I have helped others in their startup. Since showing is must more effective than advicing my goals was to:
‘BUILD a business in within a year.
Additionally the goal was to have a business information in the palm of my hand.
With a bit of pride I can say: “mission accomplished”
These are the scale up tools we used. Learn and build your business faster.
How 2018 started
The year started with a trusted business model. A dedicated team ready to start. And a customer problem we could solve.
Nordic Comfort, Dutch Design.
We combined the best Nordics isolation standards with Dutch construction traditions.
Direct access to skilled labour and low cost resources allowed us to create high quality products with competitive prices.
With the customer insights in place and a proven prototype, we moved to the next challenge:
How to SELL 10X and BUILD a business?
Tools that BUILD the business
Like there is a mobile app for everything. There is a tool for each entrepreneurial challenge. A year of testing, using and learning gave the had the following as a result.
The ‘IBC Kozijnen’-process in a nutshell
Customers arrive on our website (Chrome) when leaving their details. Outlook notifies us with an email.
At the same time a new customer and a lead is added to Pipedrive. This programs helps us to track and follow up on our sales effort
We use “Bereik” an online virtual number to talk to our customers.
ScheduleOnce makes our agenda available for them.
We use Dropbox for business to store and share files within the team.
Invoices are made with InvoiceNinja. It is used to collect payments and incoming revenue streams.
Mollie is the IDEAL payment provider.
Zapier helps us to communicate to all systems.
For customer projects and installations we use Asana
The tools that made the difference
Pipedrive
The number of leads and associated actions triggered us to look for a better way to manage our sales actions.
Pipedrive offered the solution. It proved to be a robust sales pipeline management. It provides a good overview of our sales, and enabled us to focus on priority deals.
It is easy to setup and integrate with other tools. We added most other tools to Pipedrive.
Bereik.io
A fixed number anywhere any time
We have a small team traveling and working on many locations. Still we field the need to have need to have office hour support. Instead of hiring one receptionist we used ‘Bereik’ (Dutch for ‘Range’).
With this tool we shared one fixed number. This is transfer the number to our mobile phones.
With ‘Bereik’ we could handle incoming and outgoing calls from any location by any person according to a schedule that worked best for us.
ScheduleOnce.
Customer appointments made easy
ScheduleOnce allows our customers plan site visites at a time that works for us both. Instead of going back and forth between agendas. Customer select a moment that works for them from timeslots we have allocated upfront.
It helped us increase customer satisfaction, efficiency and conversion rate.
Asana for Small Business is a guide that.puts you in control of your business and shows you how to effectively manage it. It simplifies team-based working. We use is to manage delivery actions, schedule work and communicate about specifics tasks with the team members on customer locations.
InvoiceNnja
manages the incoming revenue stream
Creating invoices and tracking payments can be very time consuming. We wanted to be able to sent invoices within minutes, stay on top of accounts and get paid faster. InvociceNinja solved that problem.
With the IDEAL payment provider MOLLIE we had customers go through smooth payment process.
Zapier finally helped us bring all tools together. Copy pasting one set of information to the other was history. It takes a bit of work to figure our the ‘Zaps’ but they payoff is worth it.
What we look to add to add toolset:
Now our focus goes to promoting multiple sales funnels and systemically capturing customer feedback and recommendations.
If you have useful tool for us, we are like to hear your suggestions and learn from your experiences.
