What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Kirsty Carswell described scattered ATS, email, CRM and spreadsheet data and slow client reporting. She accepted the Starter pricing as reasonable and agreed to a demo with her analyst Sarah, planned for May.
What happened: Lewis Kerr ran a discovery call with Kirsty Carswell, Head of Client Services, on 6 Mar 2025. She described placement and candidate data spread across several systems.
Customer view: Manual reporting to clients is slowing them down, and she said faster answers would make them more competitive. She wants placement, success-rate and time-to-placement views.
Commercial: Lewis positioned Starter and quoted a first-year all-in figure of twenty-five thousand five hundred, then £20k a year at renewal. Kirsty called that reasonable and asked for the demo.
Watch: She named an ATS, Microsoft 365 email, a CRM and Xero, which fills the four-connector Starter limit. If the account signed under v1, its first renewal on or after 1 Jul 2026 would move to the v2 Starter list of £22k (+12.8%), not the £20k quoted here.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Who was there
BG-Demo
Them
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Lewis Kerr to send reading material and book a demo on Stannard Vale's own data for late April or May.
- Kirsty to bring Sarah, the analyst, and ideally an IT person to the demo.
- Lewis to send a proposal after the demo.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- The four systems named (ATS, Microsoft 365, CRM, Xero) fill the Starter hard limit of four connectors.
- She said the CRM is not fully populated, so answers may depend on weak source data.
- The renewal figure quoted was £19,500, while a v1 Starter renewal on or after 1 Jul 2026 would be priced at the v2 list of £22,000.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- She would like account managers and possibly recruiters to use it, which could outgrow the fifteen Starter users.
- Extra connectors or a Growth tier could follow if the spreadsheet and further sources are added.
Transcript
- Lewis KerrKirsty, thanks for making time. How's your week been?
- Kirsty CarswellGood, thanks. Busy as always. Ready when you are.
- Lewis KerrBrilliant. So I know Stannard Vale is a finance and accountancy recruiter. What I really want to understand is where the data pain points are. Where does it get messy?
- Kirsty CarswellOkay, so here's the thing. We've got candidate data in our ATS, we've got emails scattered everywhere, we track placements in a spreadsheet. When someone asks, 'How many candidates have we placed in Leeds this year?', I either have to dig through the ATS, manually count, or ask someone to find an old report. It's clunky.
- Lewis KerrSo you've got data in multiple places and it's hard to query?
- Kirsty CarswellExactly. And the thing is, we do a lot of reporting to clients. They ask for placement rates, candidate profiles, all that. We have to manually pull it together. If we could do that faster, we'd be more competitive.
- Lewis KerrWhat systems are we talking about? What do you use day-to-day?
- Kirsty CarswellATS for the candidates, email through Microsoft 365. We've got a CRM, though to be honest it's not fully populated. And then we've got Xero for finance stuff.
- Lewis KerrRight. And if you could magic up a system that let you ask questions across all of that and get answers in seconds, what would you ask?
- Kirsty CarswellShow me placements by region and by type: finance, accounting, payroll. Show me placement success rate. Show me time-to-placement trending over time. Basically everything that tells us how we're doing and where we're strong.
- Lewis KerrAnd who would use that? Just you, or everyone?
- Kirsty CarswellIdeally our account managers could access it, plus our analytics person. If it's not too complicated, we could get our recruiters using it too.
- Lewis KerrOkay. So here's what I'm thinking: we could build a data layer on top of all your systems. ATS, email, CRM, finance. All the data sits inside your own Snowflake account, under your control. No third-party storage. You ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds.
- Kirsty CarswellThat sounds like what we need. When could we see something?
- Lewis KerrSo typically we'd do a discovery call, which we're doing now, get a sense of your systems and needs, then a demo where we actually connect to your data and show you what's possible. The demo's probably an hour, and we'd do that a couple of weeks out.
- Kirsty CarswellAnd would anyone else need to be on that?
- Lewis KerrYour analytics person, maybe. And your IT person to help us connect to your systems securely. But the core would be you and whoever's going to use this most.
- Kirsty CarswellOkay. I think Sarah, our analyst, should be there. She's the one who deals with reporting.
- Lewis KerrPerfect. So I'll send you some information about what we do, and we'll get the demo booked in. What does your calendar look like over the next few weeks?
- Kirsty CarswellFairly open, actually. Late April, May would work well.
- Lewis KerrGrand. I'll send some reading over today and we'll get something in the diary for May. To put a number on it, we're talking about a Starter package for something like this. Fifteen users, four data connectors. Implementation is four weeks. After that, you've got support, monthly check-ins, the works.
- Kirsty CarswellWhat's the ballpark cost?
- Lewis KerrFirst year all-in is twenty-five thousand five hundred. That's implementation, setup, training, year one of the subscription. After that, renewal is nineteen thousand five hundred annually. But that's just the headline. We'll walk you through everything in the proposal.
- Kirsty CarswellOkay. That seems reasonable for what we're getting. Let's do the demo.
- Lewis KerrBrilliant. I'll send stuff over today and we'll get it booked. In the meantime, if you've got any questions, just ping me. Sound good?
- Kirsty CarswellSounds good. Thanks, Lewis.
- Lewis KerrCheers, Kirsty. Speak soon.