CASE STUDY
How Core Growth Strategies Unblocked Its Sales Proposal Automations Solution Implementation Using Well Aware’s Research & Assistance
Core Growth Strategies (CGS) is a Profit-First trained growth strategy advisor to lawn care, landscape, & trade service businesses.
Core Growth Strategies also provides bookkeeping and accounting services - potential clients can meet with members of the CGS team in order to explore a variety of plans that may suit their needs. During this phase of the sales process, CGS is responsible for organizing and presenting plan options that are both easy to understand and visually aesthetic - par for the industry.
The rest of the CGS workflow is as you’d expect - closing the contract, proceeding with invoicing, and ultimately kicking off the service delivery workflow.
THE CHALLENGE
When Well Aware first engaged with CGS around this particular workflow, the company had already decided upon using Ignition (known as Practice Ignition at the time of our engagement). The tool was recommended by several associates in their industry.
“Ignition makes it simple to sell, bill and get paid for your services - all in one place. With automated billing and payment collection through impressive online proposals, we help accounting and professional services businesses improve efficiency, optimize revenue and deliver seamless client experiences.” - Ignition.com home page.
On the surface, Ignition appeared to be the exact tool CGS was looking for to optimize their sales workflow. However, something was wrong:
CGS was unsuccessfully onboarded with Ignition, and was effectively in limbo with having the tool operate according to the expectations they had been sold on by the Ignition team! This ended up leading to months of frustration, as the CGS team not only wanted to be ready to go with their desired workflow efficiencies in sales - they were already tending to a number of other important company projects!
OUR APPROACH
DISCOVERY CALL
Well Aware’s CEO & principal consultant Conrad Ruiz began by requesting a discovery process for the situation itself. During this time, Conrad first met with CGS’s COO & their marketing/systems coordinator who were the primary stakeholders for this project. On his 1st call with the team, Conrad came to better understand the expectations of Ignition from CGS’s perspective, and where the operation of being onboarded with the tool became “stuck”.
The team felt led to believe that the onboarding process for Ignition would be far more seamless than it ultimately proved to be. The integration between Ignition and Quickbooks Online, for instance, proved to be incompatible with the Accounts & Services information management design that CGS had - the COO had to completely reconfigure how CGS named and managed that information just to make it work with Ignition. Once that was resolved, there came another task:
VIRTUAL ASSISTANCE
None of the service items in CGS’s Quickbooks would automatically align with the identical list of service items imported into Ignition. Each item had to be manually synced. One of the Well Aware virtual assistance team members was brought on to perform this simple yet rote task. Upon completion of this step, the team at CGS was finally able to utilize Ignition as their tool for streamlining proposals.
RESEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVE
Conrad Ruiz did not simply push and support getting the Ignition software to function as advertised. Conrad did an assessment of the market for other tools that could serve as alternative tools to ignition. In all, he sufficiently reviewed 5 other candidate tools - attending if not watching pre-recorded demos, getting on calls with sales representatives, and ultimately vetting whether these tools matched up to Ignition’s capabilities.
It was highly valuable to confirm this, as a software migration and build out can be costly to any small business, and we wanted to ensure due diligence was done on such a long-term investment. This was confirmed by Conrad’s review, as well as by calling Ignition itself to both identify the issues happening with CGS’s onboarding process, and better understand how Ignition works in contrast to the rest of the market. The former discovery work led Well Aware to better understand how it could both guide and work on behalf of CGS to reach its desired state with Ignition.
THE RESULTS
Well Aware was able to bridge the gap between the incomplete onboarding process CGS had come to such frustration with Ignition on, and being able to actually use the software. We were able to deliver peace of mind on the question surrounding alternative tools that could provide a better experience than Ignition without compromising on the most sought out features of the product. This allowed CGS to move forward with automating the rest of the Onboarding process for new clients and create even more capacity with the team.
“The CGS team was able to focus on their daily tasks and other current projects by contracting the Well Aware team. It was ideal to be mindful of the team's capacity and who should champion a project like this to gain the most traction in the shortest amount of time.”
- Christeen Era, CEO of Core Growth Strategies
Well Aware thanks CGS for their willingness to see to our advice around persisting through Ignition’s onboarding process, and for allowing us to provide assistance with the few rote tasks that were required to complete the onboarding process. This project was quoted $750.00 for its discovery. Principal consultant Conrad Ruiz effectively took on the research and management for the project, and was sustainable in completing his operation toward the definition of done at the aforementioned discovery cost. No additional cost for virtual assistance was billed - the effort committed cost less than the time and energy required to invoice for it, and we were happy to resolve a task that was so simple yet so rote - a straw that broke the camel’s back, if you will.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Amidst the desires of using Ignition as a proposal management tool, CGS highly sought efficiencies in their workflow, including additional automations between Ignition and the rest of CGS’s tech stack. As researched by both CGS and later Well Aware, Ignition has an effective integration with Zapier. Well Aware called upon its trusted automation engineer referral partner, John Elder of The Business Blocks, to both scope and create these zapier automations on behalf of CGS. At the time of this writing, John has yet to create these automations as he has been tasked with other automation projects within CGS. Upon completion of the Ignition-Zapier automation project, Well Aware will provide a report on the effort in a separate study.
If you have needs for time toward a project identical or similar to this case study, please feel free to contact Well Aware via our info@wellaware.me email address. We will get back to you shortly. Thank you for your time reading this case study. Be well. Be aware.
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