.png)
If your trade business has the job side under control but the sales side still feels scattered, this episode is worth a listen. Fred Schnell is joined by Noam Horenczyk from Simpro and Kate Hay from Motii to unpack what happens before the job is won, why pipeline visibility matters, and how a cleaner handover can protect both margins and customer relationships.
The conversation moves from spreadsheets and inboxes through to connected systems, better lead nurturing, and the role AI can play in reducing admin. The core message is simple: strong delivery starts before the job hits the operations team.
Intro Motii acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia. We pay our respects to elders past and present and acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first peoples of this land.
Welcome to the Motii Playbook. If you've ever felt like your systems are technically in place but somehow still feel chaotic behind the scenes, you're in the right spot. This is where we share what we're seeing, what's working, what's not, and the lessons businesses learn the hard way. Think of it as practical strategies straight from the trenches. Let's dive in.
Fred Schnell Welcome back to part two of what trade businesses can do right now to protect their pipeline. In part one, we unpacked why the market has shifted and what's really happening at the front end of a trade business. Today, we're going a little bit deeper and look into the how, the specific moves, tools, and the mindset shift that separates the businesses pulling ahead from the ones that are still waiting for the phone to ring. Noam Horenczyk from Simpro, and Kate Hay from Motii are back with me. Let's just shift a bit more towards the kind of the front end. So in your experience, and you know, the businesses that you typically work with, how do they manage their pipeline and the sales side of things?
Noam Horenczyk Yeah, so that's where there was always a gap with Simpro. Like, it was, it was not meant for that. Right? Some people use Simpro as a CRM but that, that's not what it's meant for. What I say is like, you can have Simpro set up perfectly where all the routing and the dispatching and the zones and the right technician and the right tools. But then you can just sit there and be like, okay, how do I get people? Right? How do I get, you know, how do I feed this machine? We never had any proactive way, and say like, proactive way in Simpro to actually also let you get that, right? We didn't have any, like, ads product or, you know, like, we have lead conversion, but it's not that, that kind of like, hey, how do I get people? Right? I have, I have set this machine up, I know I can service them, I know I have all the right parts, I have all the right workflows. I need to get customers.
Fred Schnell So, Kate, let's move a bit closer to your world then. So, when you first get into a business and you look at their sales pipeline, what do you see more often than not?
Kate Hay More often than not, what I see is a million spreadsheets. I see inboxes that have got a million emails that are not shared with other people. So, BDMs who are running kind of their own pipeline really, even though it's a business pipeline. So, I see a very much a lack of reporting or insight into, you know, how those leads are being captured, who's managing those, what state of play they're at, because it might all be listed in an individual spreadsheet that that person is keeping for themselves. But as a business owner, you don't get a whole lot of oversight, you know, into what's happening across the board. And I think this is really, really common because, you know, there's platforms like Simpro that manage the job, the job element of a customer lifecycle are in place quite frequently and usually used quite well, you know, because there's a, there's a whole lot of operational things that need to happen when we're running a job. So, you know, we're looking at quotes, we're looking at purchase orders, we're looking at logging time, we're looking at potentially tracking or GPS tracking or all those sorts of things that need to happen. Whereas on the sales side of things, often the lead comes in, somebody might, might call them and, you know, sort of try and qualify that lead and move it forward, but there's no real platform that's in place to capture that across the board. So, I see that more often than I don't, to be honest.
Fred Schnell And do you think that's got a lot to do with the fact that, you know, the industry is still heavily reliant on kind of reputation and personal kind of interactions and relationships?
