To mark Mental Health Awareness month at Accelo, we're delighted to showcase one of our incredible clients, Thinking Focus, who work with teams and businesses around the world to encourage a healthier way of thinking.
By enabling professionals to think and work differently, and by defining a clear and common vision, Thinking Focus is able to unlock productivity, implement change, and leave organizations in a more positive mindset.
Co-founder and director of Thinking Focus, Ricky Muddimer, took time out of his busy schedule to talk about his love for Accelo: why he implemented the software and how it's improved the overall culture at Thinking Focus thus far - check it out!
"When we founded Thinking Focus in 2016, we wanted a CRM system that would provide a clear line of sight for our business, and because we work all over the world, we needed to be able to communicate easily, access accurate client data, and see all of our projects and financials in one place.
I and the other founding directors each brought with us extensive experience in supporting businesses through change, such as restructures, and had met hundreds – if not thousands – of professionals at various levels of their careers over the years. With that said, much of our work comes from the people we've met in the past: often managers who have moved on to new organizations, or people who have moved up the ranks and are now in need of help to manage a specific challenge.
Therefore, relationships are pivotal to our business, and keeping in touch (and tracking interactions) with contacts is vital to staying relevant and in the loop. As well as our existing contacts, we're always out meeting new people or dealing with enquiries, so we needed an effective way to manage our communications with them.
We chose to implement Accelo after having had a negative experience elsewhere. From the outset, we were impressed with the way our needs were met and our support contact at Accelo was always on hand to ensure we were quickly up to speed with the system and making the most of it.
The CRM system does exactly what we want it to: not only can we take an end-to-end view of the sales process, we can also build deeper relationships with valuable clients. Having this automated and systemized with Accelo has saved us a lot of time and effort, freeing us up to focus on developing our growing business.
One significant benefit for us is that Accelo is cloud-based, so no matter where we are in the world, we can all keep up to date with what's happening across our team. We work internationally, so it can take several weeks to get us all in a room together, yet with Accelo we can all see what's in the pipeline at a glance.
The Accelo experience has been great right from the get-go: they helped us set up a test version, walked us through the setup processes and helped us at every stage - so the adoption of the system was seamless. The on-boarding support we received was excellent as they helped us transfer all of our data and even solved a reporting issue with ease.
Of course, the test of any relationship is when things don’t work as expected. Accelo is continually improving their product and they introduced a third party integration that could be useful to us. We couldn’t get it to work, but the Accelo support team were excellent, never letting the issue drop until we were satisfied, and they provided advice and guidance, even holding our hand (virtually) through the process.
We are now in our third year, our business has grown significantly, and we're busier than ever! Despite this, keeping on top of our existing contacts has been easy with Accelo and it's something our clients tell us they appreciate.
We specialize in behavioural change in the workplace, focusing on enabling people to break the bad habits that are holding them back and alter their mindsets to achieve development and growth. One of the problems we come across and have to tackle on a regular basis is communication: keeping in touch with clients, sharing information between departments and even having regular conversations within teams.
Spending so much time guiding others to improve their communications means we have to follow those principles ourselves. Accelo enables us to maintain that level of service with ease.
