How Fernway's reps got their Fridays back

Fernway builds route planning and dispatch software for regional logistics companies. Its sales team of 40 reps sells to operations directors at haulage firms, couriers and wholesalers, in deals that usually take three to five months and involve a trial on real routes.

Until last year, every one of those reps lost Friday afternoon to the CRM. “We had a rule that the pipeline had to be up to date by 5pm on Friday, because the forecast went to the board on Monday,” says Sofia Ortega, Fernway’s VP Sales. “So from about two o’clock, nobody sold anything. They copied emails into activity logs and guessed close dates.”

The problem with Friday

Sofia’s team had been on Salesforce for six years. The org had grown to 140 fields on the opportunity object, most added for one report or another, and 22 required fields between Lead and Closed Won. Activity was logged by hand, or by a browser extension that half the team had switched off because it attached emails to the wrong records.

The result was a forecast built from data entered under time pressure, once a week. By Wednesday it was out of date. Sofia’s managers ran their own spreadsheets alongside it, which meant the board saw one number and the sales floor worked from another.

• Reps estimated they spent five to seven hours a week on CRM updates.

• Fewer than half of open deals had a next step recorded.

• The forecast missed by more than 15% in three of the previous four quarters.

A weekend move

Fernway chose Modal at the start of the year and moved over a single weekend in February. Owen Brooks from our solutions team worked with Fernway’s RevOps lead, Daniel, the week before to decide what to bring across.

They dropped 96 of the 140 opportunity fields after a usage report showed most were empty. They merged eight pipeline stages into five, each tied to something the buyer had done: requested a demo, confirmed a trial, started a trial, received a proposal, sent the contract to procurement. Every rep connected their Google Workspace account on the Wednesday, so two years of email and meetings were already in Modal before the import began.

“On Monday morning the reps opened Modal and their deals were there, with every email on them,” Sofia says. “Some of them had more history than they’d ever had in Salesforce.”

What changed for the reps

The biggest change was what reps no longer do. Emails and meetings attach to deals on their own. Close dates and stages are still updated by hand, but only when the buyer does something, and Ask Modal flags deals where the latest email suggests the date has slipped.

Fernway built three views that every rep opens each morning:

1. Today: open deals with a next step due today or overdue.

2. Gone quiet: deals with no email or meeting in 10 days.

3. Trials running: deals in the trial stage, with the start date and the operations contact.

Reps now save about six hours a week each, measured by Fernway against the time logged before the move. Across 40 reps, that is roughly 240 hours a week, most of which went back into calls with prospects.

What changed for the forecast

With the pipeline updated as things happen rather than once a week, the Friday deadline disappeared. The forecast is a live dashboard in Modal, and the board pack is a snapshot of it taken on Monday at 8am.

In the two quarters since the move, Fernway’s forecast has landed within 4% of the actual result both times. The managers’ spreadsheets are gone.

What Sofia would tell another team

“Don’t move your old CRM into a new one. We nearly did. Owen made us justify every field, and we kept about a third of them. The ones we dropped, nobody has asked for.”

Her other piece of advice is about Friday afternoons. “I told the team they could have them back if the pipeline stayed current. It has. Most of them use the time to book next week’s calls.”