Kate Hay I think there's two schools of thought to that. A lot of sales teams that I work with do have people that have been working in those particular roles for a long time, and traditionally it really was exactly that. It was going out for a coffee, it was seeing somebody on site, it was, you know, making some phone calls or text messages, and having a really personal relationship with someone. And there was no real need to track that in a really fancy dashboard or in a CRM platform. Whereas now, you know, the millennial generation, my generation, are used to having things at their fingertips digitally. So, you know, we're looking to flick out an email really quickly via a template, you know, that we didn't have to write again and again, you know, we've templated it so it's the same thing that goes out. Or we're looking to turn around leads really quickly because we know that if an email comes in, we can get something back out in five minutes, you know, we don't need to wait for half a day to book an appointment and go and see someone. So I think that a lot of the teams that I work with who have perhaps been there for a long time or have been in this industry for a long time, they're not used to using those sort of CRM platforms, or they don't want to use those CRM platforms. They've had their processes in place for a very long time, they're used to using, you know, operating directly out of their inbox or directly out of a spreadsheet, and that's what they want to continue to do. But times are changing. You know, we know that we want to connect platforms together so that we can get a seamless handover. We want to make sure that teams can talk to each other without having to, you know, get up from their desks and walk into a different room to then manually hand over information or manually transfer information. That needs to happen seamlessly and instantly. So, you know, these CRM platforms like Pipedrive or, you know, you're looking at some of the campaign platforms like Mailchimp or, you know, marketing platforms like Hubspot, they're actually really important to make sure that you're nurturing your customers and that you're nurturing those relationships.
Noam Horenczyk Yeah. I agree with all that.
Fred Schnell I think also, you know in marketing and sales there's a saying that there's no such thing as a no. There's often just a not yet, right? And particularly in the construction industry, right? In the construction world, I'd say this applies quite a bit, because like there's so many different reasons why a project or a job might not go ahead or be delayed, right? So budget approvals, DAs, financing not coming through, the timing is just not quite right or even just changing priorities in a family, right? So I'd say it's pretty important for a business to stay visible and continue to nurture those opportunities rather than simply making them... yeah, lost and okay, let's move on to the next one, right? And Noam, you mentioned that you like that Simpro group acquired a business in that particular space. So but now Kate, what does that look like in practice for a trade business? And what do you think needs to be in place to actually make this work?
Kate Hay Yeah, and I think if we, you know, if a business has a customer that reaches out and says, you know, I want to, I want to engage you to do some work, and maybe they're doing a house renovation, you know, they're looking at ripping out their bathroom or their kitchen and getting everything replaced. It's often not as simple as a as a customer who says, yeah, I'm ready to go. You know, I've got the cash, I've got the time, I've got the availability right now, and I want you to start next week, you know, pending you ordering materials and getting things ready to go. It's never that simple, is it? So especially not in this climate. Customers need to look at their finance, they need to look at their budgets. They're often, you know, ringing around to several different contractors trying to find competitive pricing so they're looking for different quotes so they can make a good decision about which way they want to go. And as a business, if you have a customer like that reach out to you and say, I want to engage you in the work, you need to keep that lead hot. You need to make sure that you're touching base with them, that you're catching up with them to understand where they're at in this process. You know, if they're waiting on finance, you should be, you know, checking in with them to see, have you got the finance? Are you ready to go? You know, if we want to secure materials or particular, you know, options that you're after for you, we need to start to, you know, get that locked in. So, if there are no processes in place, or if there's no, you know, set CRM that's managing that for you, that can fall through so quickly. Because it might feel like it's not a hot lead. The customer has reached out and said I'll be ready in three months time, and you think ah, I've got ages, you know, I don't need to follow them up every day, it's going to take months to get their finance. But in that three months, they might have reached out to, you know, five or six other trades and asked the same question. And one of those trades might be checking in with them every week or every couple of days, and they feel really nurtured, they've built that relationship with them, they're going to pick that trade to go with.
Fred Schnell Top of mind, right?
Kate Hay Right. And if it's, you know, even if you've got a competitive quote, if you're not seen to be invested in their journey, they're not going to invest in yours. And they're not going to come back to you and give you that work.
Fred Schnell Yeah, good point. So now let's just assume a business decides to invest in, say, optimising or systemising their sales pipeline. What do you think changes for a business owner who suddenly has, I'll call it full visibility over their, over their sales pipeline, Kate?
