Etowah Lane Equipment Rental / BB-Demo – Discovery
Callcompleted
Etowah Lane Equipment Rental · 2026-04-27 17:00
Discovery on 27 Apr 2026. DeShawn Mitchell wants one trusted view of a contractor across branches, side by side with Signalvane, not instead of it. Enterprise is sized, but budget sits with his finance lead and IT is unconfirmed.
What was said
What this says
Current to 13 Oct 26Discovery on 27 Apr 2026. DeShawn Mitchell wants one trusted view of a contractor across branches, side by side with Signalvane, not instead of it. Enterprise is sized, but budget sits with his finance lead and IT is unconfirmed.
What happened: DeShawn Mitchell, VP National Accounts, described branches quoting blind because the rental system, CRM, credit tool and a spreadsheet disagree. Jordan Pike sized it at Enterprise and Hannah Lowe covered Snowflake, connectors and security.
Customer view: He will not frame this as replacing Signalvane, and says a side-by-side on a handful of accounts is something he can get approved. He cannot commit budget alone, as it goes through his finance lead.
Commercial: The working figure is one hundred and fifty-five thousand pounds all-in with implementation, not an annual price. The 4 Dec 2026 target is a planning date and moves if IT drags.
Watch: He does not know whether the company has a Snowflake account. The CIO owns the Signalvane suite and DeShawn wants to position the brain with him first.
Themes
Current to 9 Oct 26Theme
Single contractor account view
Importance
upsell
Sentiment
positive
Voice
champion
Who was there
BB-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
Current to 9 Oct 26- Hannah Lowe to send an architecture note and IT questions about Snowflake and the suite the day after the call.
- DeShawn Mitchell to choose three contractor accounts and brief his CIO before BB-Demo speaks to him.
- Jordan Pike to send a recap and book a follow-up once IT has reviewed the note.
Risks
Current to 9 Oct 26- The customer may not have a Snowflake account, which changes the timeline.
- The CIO owns Signalvane and could see the brain as a threat if approached cold.
- Budget sits with the finance lead, who has not yet seen anything real.
Opportunities
Current to 9 Oct 26- Enterprise tier with single sign-on and security review support.
- A small side-by-side on three contractor accounts could prove value before a wider commitment.
Transcript
Jordan Pike NoneHi DeShawn, hi Hannah. Can you both hear me okay?
DeShawn Mitchell NoneLoud and clear, Jordan. Hannah, I think you're on mute. No, there you go.
Hannah Lowe NoneSorry, yes, hello both. My headset decided to restart itself just as I joined. Is the audio all right now?- DeShawn Mitchell NonePerfect. Good to meet you, Hannah.
- Jordan Pike NoneGreat. Here's the plan, and I'll keep an eye on the clock because we have about half an hour. One line: I want to understand how your national accounts view works today and what a good first month would look like. Then Hannah will talk through how this sits technically, and we finish on next steps. Does that work for you, DeShawn?
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneWorks for me. Let's keep this moving. Can I start with a quick story? I was at one of our branches last week, south of Atlanta, standing at the counter while a contractor's foreman asked for a quote on a lift. The branch manager is a good guy, twenty years in the business. And he's looking at his screen and he has no idea that this same contractor had a payment issue on a job at another branch across the state. Credit knew. National accounts knew. He didn't.
- Jordan Pike NoneRight. So he quoted blind.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneHe quoted blind, yeah. And that's not a one-off. That contractor rents from something like forty of our branches. My national-accounts managers are trying to see that one customer through four different systems. The rental system, the CRM, the credit tool, and then a spreadsheet somebody in credit keeps because they don't trust the other three. Four views of one company, and none of them agree.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's a very clear picture, thank you. Can I ask, before I say anything about the product, what's the one thing you most need to know from me today? I'd rather answer that than walk you through slides you don't need.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneHonestly? Two things. Does it actually give me one view of the account that the branch can use, and how does it sit next to what we already have. We run Signalvane group-wide. Finance and the executive team live in it, and I'm not going to stand here and knock it. It does what it was bought to do. But it's a group view. Show me the account, not the dashboard. What does the branch see?
