Northbrook Solar
Northbrook had outgrown a stack of estimator-owned spreadsheets for tracking post-quote follow-up. Quotes that didn't close in week one drifted into the long tail and got dropped. The leadership team knew there was money on the floor; they didn't know how much, because nobody had a coherent pipeline view across the eight estimators on staff.
Close rate on quoted-but-not-closed deals
Median follow-up cadence after quote sent
Estimator weekly admin time
Time to live on Helm CRM
The setup
Northbrook is a residential solar installer with 22 employees serving the Mid-Atlantic. Their sales motion is estimator-led — a homeowner books a site visit, an estimator runs the numbers, and a quote goes out. Closing a quoted deal in week one hits the floor; closing in week four is rare; closing in week eight basically never happens.
For five years that workflow had run on Google Sheets, eight estimators, and Outlook calendars. The conversion rate on quoted-but-not-closed deals had drifted down to a number nobody at the leadership level knew the exact value of, because pulling it required a manual reconciliation that no one had time to run.
What they wanted
Three things, in priority order:
- A pipeline view that worked the way the estimators actually worked — Kanban first, table second, drag to move, no required fields except the ones that mattered.
- Email sync that did not require BCC discipline, because nobody on the team was going to BCC reliably for the next year.
- A simple set of nudges that surfaced the deals at risk of going cold, before they actually went cold.
A full-fat HubSpot install was off the table. The team had run the procurement and concluded that 80% of the seat-cost was paying for surface area they would never use.
What we shipped
Helm CRM under their own subdomain, on the Service tier (Growth). Bidirectional Gmail sync wired during week-one onboarding. Pipeline stages mapped to their actual sales motion (Site visit booked → Quote sent → Negotiating → Won / Lost). Smart task reminders configured to nudge an estimator on day 4, day 10, and day 21 if a quote had not been responded to.
Two custom fields on top of the boxed product (roof type, panel count) so the estimators didn’t have to retype the data into a separate quoting spreadsheet. Weekly digest email to the VP of Sales summarizing the pipeline state and flagging any deal that had been in Quote sent longer than 30 days.
The outcome
Three months in, the close rate on quoted-but-not-closed deals had improved by 14 points. The estimators reported about a third less weekly admin time — most of that came from the Outlook-to-Helm sync replacing a habit of pasting calendar invites into a shared Google Doc. The VP of Sales described the change at one all-hands as “we just stopped losing the deals we should have closed.”
The pipeline view itself was used, daily, by every estimator on the team. That was the win. The CRM that nobody uses is worth less than the spreadsheet that everybody uses, and Helm cleared the bar.
This case study is a placeholder. Outcome figures are illustrative; we’ll replace it with a verified version once the live customer signs off on attribution.