Guides for every part of Gorilla Dash

Gorilla Dash is the software a multi-site business runs on: one customer database, the marketing that works off it, the selling and the operations behind that, and the reporting that tells head office how every tribe is doing. Shared between the centre and each tribe, so the brand stays consistent and each tribe still owns its own customers.

First, a word about the word "tribe"

You are about to meet the word tribe a great many times, so we may as well get it out of the way. A tribe is one location, branch or business unit inside your organisation — a shop, a depot, an office, a studio, a franchisee.

Why not just say "location"? Because every business calls them something different, and every one of those words is wrong somewhere else. "Store" is wrong for a firm of accountants. "Branch" is wrong for a food truck. "Franchisee" is wrong for a business that owns all its sites. "Location" is wrong for a mobile team that does not have one. So Gorilla Dash picked a word that belonged to nobody in particular and got on with it. Nobody has proposed a better one since, which we have decided to treat as a compliment.

The good news: you do not have to say it. You name your own groups of tribes, and that name is what your team sees day to day — Stores, Offices, Restaurants, Territories, Salons, Depots, whatever your business actually calls them. One organisation's menu says "Stores"; another's says "Offices". Both are tribes underneath.

The problem it exists to solve

A business with one site can run on a spreadsheet and a mailbox. A business with twenty cannot, and what usually happens instead is worse: every tribe buys its own tools. One uses a CRM, one uses a notebook. Three send their own newsletters. Head office cannot see what anybody is doing, cannot compare one tribe with another, and finds out about a problem when a customer complains.

The alternative most networks try is a stack of separate products bolted together — a CRM here, an email tool there, a website builder somewhere else. That works until you want one number out of it. Then nobody can say what a customer is worth, because the enquiry lives in one system, the sale in another and the marketing in a third.

Who it is for

It suits businesses that sell to people rather than to procurement departments — signage, food, trades, retail, services, fitness, franchises of almost any kind. The common thread is many sites, one brand, and a lot of local customers.

How it fits together

Everything sits on one record of a person. That is the whole design, and it is why the parts are worth more together than separately.

So a website enquiry becomes a CRM lead, the rep logs the call against the same person, the sale lands on their record, and next quarter's campaign can be sent to everyone who bought — without exporting anything or joining two systems together.

It is not just a marketing tool

Gorilla Dash is usually bought for the marketing, and that is the half people talk about. The half that keeps networks using it for years is the running of the business: what each tribe is actually doing, and what it is actually worth.

And the numbers

Because the sales, the enquiries, the calls and the customers are all in one place, the reporting is about the business rather than about a channel.

• Revenue by tribe, month by month, on the same basis for everybody — so a network can be ranked, compared and helped.
• Accounts receivable and cash position: what is owed, by whom, and how overdue.
• Lead source return: what each marketing channel actually produced in sales, not clicks.
• Activity against results: how much work a team is doing next to what it won.
• Network dashboards built from your own datasets, so head office watches the numbers it cares about rather than the ones a report happened to ship with.

Where the sales data comes from

None of that reporting works if the sales are somewhere else. Gorilla Dash connects to the tills and job systems your tribes already run, pulls the sales in, and matches them to the customer records it already holds — so a report covers the network even when the network is not on one system.

Among others: CoreBridge and CoreBridge EVO, Antera, AIM, Hoops, RepairQ, Toast, NCR Aloha, Franpos, Kosmopos, ezCater and My Area Network. Connectors are added as networks need them.

A network rarely runs one of these. A franchise that grew by acquisition can easily have three different tills across forty sites, and every one of them reports differently. Gorilla Dash normalises them: a sale is a sale, whichever system recorded it, so tribes can be compared on the same basis.

What that unlocks

• Sales on the customer record. A rep opening a contact sees what that account has actually bought, not just what was quoted.
• Marketing measured in revenue. Lead source reporting can say what a channel produced in sales, because the sales are in the same database as the leads.
• Network comparison. Every tribe on one definition of a sale, whatever their till.
• Automation that follows real events. A lifecycle stage that advances when a sale completes, or a campaign that goes to everyone who bought a particular thing.

And everything else that plugs in

• Email — Google and Microsoft mailboxes, so customer conversations land on the customer record.
• Social and listings — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and Yelp.
• Websites — the sites Gorilla Dash builds feed enquiries straight in, with no form-to-inbox-to-spreadsheet detour.
• Call tracking — calls recorded against the customer who made them.
• Payments — cards, direct debit and the billing behind subscriptions and network store orders.
• The API and Zapier — for the system nobody has built a connector for yet.

Organisations and tribes

Your organisation is the whole business; a tribe is one site inside it. How the two share data is the single most useful thing to understand about Gorilla Dash.

• Contacts belong to a tribe. That is what lets each one report on its own customers, and stops one tribe seeing another's.
• Settings are shared. Stages, statuses, categories and lead sources are defined once, so the network can be added up.
• Work flows down. Head office builds a campaign or a social post once, and every tribe sends it from their own pages, to their own customers.

Most screens exist twice for this reason — once at organisation level showing every tribe, once inside a tribe showing only that one. A figure that looks impossibly large is usually the organisation view being read as though it were a single tribe.

How to use it well

1. Agree the words first. Lifecycle stages, lead sources and opportunity stages are shared across every tribe. Settle them before anyone starts typing, because renaming them later rewrites every report.
2. Get the customer data in properly. Import once, cleanly, with email addresses verified. Everything downstream is built on it.
3. Connect the mailboxes and the social accounts. This is the step that turns Gorilla Dash from a database into something people use daily.
4. Let people work in it for a fortnight before automating anything. Automation built on a guess moves the wrong records.
5. Then automate the obvious. The stage change everyone already makes by hand, the follow-up everyone forgets.

Where to go next

• New to your account? Start with signing in and setting up your details.
• Setting the business up? Read the CRM first-week guide — the order it recommends applies to the whole product.
• Loading your customers? Importing a customer list from a spreadsheet.
• Ready to market? Email campaigns and social media posting.

Every module has its own guides below. If you cannot find what you need, ask the Help Centre or contact support — both are at the top of this page.