- Jordan Pike NoneAnd to be transparent, DeShawn, nobody on this call is asking you to rip anything out. Here's where we are: we're not replacing the group reporting. The question is whether the brain answers the contractor-level question better, for the people who ask it every day.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneThat's how I'd want to frame it upstairs, too. Side by side. If it's a replacement project, it's a two-year fight. If it's side by side on a handful of accounts, I can get a yes to try that.
- Hannah Lowe NoneOkay, so let me explain what the brain is in concrete terms, and tell me where it doesn't match what you picture. It's one layer over your sources: the CRM, the call and email history, tickets, finance, and so on. It's built and run inside your own Snowflake account, so the data doesn't leave your environment. You ask it a question in plain language, say, what is the current position on this contractor across all branches, and it answers from the underlying records and shows you where each part came from.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneInside our Snowflake account. Okay. Do we have one? I honestly don't know. Somebody in IT would.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's one of the first things I'd want to confirm. The short answer is that we need one, or we need to stand one up as part of the work. The longer answer is that it changes the timeline quite a bit depending on which. I'll put that in writing so your IT team can answer it without a meeting.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneGood. Put that in writing. They like writing.
- Jordan Pike NoneDeShawn, can you walk us through those four systems a bit more? When a national-accounts manager needs the whole picture of a contractor, what do they do today, step by step?
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneSo, say it's a big contractor, rents from a lot of branches. The manager opens the rental system and pulls what's on rent and what's been returned, and that's by branch, so it's a lot of lines. Then they jump to the CRM to see who's the relationship owner and what's been promised on rates. Then they email credit to ask where the account stands, and credit looks at their own tool and the spreadsheet. By the time they have it, the answer is a couple of days old. And half of it is in somebody's inbox, not in any system.
- Hannah Lowe NoneMm. And the inbox part is exactly what people underestimate. Which of those four would you say is the least reliable?
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneThe spreadsheet, and it's also the most useful. Which tells you something.
- Jordan Pike NoneIt does tell you something.
- Hannah Lowe NoneIt does. Right, so on connectors, to be precise: the CRM and the call and email history are well-trodden. The finance and credit side depends on what the credit tool is and whether it exposes the data cleanly. I wouldn't promise you the spreadsheet is a clean connector. A spreadsheet that one person maintains is, in my experience, a process problem as much as a technical one, and we'd want to talk to whoever owns it.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneFair. She's very protective of it, I'll warn you. But she'd rather not be the single point of failure either, so I think there's a conversation there.
- Jordan Pike NoneOkay. Let me ask the sizing question, so we're not surprised later. This sits at the Enterprise tier for us, because of the size of the company, and because your security team will want single sign-on and a proper review. Hannah runs that review herself. For planning, the working number we have on the opportunity is one hundred and fifty-five thousand pounds in total, and that's the all-in figure with implementation included, not an annual price. I'm saying it now so nothing is a surprise.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneOkay. Thank you for just saying it. That's not a number I can commit on my own, by the way. Budget goes through our finance lead, and she'd want to see something real before she looks at it. But it's not a number that makes me want to hang up.
- Jordan Pike NoneUnderstood. What would make this a yes, from where you sit? Not from finance, from you.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneThree things. One, I pick a contractor I know is a mess, and the brain gives me a picture my managers recognise and the branch can use. Two, credit sees it and says that's right, or at least that's closer than the spreadsheet. Three, nobody in IT tells me it's a security problem.
- Hannah Lowe NoneOn the third one, I'd rather start early than late. What does your security team usually ask for when a new tool touches customer and credit data?
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneA questionnaire, always. A long one. And a call where somebody asks the same questions again, differently.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThat's normal, and I'd rather have the second call than not. I'll say this plainly: I'll answer what I can answer with confidence, and where I'm not sure I'll check with our security lead before I give you an answer, rather than guess. It means occasionally a question takes a day longer. It also means the answers you get are ones you can rely on.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneThat's what I want. I've been burned before by a vendor who said yes to everything and then it turned out the yes was a maybe.
- Jordan Pike NoneThat's not us. If there's a problem, your security team hears it from us first.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneGood. Now, can I ask about the side-by-side thing, because that's what I'll be selling internally. If we ran this next to Signalvane on a few accounts, what would that look like, and how long?