Kate Hay Ah, just the ability to make great business decisions because you've got that business visibility. The minute you can see what's happening and you can see what's churning under the surface and you can see what your incoming volumes look like and what your conversion rates look like, all of a sudden you can start to plan ahead, and you can start to look at your resourcing, and you can start to look at where your people are sitting, and if they're in the right spot. So if you can see that you've got, you know, 30 odd leads coming in per month that are being converted, fantastic, that could be a job a day, you know, that you need somebody to be on the tools for, if everything flows really well. So that gives you the ability to say, well, you know, if I, if I'm a solo person, I probably need to get someone else. Because if any of those jobs run over or I want to take leave or, or take some time away, I need to have someone else in place to help this business run and to keep it running smoothly. So I think that's really important is that understanding not only, you know, what, what you can pre-plan for, but also looking back into the past to see, what have we done this time last year? What do the trends look like? Are there, you know, cycles where I get a bigger lead conversion due to, to weather or seasonability? Noam, you said before that, you know, there was an example of, maybe an air conditioning person who wants to, you know, who's coming into summer, who knows that their servicing requests are going to double, you know, in the months leading up to summer, because everyone wants their air conditioner to work. If you've got the ability to actually look at some numbers and put some dollar signs around that, that allows you to then see if you need to put on another person. Or whether you need to upskill something or you need to possibly talk to your suppliers about getting more supply ahead of time so that you're not then putting things on back order and holding those jobs up.
Fred Schnell I would personally call it stress relief, to be honest. Kind of knowing what's in the pipeline, knowing what's coming down the track, being able to kind of plan ahead a little bit, would take away quite a bit of sleepless nights, to be honest. So now let's just move into that space where Motii and Simpro world meet, the handover between the sales and the delivery side of things. I might just start with Kate. The handover between winning a job and delivering it, in your experience, what are some of the things that can go wrong?
Kate Hay The biggest issue that I've seen is a manual handover. Where somebody either writes the information into an email and then tries to send it to somebody, and there's a risk that they haven't transposed that or transposed everything that they need. Um, it's really about getting that information intact in full from one team to another. You know, when you've got a team who's working, an operations team might be using Simpro, as an example. And that's configured really nicely, they're all trained on how to use it, you know, they've got their, their different job categories and their cost centres, and everything works beautifully on that side. And then from sales, they've got a spreadsheet, and that spreadsheet doesn't capture any of that sort of information and doesn't give any insight as to what that should be. So I think that the biggest risk there is that handover not going well because the information isn't transferred in a useful way, or it might be sent over but it's not useful, you know, it's not in a format that can be easily digested and uploaded into a job format. So yeah, that's what I see quite a lot.
Fred Schnell And Noam, in your view, what can a poor handover cause then on the delivery side of things?
Noam Horenczyk Yeah, so like we started by saying like the margins are so small that any error can put you in the red. Then if you haven't communicated well, and then the, you know, the technician doesn't have all the information, you know, they don't know that there's a, a dog on site that, you know, you have to handle, or that you know, there's certain keys hidden behind something. Like, you know, then you have to drive back, drive again, it affects all your other jobs, it affects other technicians, other stuff. So I think the delivery is very tied to that. I come from the software world. These things are very similar when it comes to the handoff between sales and account management or customer success, right? If you don't get all the information about why that customer bought, what they're trying to do, first of all, it's annoying because you ask the same questions. So if you're a customer, you're like, hey, I already answered all these questions. You should have that, you should have a better handover. And then also you're missing all that important context, which in software can result in a, in an upset customer. In trades, it can result in repeat visits and your whole month being, you know, all the jobs being moved, and your whole month being in the red just because of that. So it's, it's critical.
Fred Schnell It sounds like the handover is actually, yeah, as you say, quite a critical point where businesses can actually lose quite a bit of money or damage a lot of the relationships, right? So I would assume this probably also causes quite a bit of frustration, not just internally, but also creating quite a bit of unhappy customers, right? So Kate, in your experience, how can you ensure a clean handover between sales and delivery?
