Pilgrim Communications
ROLL User: Dan McFarlane, Director of Strategy
The Business: Pilgrim Communications
Industry: Management consultancy, Marketing agency
Location: Sydney, Australia
Who are Pilgrim Communications?
Pilgrim Communications is a Sydney-based, boutique marketing organisation that creates brand journeys for consumers. We specialise in plotting a product’s or brand's route to market and managing interactions at each touchpoint along the way.
We help clients with go-to-market planning, new product development, customer marketing, trade marketing, product promotion and brand storytelling. All of our executions are firmly anchored by quantifiable shopper insights with the single-minded end objective of the advocacy and adaptation of the brand.
What makes you different?
Delivering good results for our clients is about creating repetition, not just sales. We work on the ten by ten approach, not 100 by one. That is, it’s better to have ongoing regular purchases of a lower amount (10 transactions of $10 each) than a larger one-off sale. Repetition is king, and we teach our clients to think and act in this way. Using data and analytically driven insights, we think about the shopper first, and the brand second.
In a nutshell, we’re an agile, client-focused, contemporary management consultancy that provides highly experienced resources for reasonable costs with proven, ROI-centric results.
Life before ROLL
We were using too many platforms to quote clients and manage projects. We were spending too much on the admin, and working too much in the detail, losing sight of the big picture.
And this goes against how we operate as a business.
We hate multi-tasking and fully subscribe to the habit of doing one thing at a time, and doing it exceptionally well. When you have too much software, too many tabs open, email and voicemail notifications distracting you all the time, you don’t give your full attention to anything. And you don’t do anything really well. So we needed software that fit with our way of working.
Other software tried/tested
We tried a few other applications, like Streamtime, WorkflowMax, and Asana. What we found was that they were either too heavy on the project management stuff, and not useful enough for time tracking. Or they were too focused on time tracking, and not robust enough for project management.
Many of the packages out there are too focused on time instead of output.
What has ROLL done for your business?
Unlike some of the other software that we’ve tried and used, ROLL is a nice hybrid of both a project management and time management tool. It’s more than just time tracking – it’s about time management.
ROLL allows us to delve in and out of projects as much or as little, as deep or as shallow, as we need to. I like to focus on one task deeply, without distractions. With ROLL I don’t have to worry about and remember to enter all sorts of details – they’re carried throughout a project by the software. ROLL really is a jack of all trades, and that’s what I like.
The way ROLL works is rational and it makes sense – it’s software designed for users, not techies. It’s very utilitarian, and that’s what we like.
How has ROLL added value?
If I had to quantify the value that we’ve gained by using ROLL, I’d say that we’ve seen about a 30% savings in our admin time.
This then allows us to be much more effective in deploying client resources and focusing on helping our clients more.
Two standout benefits
- The cloning tool is very good – the ability to very quickly clone quotes saves us a huge amount of time.
- The Xero integration is fantastic – there have been no bugs or glitches whatsoever.