Merriott Lyle Distribution / BG-Demo – Training
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Merriott Lyle Distribution · 20 May 2025 10:00
Training for Neil Ashworth and Tariq Saleem. Neil's first real use of the brain landed well, and his managing director wants to know what the £116k a year buys. Branch manager dashboards are the next step.
What was said
What this says
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Training for Neil Ashworth and Tariq Saleem. Neil's first real use of the brain landed well, and his managing director wants to know what the £116k a year buys. Branch manager dashboards are the next step.
What happened: Hamza Akhtar ran the 20 May 2025 training for Tariq Saleem and Neil Ashworth. Neil's first question returned a list of disputed North accounts with last invoice and last contact.
Customer view: Neil said he had only been in the brain a handful of times before, then called the result really good. Tariq reported one open how-to ticket, no connector failures and nothing stale.
Commercial: Neil's managing director keeps asking what the £116k a year buys, so the dispute list and dashboards are the start of a value case. Tariq said branch usage has gone up a lot but gave no figure.
Watch: Hamza named a flat record count and one person asking a large share of questions as early warnings; the spread was healthy on the day. The no-contact table leaves out branch visits, so it needs a caveat when shared.
Themes
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026Theme
Training and value case
Importance
renewal
Sentiment
positive
Voice
user
Who was there
BG-Demo
CRMmade from
Them
CRMmade from
Follow-up
Next steps
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Hamza sends Tariq and Neil a half-page guide and the recording link on the day of the call.
- Neil sends Tariq the branch manager names so Tariq can create a sharing group.
- Hamza proposes a short follow-up in a few weeks, folded into Daniel Okafor's next review.
Risks
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Neil's managing director is asking what the £116,500 a year buys and needs more than a list to answer.
- Neil had used the brain only a handful of times before this session, so senior habit is still forming.
- The no-contact table leaves out branch visits and could be misread as branches not caring.
Opportunities
As at Fri 9 Oct 2026- Dashboards shared with branch managers can give the managing director a visible answer on value.
- A starter pack of pinned questions for new branch managers can spread use across the Enterprise licences.
- Tariq reports far more people in the brain, and there is plenty of room under the licensed user count.
Transcript
Hamza AkhtarMorning both. Can you hear me alright?
Tariq SaleemMorning Hamza, loud and clear. Neil's in the lobby, I can see him. He's just coming through.
Neil AshworthSorry, sorry. Back to back since eight and the last one overran. Morning. Is that working? Can you see me?- Hamza AkhtarWe can hear you, camera's a bit dark but that's fine. No rush at all. Did you both get in alright? It's been chucking it down down here.
- Neil AshworthSame up north. I drove between two branches this morning and the wipers were on full the whole way. I'll be glad of a call where I can sit still.
- Tariq SaleemBirmingham's the same. Right, before we start, can I run through the open tickets? There's only the one, which is a good sign, but I'd like it on the record.
- Hamza AkhtarPlease do. That's the how-to one, isn't it? Saving a search so it stays pinned?
- Tariq SaleemThat's the one. One of the credit control team asked it and I didn't want to guess at the answer. Nothing else open. No connector failures, nothing stale. I looked at the load log first thing and every overnight load finished before the branches opened.
- Hamza AkhtarGood, that's what I wanted to hear. We'll cover the pinned search in the second half. It's a two-click thing once you've seen it. So, plan for today. I'd like to spend the first part on asking questions properly, because that's where most people get the value. Then pages and search, then the dashboards builder, then who sees what. Neil, shout if you want to go off piste.
- Neil AshworthYeah, that's fine. Can I be honest about where I am with it? I've been in it a handful of times. Tariq set me up, I asked it a couple of things, it came back with sensible answers, and then the day got in the way.
- Hamza AkhtarThat's completely normal, and it's really useful to know. So let me share my screen. You should see the chat view now. Tell me if it's too small.
- Tariq SaleemThat's readable for me. Neil?
- Neil AshworthFine, yeah. I can see it.
- Hamza AkhtarGreat. First thing, and it sounds obvious: ask it the way you'd ask a colleague who knows the account. Neil, what's a question you'd actually want answered on a Monday morning?
- Neil AshworthUm. Which of my trade accounts in the North are in dispute and haven't had a call from anyone in a fortnight? That's the one that bites me. By the time I hear about it the customer's already annoyed.
