Through Jetbuilt’s cloud-based platform for proposal generation and 360-degree project management, the sales team at Kinly have entered a new era of operations. Kinly can now better allocate resources and manage lead-in times, ultimately providing an improved client experience with a workflow that saves time and money and adapts quickly to client needs, while the team can focus on building customer relationships.
Like many businesses, Kinly relied on manual and outdated processes for creating system quotes and proposals, often leading to delays in their sales cycle. "We put designs together using an Excel-based solution that was very manual and time-consuming,” recalled Mark Kempson, head of consulting at Kinly U.K. "Our proposals had to go through two departments before finally reaching clients." This disjointed approach made it difficult to streamline operations and provide accurate quotes in a timely manner, while changes in a project specification often required the whole process to be restarted again.
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Kinly's journey to Jetbuilt began a few years ago when Mark Kempson was introduced to the platform. "My manager had suggested looking into Jetbuilt, and I first spoke to members of the Jetbuilt team at ISE in 2019,” explained Kempson. “I visited the stand and saw demos of their product and thought it looked interesting." The motivation to look closer at inefficiencies in the proposal process stemmed from a broader initiative to examine internal operations at Kinly, a project undertaken in collaboration with a business consultancy firm. A pain point exercise revealed that one of Kinly’s top priorities was to find a quicker and easier-to-use quoting process, which would align with Kinly's ongoing efforts to become more efficient overall.
The decision to move Kinly’s quote-building process to Jetbuilt was the direct response to a trial exercise, initiated by Kempson, to demonstrate the potential benefits of making the switch. What began as an exercise to show the time-saving abilities of a dedicated quoting tool soon revealed other unexpected benefits. Mark Kempson and his team assessed how many jobs they handled annually across a variety of price ranges before focusing on their average quotation cost and calculating how long it took and how many resources were required to produce a quote for this average-size project.
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“The results were eye-opening,” recalled Kempson. “Not only were proposals taking a fraction of the time to generate, but the efficiencies mainly achieved from utilizing the inbuilt pricing, led to incredible workforce savings, allowing the pre-sales team to spend more time building client relationships rather than dealing with infinite Excel sheets. Jetbuilt also significantly reduced the cost of creating quotes.” Aside from the subscription, Jetbuilt costs nothing to use, while using the traditional system, Kinly spent money during the process of producing a proposal and sourcing the necessary product information and pricing. Product information and live dealer pricing are readily available on the Jetbuilt platform. "The switch was a no-brainer,” confirmed Kempson. “We came up with a report that was presented to our leadership team to get a trial phase off the ground."
“We designed Jetbuilt as a 100% return-on-investment tool that provides a substantial net gain for companies of all sizes,” explained Paul Dexter, CEO at Jetbuilt. “Learning about this exercise to test Jetbuilt and measure real savings across Kinly’s most commonly quoted projects was interesting and, ultimately gratifying.”
The team at Kinly estimates that they have saved at least one person's salary worth of manual pricing-related work. While some were apprehensive of this tool taking away their day-to-day work, this newfound efficiency has instead allowed them to focus on projects they actually sell, rather than dealing with prospective quotes all day. As a result, Jetbuilt has led to improved job satisfaction and productivity. Additionally, Jetbuilt's live pricing and data accuracy have made Kinly more reactive and agile in its quoting processes.
Another major value that Kinly has implemented is Jetbuilt’s latest innovation: Integrated Project Registration. “Product Registration is a very important feature for us,” confirms Kempson. “Now, when we land a project we can automate the process of registering products with manufacturers, rather than reaching out to each one individually; the sales support team loves it.”
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Following the success of the trial phase, Kinly first rolled out the Jetbuilt platform to the entire U.K. pre-sales and sales support teams, with the sales team set to join the platform before the end of the year. This has been followed by the decision to proceed with wider adoption of Jetbuilt across its global services operations in the US, and on European projects managed from the UK, demonstrating the integration of the platform into everyday operations at the company.
“Working closely with Kinly through their evaluation process was as critical for our team as it was for theirs,” concluded Dexter. “We are constantly learning the diverse and demanding needs of integrators. Through client feedback, we discover opportunities for growth, while confirming and reinforcing our strengths. I am proud that Jetbuilt meets the needs of the world’s leading integrators.”