- Hannah Lowe NoneSo the shape I'd suggest is small and honest. You choose a few contractor accounts, ideally with different problems: one that's spread across many branches, one with a credit history, one that's just awkward. We connect the minimum number of sources to answer questions about those accounts. And then your managers, and someone from credit, ask the brain the same questions they'd normally spend a day assembling. You compare it against what they get today, and against what the group reporting shows.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneAnd if Signalvane's numbers and the brain's numbers differ, what then?
- Hannah Lowe NoneThen that's the useful part, honestly. Usually the difference is definitional: one counts a contract by its start date, one by its billing, or one branch records a customer under a slightly different name. I'd want to look at each difference with you rather than declare a winner. If the brain is wrong, I'd want to know why, and I'd say so.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneOkay. I like that, because it's the opposite of a bake-off. I can't have this look like a bake-off. My CIO owns the suite, and I need him with me, not against me.
- Jordan Pike NoneThen let's make him part of it. Is he someone we should talk to early, or would that make it feel bigger than it is?
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneEarly, but through me. Let me position it with him first. If you show up cold, he'll hear it as a threat. If I say my team has a specific problem the suite wasn't built for, he'll hear it as a gap, and gaps he's fine with.
- Jordan Pike NoneGot it. We follow your lead on that. Hannah, anything you'd want to know from his side before we talk to him?
- Hannah Lowe NoneMostly how the suite is fed. If it already pulls from the same four systems, there may be a cleaner route to some of the data, and I'd like to use it rather than build a parallel one. That's a question for whoever looks after it, rather than for DeShawn. And, sorry, DeShawn, one more thing for the questionnaire: where does your data need to live? You're US-based, so I'd assume US residency, but I'd rather ask than assume.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneUS, yes. Everything's here. I can't think of a reason anyone would want it anywhere else, but I'll confirm.
- Hannah Lowe NoneThank you. That goes in the notes.
- Jordan Pike NoneOne more from me on timing. We've got this on our forecast as a target of 4 December 2026. To be transparent, that's a planning date, not a promise from either side. Does that feel roughly right, too early, too late?
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneIt's not crazy. Depends on when I can get the side-by-side done and in front of the leadership team. If the first part goes well, I could see us there. If IT drags, it moves. I'd rather you plan on it moving a bit than be disappointed.
- Jordan Pike NoneThat's honest, and I appreciate it. Okay, so here's where we are. I think we have the shape. Let me say it back and you correct me. Goal: one view of a contractor account that branch, national accounts and credit all trust. Not a replacement for the group suite. A small side-by-side on a few accounts first. IT and security looped in early, with your CIO positioned by you. Is that right?
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneThat's right. One tweak: I'd like credit in the room for the comparison, not just told about it afterwards. If credit says it's right, the branches will believe it.
- Hannah Lowe NoneAgreed, and that's a good instinct. Someone from credit who'll say, honestly, that's wrong, is worth more than three who nod.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneHa. I know exactly who that is. She'll be thrilled.
- Jordan Pike NoneSo, next steps. Hannah, you were going to send a short architecture note and the security questionnaire?
- Hannah Lowe NoneYes. I'll send a short architecture note with a diagram showing how it sits inside your Snowflake account, the list of sources I'd expect us to need, and the questions for your IT team about the Snowflake account and the suite. I'll put that in writing and send it tomorrow. And I'll mark clearly what I'm confident about and what I'll come back on.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneGreat. From my side, I'll pick the contractor accounts. Three, I think. Let me think about which ones, and I'll get back to you by end of the week. And I'll have the conversation with my CIO before you speak to him.
- Jordan Pike NonePerfect. I'll send a recap with those points today and put a follow-up on the calendar for once your IT team has looked at Hannah's note. And if you need anything for your finance lead before then, tell me, and I'll build it around what she actually wants to see.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneWill do. Look, this was a good call. Practical. I'll say that the last vendor spent the first half hour on their own history.
- Hannah Lowe NoneWell, we've got your history, which is more interesting. Thanks, DeShawn. And good luck with the foreman and the lift.
- DeShawn Mitchell NoneHa, I'll tell him you said so. Thanks, everyone. Talk soon.
- Jordan Pike NoneThanks, both. Talk soon.
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