In our final video, Sam interviews Lucy Whittington about Connectably. You can find the transcript below.
Transcript:
[Samantha Grigg] Hi everyone, I’m Sam and I’m here with Lucy from Connectably. We’re going to find out a little bit more about Connectably today.
Hi Lucy! Do you want to tell us a little bit more about yourself, your history and Connectably and how it came about?
[Lucy Whittington] Sure okay, so Connectably is a small business software, it’s a CRM, with quotes and emails and it’s really, the connected part of it is it’s bringing all the things small service business owners need in one place. So it’s their sales, their marketing, and the getting paid… They’re usually the key areas that people are wanting all in one place so we’ve brought it all together in one app!
Do you want to tell a little bit more about your background and how you came to be Connectably?
Yeah, so my background, I used to work in software marketing for a long time in fact I actually launched Xero in the UK, that’s part of my software history, and then as a marketeer I went away, I got my own consultancy and agency and I actually then worked with small business owners.
So I’m in that unique position of knowing how all the software side of things works, but also knowing all of the day-to-day frustrations that small business owners have.
Do you want to tell me how Connectably helps SMEs in particular?
The thing with an SME, so everyone’s got different hats on and so what can happen is it’s very easy to forget something, did we follow up that lead you know, did we send that proposal, and has that person paid and just going through all those different tasks, even having one central place where all tasks can get allocated, or having the work flow that everyone can see.
As you know, we’re massive fans of Xero so do you want to tell us a little bit of how you got to be working with Xero as Connectably?
So my history with Xero is about as far back as you can go! I actually was the second hire in the UK and then I went off and did other things. So I have my own marketing consultancy, we do really cool stuff with Xero on that because you know, as much as we’re huge Xero fans, most of small business owners aren’t huge fans of doing bookkeeping. You know, it’s not top of their list of fun things to do!
So what we’ve done is that when you send a proposal or a quote out you can send it with an order form and because the items that are in the proposal comes from your Xero inventory when someone wants to go ahead and buy that they go “yeah great I’m gonna pay” on Stripe, put in the credit card or GoCardless or direct debit they go “yep, we’re going to go ahead,” and what happens is Xero will raise the invoice, know it’s been paid and reconcile it as well so that actually you don’t have to do any bookkeeping!
Brill! If you had 3 top tips to give to new users of Connectably, what would they be?
Definitely have a way of making sure everyone who contacts you as lead, even if that’s down to having a process in your business where if someone phones, you know your staff are trained to add them to the CRM.
So tips 2 and 3 are sort of the same subject which is around getting paid because that’s what most SMES want to do. So my tips around that is… number 1, have quotes and proposal templates ready to go and that kind of brings us into tip 3, have really easy ways of people paying you.
If you were to sum up Connectably in a sentence, how would you do so?
Connectably in a sentence, is the answer to your pain of evening admin!
Brill, thank you very much for your time!
You’re welcome!
