Business Pilot has returned from three days at Glassbuild America in Atlanta with significant new business leads, potential new business partners, and is now better positioned to expand internationally.
“This was our first year exhibiting at Glassbuild America, and it has benefited us far more than we ever expected it to,” Business Pilot’s Managing Director Elton Boocock said.
“We’ve already lined up five demos with potential customers, and how well we progress with them will pave the way for how we establish a full-time presence in the US. We will definitely deliver the training in person if they come on board.
“We’ve been established for five years in the UK, and in that time we have grown incredibly successfully, with one in every 1.15 businesses that we pitch our services to becoming customers. We weren’t expecting to get that kind of success oversees on our first trip to the States, but even the most optimistic of our team were surprised with the interest American installers showed in our CRM system.”
Elton explained that this first trip was designed more as a fact-finding mission. The company has been making critical changes to the Business Pilot software in preparation, and the team wanted to make sure they hadn’t missed anything important.
“When you offer a software product like Business Pilot to users in a different territory to the one it was originally designed for, you can complicate the user experience to the point where it becomes confusing,” Elton said. “Instead, we went through a process called ‘regionalisation’, which allows us to sell Business Pilot into different countries without users in the UK being affected.
“These changes can include differences such as calculating tax, and the way people search for addresses.
“This way, not only can we expand internationally without upsetting the apple cart, but we can develop new modules and products that will directly benefit our customers in the UK, based on our experiences abroad.”
Despite low-key intentions, Business Pilot developed closer working relationships with US-based software companies, including Paradigm Vendo, a home improvement contractor sales app.
The two digital business and sales management platforms are now seamlessly integrated via an API, to remove double entry input and to help improve business efficiency. Customer details, lead information and sales appointments entered into the Business Pilot system can be pulled through to the Paradigm Vendo platform ready for quoting and selling jobs virtually or in the home.
“If we are successful in the US, our users in the UK will really benefit,” Elton concluded. “We are very much about collaboration, and what we learn in the States can help us design some exciting new products and services on home turf!”