- Hamza AkhtarPerfect, that's a real one. Type it in more or less as you said it. I'll do it on mine and you can follow along on yours.
- Neil AshworthRight. Typing. Do I say North or Regional Branch Director North?
- Hamza AkhtarJust say the North, it'll work out the rest from how your branches are set up. If it's not sure it'll ask you, or it'll show you what it assumed.
- Neil AshworthOkay, it's thinking. Oh. That's a list. That's actually a list of accounts. It's got the dispute, the last invoice, and who last spoke to them.
- Hamza AkhtarYeah. And if you click the little source marker next to each line you can see where it came from, so the dispute from the ticket, the last contact from the call recorder, the invoice from the accounting system.
- Tariq SaleemWhich is why the account matching matters so much. If the branch system and the CRM disagree on who an account is, you'd get two half-pictures. That's a mapping question, and it's why I've been fussy about it.
- Neil AshworthIs that why I used to get three different spreadsheets and they never agreed?
- Tariq SaleemPartly, yes. Partly it was just people keeping their own copy. One view fixes the second part. The first part we've been fixing connector by connector.
- Hamza AkhtarAnd for what it's worth, from the training side, that's the difference we see between sites that use it and sites that don't. You've got the data in good shape, Tariq, so now it's mostly habit.
- Neil AshworthHabit I can do. Can I ask a follow-up in the same box or do I start again?
- Hamza AkhtarSame box. It keeps the thread. Try something like, show me the one with the oldest open dispute and what's been said about it.
- Neil AshworthOkay. That's got it. That's a plumbing contractor, been open a while. There's an email thread, a call summary and two invoices. Hang on, that call was one of my branch managers. I didn't know he'd rung them.
- Hamza AkhtarThat's the point. It's not telling you anything new about the customer, it's pulling together what your own people already did.
- Neil AshworthRight. No, that's good. That's really good, actually. Sorry, I'm repeating myself. I just wasn't expecting it to be that quick.
- Tariq SaleemIt's worth saying the usage across the branches has gone up a lot since we switched on the wider group. I'm not going to quote you a number, I'd have to check it properly, but the load log shows far more people in there than a couple of months back.
- Hamza AkhtarI've seen the same from our side. It's a healthy curve. And you've got two hundred licensed users, so there's plenty of room for it to keep going.
- Neil AshworthWhich, to be fair, is what my managing director keeps asking about. He wanted to know what we get for the £116,500 a year. So if I can show him this list, that's half the answer.
- Hamza AkhtarThen let's make sure you can show him more than a list. That's what the dashboards builder is for. But first, let's do a bit on search, because people mix up search and chat, and they're quite different.
- Tariq SaleemGo on, that's a good one to explain. I get asked it weekly.
- Hamza AkhtarSo chat is for questions with an answer: how many, which ones, what happened. Search is for finding the thing itself. A specific email, a specific order, a specific call. You use search when you know roughly what you're after and you want to open it.
- Neil AshworthSo chat for what, search for where.
- Hamza AkhtarHa, yes. I'm going to steal that. Chat for what, search for where. Try it. Search for the plumbing contractor's name and then filter by type.
- Neil AshworthOkay, I've got the filters down the side. Emails, calls, tickets, invoices. If I tick just calls I get the three. Oh, and I can sort by date.
- Hamza AkhtarExactly. And this is where Tariq's open ticket comes in. See the little pin icon top right of the results? If you've built a search you keep using, you pin it. Then it's in your left-hand panel every time.
- Tariq SaleemOh. That's it? I'd been looking in the settings menu.
- Hamza AkhtarEveryone does. It's not in settings. I'll update the ticket with a screenshot so your credit control colleague has it in writing.
- Tariq SaleemCheers. That closes it, as far as I'm concerned.
- Neil AshworthCan I pin the dispute one from earlier? The Monday morning one?
- Hamza AkhtarYou can pin a chat question as well, yes. Go back to it, and there's a star by the question. That saves it. Next time you just click it and it re-runs on fresh data.
- Neil AshworthDone. It's there. So every Monday I click that and I've got my list.
- Hamza AkhtarEvery Monday, and it'll be right as of the overnight refresh, which has finished before you start your day.
- Tariq SaleemThat's the bit I watch. If a refresh was late I'd see it in the log before anyone else did, and I'd tell you straight away. Not that it has been.
