Building a Single Sales Ops System for a Solar Financing Business

Company overview

The company sells rooftop solar to Singapore homeowners on a rent-to-own model: zero upfront cost, fully serviced. The promise is simplicity for the customer. Behind it sat the opposite — every project ran through Airtable, an internal admin app, Google Drive, HelloSign, Trengo, WhatsApp Web, Monday.com and a separate Excel tracker for each financier and installer.

Nothing was broken in isolation. The problem was the seams. A single project touched five tools before installation, and none of them agreed on where the truth lived.

"Get a customer's system up and running as efficiently as possible, and keep them and our partners satisfied along the way."

The two golden rules already existed. The system underneath them did not support either one.

Challenges

• Fragmented tooling. Customer data was split across the admin app, Airtable, Google Drive and per-partner Excel trackers, with the same fields re-keyed by hand at each step.
• Manual document assembly. The rent-to-own summary two-pager and the long-form agreement were filled in field by field from a spreadsheet, then re-uploaded as PDFs to three places.
• Status drift. Airtable status changes triggered automations, so a mistimed update fired the wrong customer notification.
• Partner-shaped processes. Each financier and installer partner needed a different tracker, contact, template and form. The process forked three ways at almost every stage.
• Communication sprawl. Customer messaging ran through Trengo, project coordination through WhatsApp Web with limited seats and no reliable history retention — site photos had to be saved out by hand before they disappeared.
• Undocumented tribal knowledge. Credit checks, utility-account edge cases, payment-setup rules and technical site constraints lived in people's heads.
• No enablement layer. A new ops hire had no path from zero to running a project unsupervised.

Solution: one operating system for sales and ops

We rebuilt the sales and operations layer as a single Notion wiki sitting on top of the existing tools, rather than replacing them. Six components:

1. Stage-based operations playbook. The entire rent-to-own lifecycle mapped into six named stages — from site visit through investor approval, contract, installation and commissioning. Each stage carries its own objectives, step-by-step process, special scenarios and tips. One page, expandable, no scrolling through irrelevant detail.
2. Status as the single control surface. Airtable status became the one field that moves a project forward, with every automation and customer notification hanging off it. The playbook documents exactly what must be true before each status change, which removed the mis-fired notification problem.
3. Partner-branched process trees. Every fork in the process — one partner versus another — is documented inline at the point of decision: which contact, which tracker, which template, which inbox. The ops associate no longer has to know the partner landscape to execute correctly.
4. Template and asset library. Trengo WhatsApp and email templates, contract and addendum templates, direct-debit packs, bank cover letters and the two-pager model all indexed from one place, with merge-field instructions attached.
5. Recurring-activity rhythm. BAU broken into daily, weekly, fortnightly and monthly blocks — inbox screening, e-sign checks, payment follow-ups, Airtable hygiene, monthly payment reconciliation. Ops work became a cadence instead of a reaction.
6. Target tracking in the open. Monthly volume targets and actuals on the wiki home page, next to the sales principles they depend on. Performance stopped living in a separate deck.

Automation engine

Results

1. One source of truth per project. The admin app holds customer data, Airtable holds status, Drive holds documents. No overlap, no guessing.
2. Faster contract turnaround. Two-pager and agreement drafted concurrently from shared fields, cutting takt time on the highest-friction step.
3. Onboarding without shadowing. A new ops associate can run a project from the playbook alone.
4. Cleaner partner relationships. Approval follow-ups, tracker updates and photo requests happen on a defined rhythm rather than when someone remembers.
5. Fewer mis-sent notifications. Status discipline stopped automations firing at the wrong moment.
6. Predictable payment collection. Direct-debit validation, batch submission and reconciliation run to a fixed monthly calendar.
7. Edge cases documented, not rediscovered. Homes under construction, owner vs bill payee mismatches, contract novation and payment rejections all have a written path.
8. Visible performance. Targets and actuals sit on the page the team already opens daily.

What made it work

The temptation with a mess like this is a rebuild — one platform, everything migrated. That would have stalled sales for a quarter. Instead the existing tools kept their jobs and Notion became the layer that told people what to do, in what order, with which asset. Cheap to adopt, and it survived the team growing.