Ardfinnan Freight Services / BB-Demo – Discovery
Callcompleted
Ardfinnan Freight Services: documents · 2024-12-05 10:45
Discovery on 5 Dec 2024: Grainne Lynch and Finance Director Brendan O'Mahony described chasing data across order, tracking, Xero and email. Lewis Kerr pitched Growth at £44k with eight weeks' implementation, aiming to close by early February.
What was said
What this says
Current to 11 Oct 26Discovery on 5 Dec 2024: Grainne Lynch and Finance Director Brendan O'Mahony described chasing data across order, tracking, Xero and email. Lewis Kerr pitched Growth at £44k with eight weeks' implementation, aiming to close by early February.
What happened: Lewis Kerr ran a 32-minute discovery with Grainne Lynch and Brendan O'Mahony. Ardfinnan is a freight forwarder and customs agent with no Snowflake today.
Customer view: Grainne wants one question to pull delayed shipments and contacts from several systems. Brendan wants to see invoiced but unshipped customers without reconciling Xero and the order system by hand.
Commercial: Lewis positioned Growth with eight weeks' implementation and a £44k annual subscription. Brendan accepted the annual term and thirty-day notice as reasonable.
Watch: the proposal and contract template were still to be sent, and the evidence does not show Brendan's view of the price. The bespoke order system is a connector unknown.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Who was there
BB-Demo
Them
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Lewis Kerr to send the proposal and contract template on 5 Dec 2024.
- Lewis Kerr to follow up the following week.
- Aim to sign by early February.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- Ardfinnan has no Snowflake, so the account must be created during onboarding.
- The order system is bespoke, and the evidence does not show how much connector work it needs.
- The price was given verbally and Brendan had not yet seen it in writing.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- Growth subscription at £44,000 with an eight-week implementation.
- Finance use case on invoiced but unshipped customers brings the Finance Director into the buying group.
- Later growth through extra users or connectors, which Lewis said is straightforward.
Transcript
Lewis Kerr NoneHi Grainne, Brendan, thanks for making time this morning. I'd like to understand what Ardfinnan does, where things are painful for you, and whether the brain might be a fit. How does that sound?
Grainne Lynch NoneSounds good. So we're a freight forwarder and customs agent, we move goods for Irish exporters into the EU and UK. Pretty high-touch business.- Lewis Kerr NoneAnd where are the pinch points day-to-day?
- Grainne Lynch NoneWe've got order information in one system, shipment tracking in another, customer comms in email and Slack, and finance stuff in Xero. When something goes wrong with a shipment: a delay, a documentation issue, we're chasing information across three or four systems. It's quite frustrating, frankly.
- Lewis Kerr NoneSo if you could ask a single question and get information from all of them at once, what would that look like?
- Grainne Lynch NoneI could ask 'show me shipments delayed in the last week and who we need to contact', and it would pull that from the order system, the tracking system, and the customer file in one go. Right now I'm asking three people and waiting for emails back.
Brendan O'Mahony NoneAnd from a finance perspective, I'd like to see which customers we've invoiced but haven't shipped yet, it's a cash flow question. That's locked in Xero and the order system, and I have to manually reconcile.- Lewis Kerr NoneRight, so operational visibility and cash visibility. Tech-wise, what systems are you on?
- Grainne Lynch NoneWe've got a bespoke order management system, Xero for accounting, Slack for team comms, and I think that's really it. Email's in Outlook.
- Lewis Kerr NoneAnd do you have Snowflake?
- Brendan O'Mahony NoneWe don't have it.
- Lewis Kerr NoneThat's fine, we'd set it up as part of onboarding. So looking at what you've described, Xero, Slack, email, and a bespoke system, I think you're looking at Growth. That's a good fit for your size and scope. Growth gives you eight connectors, up to forty users, dashboards if you want to build them, and quarterly business reviews where we sit down and talk through how you're using it. To put a number on it: implementation is eight weeks, and then the annual subscription is forty-four thousand.
- Brendan O'Mahony NoneAnd what's included in the eight weeks?
- Lewis Kerr NoneWe'll set up Snowflake in your account, connect your systems, run training with your team, and make sure the connectors are pulling the right data before we hand over. Then you're live and self-service. If you want to add another connector later or more users, that's straightforward.
- Grainne Lynch NoneHow soon could we start?
- Lewis Kerr NoneOnce you sign, I'd aim to kick off within a week or two. Eight weeks from there, so you'd be live early in the new year. Does that timeline work for you?
- Grainne Lynch NoneYeah, that'd be good.
- Brendan O'Mahony NoneAnd the contract, is there a term?
- Lewis Kerr NoneAnnual terms. You sign up for a year, and then you renew. If you want to cancel, thirty-day notice. We'll come back around three months before expiry to talk about your renewal.
- Brendan O'Mahony NoneOkay, that's reasonable.
- Lewis Kerr NoneGreat. So let me send you a proposal and the contract template. I'll walk through everything again in writing, and if you've got any questions, especially on the financials, just let me know. I'd love to get this over the line by early February if we can.
- Grainne Lynch NoneEarly February sounds good to us.
- Lewis Kerr NonePerfect. I'll send that over today and follow up next week. Kind regards.