Kate Hay Great question. I think a clean handover needs to be captured in a way where all of the data that's been captured in the sales lifecycle is collected, is put together, and handed to the operations team in a way that they can digest it. Now, some of the best handovers that I've seen, you know, involve an integration between a sales CRM and the operations platform. So maybe something like Pipedrive and Simpro. Where the information that's captured, you know, while the sales team is developing that lead and talking to that customer, and capturing that information about what they want and how they want it to be done, as well as perhaps some customer insights. You know, how does this customer like to be communicated with? You know, do they have any particular requirements that we need to consider? You know, do they have a language barrier, perhaps? Do they have any specific, as you say, on their job site, are there any specific things we need to think about? Maybe they're in a high-rise apartment and it's going to be difficult to get the materials up the stairs, or maybe we need to deliver the materials over a back fence with a crane, so we need to consider our logistics and our freight here. If all of that information is known, what we really want to see here is potentially, or is to see an integration between the two platforms to take it from one and push it into the other, into the already seamless operational configuration that they have there. So you know, jobs in Simpro are often scoped out really nicely. They've got lots of beautiful fields, custom fields, you know, job descriptions and mechanisms to capture the labour and to capture the materials. If those custom fields are there, the best handover is where we can push the information from one system straight into those fields in another system, so that the operations team aren't trying to interpret that in any way. It's coming in in a way that they're already used to seeing or they're already used to filling out, you know, those forms in that particular format or that particular order. And you know, when that happens, it means that the handover is smooth, it means that if the teams do need to talk to each other, if there's any specific requirements, it might not need to happen quite so frequently. So the teams can, you know, be confident that the information is going from one to the other. And that customer journey is seamless too. The customer is not seeing the same questions asked again and again, you know, they don't feel like they're repeating themselves or they haven't been heard or worse, they haven't been understood. They're confident that the professionals, you know, that they're working with fully understand their requirements and are acting on those accordingly.
Noam Horenczyk Nothing to add. Covered everything.
Fred Schnell Nothing to add, very nice. I think well, for me it also starts, well it's kind of multiple angles, right? It's one, having the sales team and the delivery team actually work or talk to each other to understand and align with, you know, what the information is that needs to be transferred or captured in a sales conversation, including, you know, access to the property and stuff like that. And then, and then, you know, so so that the delivery team actually is, you know, in a good position to do the job properly. And the second thing is, I think, to make sure that there is no double handling between the systems, because as you alluded earlier, Noam, that it's always a big risk. You only need to do a five instead of a two, right? And particularly if it's a handwritten note, right, and suddenly there's, you know, a five-metre pipe instead of a three-metre pipe being delivered to the house, and well, that's not going to work, right? So I think to have that kind of integration between two systems work seamlessly is not just reducing the admin burden on the business, but it's also ensuring that, you know, the right information is handed over to the delivery team and there's no kind of errors passed on just because of that copy-paste exercise between the two different systems.
Noam Horenczyk Yeah. And I think it's important to let each team understand why the other team needs certain information. So again, piggybacking on the software world, Salesforce. People hate mandatory fields in Salesforce. So every sales rep complains all the time if another field became mandatory. Like, "Oh man, it's slowing me down, why do I need to do this?" But if you show them, hey, here's where the information you put in that mandatory field shows up for the technician, or in this case account manager, and it connects the dots for them, they're like, "Okay, I understand why this is important." So if you have a salesperson at a trades business, they have this mandatory field now in Pipedrive, and you're like, they're complaining about it. You say like, "Oh, what you fill out here shows up in the mobile app on, for Simpro, for that technician when they're at the door." Right? So if you fill it up here, it shows on the phone right when they're at the door. So if you, so that's why we're asking you for a mandatory field saying like, are there any restrictions getting into the house, and then put some notes, because that person will be at the door reading it on their phone exactly from what you wrote. So once they feel that they understand that connection, it makes a lot more sense for them to like, "Okay, here's why I need to fill this out." And they're also going to fill it out properly.
Fred Schnell And I think it goes back to kind of that communication between sales and delivery, because a salesperson is saying, "Well, why do I have to do all these, all these mandatory fields, right? Because I want to be out there selling and getting new leads and everything else, right?" And the tradesperson on the other side, or the installation person, is then, you know, not quite happy because there's half the information only in the system and he or she is not able to really perform the job the right way, right? I guess the additional point I would just say is there's probably a bit of a balancing act between, you know, how much information you put into the system and how much information is then also becoming a bit of an overkill. Because there's, you know, there is certain over-engineering, I'll call it, in a lot of systems where you say, "No, no, no, all these fields need to be mandatory." Whereas then, you know, suddenly the people start to not use the system anymore and go back to the post-it notes and the spreadsheets because they say, "No, look, it's, I can't work with that," right? So it needs to be kind of user-friendly and practical in a lot of ways as well.
Kate Hay Yeah, yeah, agreed.
