Moved a marine solar company off notebooks and manual invoice fixes with a CRM pipeline and sync monitoring

The problem

A marine solar and energy company sold to boat owners, charter fleets, service centres, van-life builders and B2B dealers through phone, email, Shopify, trade shows and outbound prospecting — with no automation at all. The sales lead tracked prospects in a notebook, partly logged notes in HubSpot, and hand-wrote every follow-up email and call reminder. With dozens of contacts at different stages, leads went cold because follow-up was forgotten.

On the back office side, Shopify orders synced to QuickBooks with errors: deleted or replaced items appeared as dummy entries, payments and tax amounts did not match, and credits caused confusion. Someone corrected every affected invoice by hand, and the workload grew with order volume. Inventory and shipping lived in spreadsheets across warehouses, solar system quoting had no standard intake, and warranty and support requests arrived unstructured.

What it cost

Sales time went into remembering who to call rather than selling, and there was no pipeline visibility for the owner. Accounting cleanup scaled linearly with orders. Quoting a solar system was a slow consultative process each time, and support requests were handled reactively with no record.

What we built

A phased no-code and low-code implementation the client could run independently. For sales: a GoHighLevel pipeline where each prospect is logged as Yes, Maybe or Not Now and dropped into the matching sequence — a dealer track (day 1 recap, day 7 case study, day 21 follow-up, day 45 partnership touch) and a customer track (day 1 system summary, day 5 education, day 14 check-in, day 30 product update). An AI layer personalises each email from the prospect's website, industry and call notes, every sequence carries a self-booking link, and a live dashboard shows pipeline stages and conversion.

For finance: rather than rebuilding the Shopify-QuickBooks integration, a Make.com automation watches new QuickBooks entries after each sync, checks for dummy item codes, payment mismatches, tax discrepancies and false balances, and alerts the bookkeeper with the order number, the issue and a suggested correction, with a daily exception summary. Further phases cover inventory tracking, a standardised solar quoting intake and structured warranty and support intake.

What changed

Prospect follow-up runs on a schedule instead of memory, and accounting errors are flagged before they become cleanup work. The only ongoing cost is third-party software paid directly to the tool providers. Outcome figures are still to be collected from the client.