youâll actually look at reports you didnât know you need to read,â Tim noted. âAnd you look at it and think, âI didnât even realize that was a problemâ or âThatâs doing better than I thought.â You can make decisions that you probably wouldnât have in the past.â
Here are the results First Response saw using Databox:
âItâs 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.â
âDuring 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 2020âjust having all that information because if you donât have it, you donât know to keep pushing.â
âJust having everything in one place and having really crisp, clean data. Itâs really clean and up to date, itâs drawing information from multiple sources and putting it in one place for you. Youâre not relying on someone writing a report and giving it to youâitâs coming straight from your sources.â
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