Fred Schnell Right, so now before we wrap up, I always have one question we ask every guest here on the Motii Playbook. Noam, if a trade business owner is listening to this right now and is recognising parts of their business in this conversation, what is the one mindset shift you would hope they take away today?
Noam Horenczyk Yeah, so I stopped myself from answering this question earlier, saving it for here. I think it's around AI, which is not surprising, but that AI can actually help them in the trades. And I'll explain why I'm saying that, because I feel like a lot of tradespeople are seeing what AI is doing right now, how it's disrupting software engineers, right? How it's disrupting all these like office jobs. And they can, they can, and they tend to say like, "Oh, AI is not for me. It doesn't touch my world." Right? "I'm a plumber, I'm an HVAC technician, like, it can't do the stuff on the tools yet, so I can just ignore this revolution for now and deal with it later." What we're saying is that that's the wrong way of looking at it, because yes, it won't replace what you're doing on the tools yet, or forever, I don't know, but it's not going to be fixing the stuff which is what you want to do. But that's not your entire business. That unfortunately, often very small part of your business versus all the stuff you have to do at night and over the weekend. So AI can help your trades business not from the tools perspective, not from the actual jobs perspective, but from all the admin, right? So AI is your friend, it's not your enemy. It's not coming, it's actually not coming to take your job, which is good. Software engineers should be scared of this, right? Like, hey, you know, now a company needs less software engineers. But companies are not saying, "Oh, I need less technicians because I have AI." No, someone still needs to connect the pipes or the wires. But you can have AI in your business doing all the stuff you do not want to do, and so take part in that revolution, say, "Hey, I am open to doing AI in my business," just make sure you understand which aspects of your business it actually focuses on and where it can help.
Fred Schnell Love it.
Kate Hay I agree with you, Noam. I think embracing AI in this climate is absolutely critical for businesses who understand that AI can help them to plug some of those little gaps that they've got, you know, and those little gaps are things like human intervention follow-ups, or, you know, maybe some of those emails that go out at the same time every time. We can use automations or AI to maybe do some of those things for us that would often get forgotten or lost. And I also agree with you in saying it's not coming for our jobs. What it's doing is freeing the people up who you've got in your business to do bigger and better things, you know, to start expanding on what they can do with their time for better initiatives, for, you know, for fantastic campaigns that they can construct. Or perhaps they can review how you're interacting with your customers and design better interactions or more frequent interactions or a better experience for your customers, which AI can help you to facilitate that, but it takes people to design that because people understand people, and people understand how human emotions work and how human nature is. So, AI I think is there to do some of the heavy lifting to free you up to do, you know, the creative thinking and to think about how you can make things better. So my takeaway from this would be, you know, to businesses to, or to business owners, is to think about investing a little bit of time into something like AI to give you more time to think about the strategy and, you know, where you're positioned in the market and how you want to build your business or to keep it moving along the same way that it is now. So use it to free up your time to invest back in your business to make it better.
Fred Schnell Love it. And I think for me, along the same lines, I think the businesses that will do well over the next few years won't necessarily be the ones that work the hardest, but it will be the ones that really consciously take the time to step out of the daily grinds and think about how they should adapt and find smarter ways to operate their business. Noam, Kate, really appreciate both of you joining me today. If today's conversation resonated with you and you would like to learn more about connecting Simpro and Pipedrive, please reach out and we'd be absolutely happy to arrange a demo or just have a chat. Also, more episodes of the Motii Playbook can be found on our website motii.co/playbook. With this, thank you both for joining me and have a lovely day.
Kate Hay Thanks Noam.
Outro That's it for another episode of the Motii Playbook. One shift, one system, one measurable improvement. All information shared in this podcast is general in nature. For tailored advice specific to your business, visit motii.co/playbook and book a momentum call with our team. See you next time.
Latest updates
You paid for the licences. Sat through the demos. Maybe even brought someone in to set it up. And then nothing really changed. The software isn't usually the problem — it's everything happening around it. Here are the five reasons adoption breaks down, and what to actually do about each one.
Motii has been named Pipedrive's 2025 Regional Partner of the Year for ANZ! Discover what that means for businesses implementing CRM, and how the right partner turns a sales tool into a revenue-driving system.