- Hamza AkhtarRight, so let me move to pages, then. Pages are the long-lived view of one thing. One account, one branch, one project. Think of it as the file on the customer, except it keeps itself up to date.
- Neil AshworthIs that what the account summary is? The one with the timeline down the middle?
- Hamza AkhtarThat's the one. Open the plumbing contractor again, and you'll see orders, disputes, calls and invoices in one stream. The idea is that the branch, key account and credit control teams all look at the same page instead of three different tools.
- Tariq SaleemWhich was the original reason we bought it. Credit control would chase an invoice and the branch would have just agreed a credit with the customer and nobody knew.
- Neil AshworthThat happened to me last year. I won't say which customer. Embarrassing phone call.
- Hamza AkhtarWell, now you'd see the credit before you ring. Okay, I want to give you both a few minutes on your own. Neil, pick any account in your region and open its page. Tariq, do the same but pick one where you know the data's awkward. I'll stay quiet.
- Tariq SaleemGood idea. I'll take one of the older accounts that was merged in the branch system.
- Neil AshworthOkay. I picked one of the bigger accounts. Hang on. It's got two names on it. Is that a mistake?
- Tariq SaleemWhich account? Is it one with a trading name and a legal name?
- Neil AshworthYeah, exactly that. A company name and then a trading as underneath.
- Tariq SaleemThen that's right, that's deliberate. I matched the two so the orders under the trading name roll up to the legal entity. If it had been split you'd have seen two pages. I'll check the load log to be sure, but I'm confident that's the mapping I put in.
- Hamza AkhtarAnd Tariq, what did you find on yours?
- Tariq SaleemMine's the merged one. It's clean, actually. The history from both old records is on the one page. I was bracing for a gap and there isn't one. I'll still go through the older ones properly this week, but that's encouraging.
- Hamza AkhtarGood. If you do find a gap, send me the account and which connector it came from and we'll look together. Don't change anything on your own, you know how that goes.
- Tariq SaleemI'd tell the team before I touched a mapping anyway. Same rule as ever.
- Hamza AkhtarFair. Right, dashboards. This is the bit your managing director will want. Neil, if you had one screen for the North, what would be on it?
- Neil AshworthOpen disputes by branch. Accounts with no contact in a fortnight. Overdue invoices by trade account. And, I don't know, a count of the questions my branch managers are asking, so I can see who's using it and who isn't.
- Hamza AkhtarThat's a proper brief. Let me build the first one live so you can see how it's done. New dashboard, give it a name, North region. Then add a tile, and the tile is just a saved question.
- Neil AshworthOh, so it's the same thing I did with the star.
- Hamza AkhtarExactly the same. Anything you can ask in chat can be a tile. You choose a chart or a table, and where it sits. I'll add the disputes one.
- Tariq SaleemCan I ask about permissions on those? If Neil builds a dashboard, who can see it?
- Hamza AkhtarGood question. By default it's private to the builder. He can share it with named people or with a group. And whoever opens it only sees the rows they'd be allowed to see anyway, so sharing a dashboard doesn't leak a branch's data to someone who shouldn't have it.
- Tariq SaleemThat's what I wanted confirmed. Because I'll get asked, and I'd rather say it with certainty.
- Neil AshworthCan I share it with my branch managers?
- Hamza AkhtarYou can, and Tariq can make a group so you're not picking people one by one. Tariq, that's a thirty-second job in the admin panel, I'll show you after.
- Tariq SaleemFine. Send me the list of names, Neil, and I'll set it up this afternoon.
- Neil AshworthWill do. Right, can I try building the second tile myself? The no-contact one.
- Hamza AkhtarGo on. I'll watch. Don't worry about getting it perfect.
- Neil AshworthOkay. I think I've done it. It's a table, it's got the account, the last contact date and the branch. It's showing a few more than I expected. Is that wrong?
- Hamza AkhtarLet me look. No, that's right. It's picking up anything where the last logged contact is a call or an email, but not a branch visit, because nobody logs those. So you may want to tweak the wording. Say something like, no call or email, and then you know what it's measuring.
- Neil AshworthAh. That makes sense. The branch managers do pop in on people. That wouldn't be in there.
- Tariq SaleemWhich is a data habit, not a system problem. I'd not want anyone to read that table as the branches not caring. Worth saying when you share it.
- Neil AshworthYeah, good point. I'll put a line at the top of the dashboard. Can I do that?
