In 2024 Speed Gas had operations in Melbourne and Sydney with plans to expand into Brisbane. Their team of six salespeople - five in Melbourne, one in Sydney - knew they would need to hire more for Queensland. Their promise to customers is simple: call today, get your gas tomorrow.
Gerard is the Operations Manager. Having been with Speed Gas for seven years, he's watched the sales team grow from one or two people to six. What he also watched was the way the business operated failing to keep pace.
The Challenge
An operation that worked at three or four salespeople wasn't going to survive six, let alone Brisbane
Running on notebooks, manual workarounds, and individual effort - and it was starting to show
Salespeople tracked prospects in physical notebooks. They'd visit a potential customer, write down the details, and move on. The problem was what happened after that - flipping back through pages of handwritten notes to figure out who to call next isn't a reliable system - and it wasn't happening. Follow ups weren't occurring, things were getting missed.
Getting new customers signed up was painful too. Supply agreements were Word documents that customers had to print, fill in by hand, scan, and email back. Some prospects never came back. The friction gave them an excuse to stay where they were.
Gerard had no visibility on what was actually happening across the sales team. And when warm leads came through the website, they sat in an inbox waiting to be forwarded.
"The time from when that lead originally came in to when it was being actioned could have been anywhere from 5 minutes if we were lucky to 24 hours. By then, you potentially lost that customer or they've spoken to 3 other businesses."
In an industry where customers can require gas urgently, that delay was costing them.
Gerard could see where things were heading: more salespeople, more states, and an operation that wasn't built to handle either
Speed Gas wasn't in crisis but Gerard could see the trajectory. The business was growing, Brisbane was on the horizon, and the way they operated wasn't going to survive another state.
"I could see 12 or 18 months ago where we were heading with a salesperson coming on board in Brisbane... So knowing that was coming, that we couldn't keep operating in the same fashion."
Every new salesperson made the gaps worse, not better. More notebooks. More prospects being forgotten. More leads sitting in inboxes. More deals slipping through without anyone knowing.
The Solution
An operation where nothing could slip through - every lead, every follow-up, every quote tracked from the moment it entered the system
To resolve these problems Speed Gas turned to The Systems Business.
The notebooks were replaced with a CRM. Salespeople now enter prospect details into an online form, right from their phone if they're standing in a customer's warehouse. The information goes straight into the system, structured and searchable.
The manual supply agreements were replaced with digital ones. Customer details are pre-populated from the CRM - no more printing, handwriting, and scanning.
"The information is in HubSpot. It's pre-populated into the agreement. So that's a time saver at that stage and then it's a time saver for the admin people... and a time saver for the customer as well."
Website enquiries now route directly to the right salesperson based on location. The lead hits their phone immediately, and the system tracks whether and when they follow up.
Gerard and the sales team got visibility. The pipeline, the quotes outstanding, the activity levels - all trackable in real time. And new salespeople receive structured training on exactly how to use these systems from day one.
The Outcome
The operation that was losing customers to its own gaps is now built to hold onto every one of them
The response time went from up to 24 hours down to minutes. Gerard puts it simply:
"If I send an inquiry through for something and I get a phone call from one of those businesses within two or three minutes, they're gonna have to do something pretty bad for me not to give them the business. Because it's pretty impressive to get a phone call within a few minutes. And I assume if they ring me like this, they're gonna service me like this going forward."
The operation that was maxing out at three or four salespeople now supports six across two states, with systems ready to handle expansion into Brisbane and beyond.