Background
Hird is one of the UK’s established specialists in lifting and access equipment, providing mini cranes, powered access, glass lifting equipment, machinery moving and contract lifting services to customers across the UK. Incorporated in 1982, the business now operates from locations in Hull, Doncaster and Redhill and supports customers across construction, facilities maintenance, manufacturing and other specialist sectors.
With a broad equipment fleet, multiple locations and a large customer base, Hird generates significant amounts of valuable commercial and operational data every day — from enquiries and quotations through to hires, customer spend and fleet utilisation.
The opportunity was to make more of that data available to the sales team.
The Challenge
Bringing sales and hire activity together
For a specialist hire business like Hird, understanding a customer requires more than simply looking at their contact details.
Sales teams need to know who is hiring, what they're hiring, how much they're spending, which quotations are progressing and where the next opportunity might be.
Hird needed a CRM environment that could give its team a clearer, more accessible view of that activity while supporting the day-to-day work of its salespeople.
That meant bringing together information that would otherwise be spread across different records and workflows, including:
- Prospects, leads and quotations
- Customer and site activity
- Salesperson notes and interactions
- Current and historic hire activity
- Customer spend
- Asset categories
- Fleet utilisation and future availability
- Quotation performance and lost reasons
The goal wasn't simply to hold more customer data. It was to turn that data into useful sales intelligence.
The Solution
SitePad provides Hird with a sales layer built around the hire business
Hird uses SitePad to give its team a central view of sales, customer and hire activity.
Rather than operating as a standalone contact database, SitePad brings CRM activity together with information from Hird's hire operation, allowing users to move from a high-level business view right down to individual customers, sites, quotations and activities.
A single sales pipeline
SitePad's visual Pipeline gives Hird a live view of prospects, leads and quotations as they move through the sales process.
Opportunities can be organised across stages such as New, Qualified, Scoping, Quote Sent and Negotiation, with pipeline values visible at both stage and overall level.
Salespeople can quickly see what needs attention rather than relying on spreadsheets or manually assembling information from multiple places.
Customer spend intelligence
SitePad transforms Hird's hire data into a much clearer commercial picture.
The Spend dashboard allows the team to analyse total spend, number of hires, active sites, average hire value and average spend per site.
Users can then explore trends including spend over time, spend by site, spend by asset category and customer spend concentration.
This gives sales teams a much stronger starting point for account reviews and conversations with customers.
Live visibility of what's actually on hire
For Hird, CRM intelligence doesn't stop when a quotation is won.
Users can analyse live hires by customer, depot and asset category, as well as understand fleet utilisation, hire age and future asset availability.
This connects the sales conversation directly with what is happening across the hire business.
Understanding long-term hires and fleet opportunities
SitePad also helps Hird understand the age profile of equipment currently on hire.
The Hires by Age view breaks live equipment into 0–30, 31–90, 91–180, 181–365 and 365+ day periods by asset category.
This makes it much easier to identify long-running hires, understand where equipment is committed and spot patterns that could influence both customer conversations and fleet planning.
Turning activity into measurable sales performance
Sales activity is captured inside SitePad rather than disappearing into individual inboxes, notebooks or disconnected systems.
Hird can report on activity including emails, telephone calls, quotations, site visits and sales notes, giving managers greater visibility of what's happening across accounts.
The Notes Report provides a detailed audit trail, while dashboard analytics show activity trends such as site visits and notes added over time.
This helps turn CRM adoption itself into something that can be measured.
The Impact
From CRM records to commercial intelligence
SitePad gives Hird a much more joined-up view of the relationship between sales activity, quotations, customers and live hire performance.
Instead of looking at CRM and hire information in isolation, the team can use SitePad to understand the wider commercial picture.
The result is a platform that helps Hird:
- Prioritise opportunities with a structured, visible sales pipeline.
- Understand customer value using real hire and spend information.
- Give salespeople greater context before contacting customers.
- Monitor sales activity across calls, notes, quotations and site visits.
- Identify trends across asset categories, customers and sites.
- Understand fleet activity alongside the sales pipeline.
- Spot opportunities earlier using data already being generated by the business.
One platform. A clearer view of the hire business.
For Hird, SitePad isn't simply a place to store contacts.
It provides a sales and intelligence layer for the hire operation — connecting the people responsible for winning and growing accounts with the information they need to make better decisions.
From a salesperson reviewing their next opportunity to management looking at pipeline value, customer spend or fleet utilisation, SitePad turns everyday hire data into information that can be acted upon.
SitePad helps bridge the gap between CRM and hire management — giving Hird's team a clearer picture of what's happening with their customers, their pipeline and their fleet.