- Hamza AkhtarThere's a text tile for exactly that. Add one at the top and write what you like.
- Hamza AkhtarShall we take a short break? Five minutes, get a coffee. Then I'll do the last section, which is admin things for Tariq and a quick look at how to get new starters going.
- Tariq SaleemYes please. I've been staring at this for ages.
- Neil AshworthBack in five.
- Hamza AkhtarEveryone back? Good. Tariq, this bit is mostly for you, Neil, so feel free to drift if you need to. Let's talk about onboarding someone new to the brain.
- Neil AshworthI'll stay. I'd like to know what I'm asking Tariq to do.
- Hamza AkhtarFair enough. So when a new branch manager joins, Tariq adds them in the admin panel, assigns them to a branch group, and the permissions follow. No manual rules per person. The first time they log in they'll see an empty-ish home screen, and that's where people stall.
- Tariq SaleemI've seen that. They log in, they don't know what to type, and they never come back.
- Hamza AkhtarRight. So what works is giving them three starter questions on day one. I'd suggest ones Neil's already proved: the disputes list, the no-contact list, and one about their own top accounts. If they click a pinned question they're already getting value.
- Neil AshworthCan I share my starred questions? As a starter pack, I mean.
- Hamza AkhtarYou can. Put them in a shared folder and Tariq can make it the default for the branch group. New joiners then get them automatically.
- Tariq SaleemI like that. Which connector would that depend on? The disputes one pulls from the helpdesk, doesn't it, and the invoices from the accounting system?
- Hamza AkhtarYes, and the calls from the call recorder. All of which you've got live. So nothing new to wire up.
- Tariq SaleemGood. Then I'll build the folder myself once Neil's happy with the questions.
- Neil AshworthI'll tidy them tonight. A couple of them have rubbish names. One's just called test.
- Hamza AkhtarHa. We've all got one of those.
- Hamza AkhtarLast bit from me, and then I'll stop talking. A word on how you phrase questions, because it's the single biggest thing. Be specific about time and place. Not, how are sales doing, but, which accounts in the North have ordered less this quarter than last. It'll still answer the first one, but the second gets you something you can act on.
- Neil AshworthSo say what I'd say to a person, but more precisely.
- Hamza AkhtarExactly that. And if you're not sure it understood, ask it what it assumed. It'll tell you.
- Tariq SaleemI might put that on a one-page note for the branch managers. They don't read long documents.
- Hamza AkhtarI'll send you a short guide today. Half a page, the three habits, with screenshots from this session. You can send it on as it is or change it.
- Neil AshworthThat'd be brilliant. And the recording? Can I get that too? I'd like to watch the dashboards part again.
- Hamza AkhtarYes, I'll send the recording link with the guide. It's Tuesday today, so you'll both have it before the end of the day.
- Tariq SaleemOne more from me, while we're here. Is there anything I should be doing differently on the admin side now that more people are in? Any early warnings I should watch for?
- Hamza AkhtarHonestly, you're already doing the right thing by watching the load log. The things I'd look at are a connector that loads but records stop growing, because that means the source changed quietly, and any one person asking a big share of the questions. At the moment you've got a spread, which is what you want.
- Tariq SaleemRight. A flat record count I'd spot. The one person asking everything, I'd not have thought of. I'll keep an eye.
- Neil AshworthSorry, I'm going to have to dash soon, I've got a branch visit. Is there anything else you need from me?
- Hamza AkhtarJust the two things. Tidy the questions, and send Tariq the names for the group. Everything else I'll send you. And if anything odd shows up, a number that looks wrong, say, tell Tariq first and he'll bring it to us.
- Tariq SaleemUnderstood. I'll check the load log before I come back to you and I won't guess at the cause.
- Hamza AkhtarPerfect. I'd suggest a short follow-up in a few weeks, once the branch managers have used it for a bit. We can look at what they're actually asking and tidy up from there. Daniel can fold it into the next review so it's not another meeting for you.
- Neil AshworthSounds sensible. Thanks, Hamza, that was far more useful than I'd expected. I'd half thought it would be a slide deck.
- Hamza AkhtarNo slides. Glad it helped. Speak soon, both.
- Tariq SaleemCheers, Hamza. Cheers, Neil. Speak soon.
- Hamza AkhtarSorry, I think I've been left in the room. Ending the recording now.
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