It is hard to pick out a list of features we love from Business Pilot, when there are so many features that all work together to create the system as a whole. However, BP Mail was so massive when it released and is still so integral now, that this one was a no-brainer.
Having your emails within your crm system seems like an easy ask and something that would be obvious. It is only when you look into the complexities of what that may mean that you start to see why BP Mail is so great and why it’s place on the list was never in doubt.
Before we get into why the way in which BP Mail works is something worthy of our love, lets look at what it gives you, the Business Pilot user.
Essentially, you can send emails from within Business Pilot. Nothing amazing there, but when you add in templates, things get slightly more interesting. You can create an unlimited amount of templates for all those emails that you send on a regular basis and use placeholders for customer/quote/job info. This means when you want to send an email, you just select from one of your templates and click send. All the details are correct and you have saved a lot of time.
That would be good, but you can also attach documents to those emails, that may also be templates in themselves. For example, you may have a deposit invoice payment request email. The email is populated with key information about the job and of course the request to pay the exact amount of that invoice, whilst the attachment is the invoice itself. Neither of which did you need to create at the point of sending the email because they were saved in your templates.
If only that was good enough, when you couple this with Status Progressions (look out for the why we love status progressions!), you can have all of the above happening automatically when you move your lead or contract to the next step. You don’t even have to choose ‘send email’. Now that is fancy!
Naturally all of these emails are stored within the lead or contract that they relate to. But what about when a customer, supplier, or anyone else for that matter sends an email to you about the job? This is where the real magic happens. Every time you create a lead or contract within Business Pilot, it is given a unique email address. Anything sent to that email address will be attached straight into the lead or contract within Business Pilot. This means if you send out from the system or from another email program, as long as you use that email address in the CC, it will appear in Business Pilot.
If you receive an email that hasn’t used the address, you can just forward it to that unique address and it will be right there for you, alongside your notes and every other detail of the lead or contract.
All of this and we still haven’t mentioned what is really neat about this. Connecting emails to CRMs is normally done by having all of your email come into the CRM. This is easier but creates a whole mess of your system. You have to trawl through email just like you would in a separate email client. You get all those ‘chewing the fat’ emails like ‘have a great weekend’. Great for relationship building, but not helpful when you are looking through a contract for important communications. What about private emails too that now become available to everyone in the system. Oops!
The main criteria for a feature of Business Pilot ending up on the What We Love list is how it helps installers. BP Mail was an absolute game changer in that regard. Therefore it is definitely worthy of its position.
The question is, when you send emails using whatever system you currently use (crm, outlook, Gmail etc.), how does anyone else in the office know what has been agreed in your message? Do they (and you) have all your customer and supplier communications about a specific job, instantly at your fingertips? And are they with you at all times, from your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop, wherever you are? And if they aren’t, just imagine what having that would do for your business. And how much easier your job would be. That’s why we love BP Mail!
