The situation
Precision Glassworks is a UK balustrade specialist making glass panels, stainless steel railings, and decking surrounds for residential and light-commercial customers. Enquiries come in steadily through the website, so the pipeline was healthy. The shape of it was wrong.
The existing flow was a questionnaire. Customers described what they wanted, submitted the form, and waited. Someone on the team then worked through the queue to price each one up and send a quote back. No price was ever shown on the day.
Two things were going wrong with that. The obvious one was delay. Customers ready to spend today do not wait days. They click on to the next installer. The less obvious one was bill shock. Lengths of imported glass with bespoke stainless steel fittings are not cheap, and the number many customers had in their head was nothing like the real price. Deals died at the final hurdle, after the team had already put hours into estimating, and nobody's time had been well spent.
On top of that, the bigger rivals every balustrade installer is watching had put their own calculators online. Customers could design their own balustrade on screen, see a price in real time, and only pick up the phone when they knew roughly what they were committing to. The playing field had shifted, and Precision Glassworks could feel it in the conversion rate and, worse, in the margin they were having to give away to stay in the running.
What we did
We split the work in two.
The first piece was the unglamorous plumbing: lead capture across the website, email, WhatsApp, and social, routed straight into the CRM with the right tags, priority, and follow-up task attached. Before this, enquiries arrived through four different channels and got re-keyed by hand when they got there at all. Now they do not. The early read on that piece alone is recovered pipeline worth around £10,000 a month that was leaking through the gaps.
The second piece, and the one Oliver was most excited about, is the balustrade calculator. Customers design their own balustrade in the browser, picking length, material, panel style, fittings, and finishes, and see a live price that reflects current costs on imported glass and steel. When they hit submit, the full spec, price, and lead details land in the CRM as a qualified opportunity. The sales conversation starts with scope and budget already agreed. No more bill shock. No more estimating hours spent on deals that were never going to close.
The result
Leads now arrive in the CRM fully qualified, routed, and tagged, and the team focuses follow-up time on the enquiries most likely to close. The balustrade calculator gives customers an instant price online and drops the full spec into the CRM the moment they hit submit, compressing time-to-price from days to seconds.
The commercial shift is the part that surprised everyone. Without an instant-pricing tool of their own, Precision Glassworks had been competing on price against bigger rivals whose software let them quote faster. Putting a calculator on the website did more than speed up quoting. It took the team off the price race entirely, and the margin started coming back.
When we asked Oliver Dolman, Precision Glassworks' managing director, what has changed for the business, he said this. "We've always felt pressure to compete heavily on price, often at the expense of our margins, simply because other companies were beating us with advanced software and years in the field. Since working with gofasterwith.ai and implementing the balustrade calculator, that's completely changed. Not only are we generating more enquiries and converting more orders, but we're no longer forced to race to the bottom on price. The software has given us the confidence to price properly again, improving our margins and giving us the breathing room to reinvest back into the business and continue growing."
Frequently asked questions
How does the calculator handle changes in glass and steel prices?
The calculator pulls from a pricing model that reflects current costs on imported glass and stainless steel fittings, along with installation rates. When supplier costs move, Oliver's team updates the inputs in one place and every quote produced from that point forward reflects the new numbers. We deliberately did not hardcode prices into the front end, because the materials market on imported glass is too volatile to make that workable. The team owns the pricing logic and we trained them to maintain it.
What stops a customer using the calculator to size up a job and then taking the spec to a competitor?
Honestly, nothing absolute, and that was a discussion we had with Oliver early on. The calculator is open to any visitor. The bet is that customers who get an instant, credible price from Precision Glassworks are more likely to stay with Precision Glassworks than ones made to wait three days for a quote that arrives well above what they had in mind. Conversion data since launch backs that up. The calculator wins more deals than it leaks, by a wide margin.
How does an enquiry flow from the website into the CRM in practice?
When a customer hits submit on the calculator, the full configuration, the live price, and their lead details land in the CRM as a qualified opportunity, tagged and routed to the right person with a follow-up task attached. Enquiries from email, WhatsApp and social channels feed into the same CRM with consistent tags, so nothing gets re-keyed by hand and nothing falls through the gaps between channels. That plumbing alone recovered around £10,000 a month of pipeline that had been leaking before.
Could a similar configurator work for a fabricator that sells more bespoke jobs?
Yes, with a caveat. The pattern works wherever the price of a typical job is a function of a manageable number of variables: length, material, fittings, finish, install complexity. We have spoken to bifold installers, fencing contractors, signage makers and shopfitters where it would fit. Where it does not fit cleanly is one-off architectural work that genuinely needs a site visit before any number is credible. In those cases, an instant ballpark with a clear handover to a surveyor often beats no number at all.