Coldwell Banker Realty

Coldwell Banker Realty Improves Sales Processes and Visibility with Salesforce and AllCloud

Coldwell Banker Realty (CBR) has a Hawaii-based division which is the largest residential brokerage onthe island of O`ahu. Coldwell Banker is the nation’s oldest real estate company, founded in 1906 on a commitment to professionalism and customer service, both of which remain cornerstones for the organization and its thousands of agents across the US today.

Challenge

CBR recently started work on a new project to sell housing units within a large real estate development in Hawaii. To make this effort a success, they needed a way for their team to easily work with real estate agents to track interested buyers.

Previously, CBR handled general brokerage through a legacy CRM solution and tracked basic information on all leads (name, email, phone number) in Excel spreadsheets. However, this created several challenges. For example, agents would document buyer information in notebooks, which created a lack of visibility into pipeline and agent activity, making it impossible to track the process from lead to unit purchase. The team also relied on a manual process for assigning inbound leads, which was not linked to their tracking of sales activities or unit allocations.

CBR quickly realized that introducing a modern CRM solution designed specifically to support the company’s new construction project could resolve these challenges and better position them for success. In doing so, they identified several key objectives:

• Improving sales tracking: Easily identify who the buyer is to simplify contracting and the tracking of those buyers throughout the purchase process.
• Introducing standardized processes: Reduce manual efforts to improve accuracy by introducing more standardized processes and automated functionality.
• Increasing visibility: Provide sales management with visibility into the pipeline of purchasers, including the ability to decrement available units as each one gets sold.

Solution

After identifying the need to introduce a CRM solution, Doug Shanefield, Vice President, Projects Director at CBR, led his team in the effort to find the right technology for their needs. This search brought them to Salesforce, as they found significant value in the solution’s flexibility to be optimized for specific needs, ease of use across devices (including mobile) and overall reliability. Upon deciding to implement Salesforce, CBR also opted to work with a partner to ensure a smooth implementation and selected AllCloud, a Salesforce Platinum Consulting Partner.

The Salesforce implementation ended up as a seven week project to implement Sales Cloud for a total of 23 admin and sales users in time for the new project launch. AllCloud started by reviewing CBR’s current setup and their desired future state to understand exactly how to create the best Sales Cloud environment for their needs.

Based on this discovery, AllCloud led an implementation that included:

• Updating the lead cycle, including the creation of standard processes and definitions for leads and opportunities.
• Developing HTML for web leads to feed directly into CBR’s Salesforce instance.
• Defining how new leads get created in the system, including capturing details like how long each person has been in the system as a lead.
• Setting up Person accounts within the system to represent qualified buyers.
• Developing visibility into sales activity for management, including how many emails, text messages and calls each agent makes.
• Creating reports that allow sales managers and agents alike to see information like which opportunities are in the system but haven’t been touched yet, which opportunities are sitting in each stage of the sales pipeline and when opportunities convert to the next stage. AllCloud led training for the CBR team following the implementation, taking extra time to review best practices for the new processes in Salesforce to help users understand the value behind the changes.

Results

CBR successfully implemented Salesforce by their target go-live date without any delays thanks to their partnership with the AllCloud team.

From there, CBR has already realized numerous benefits since going live with Salesforce. These benefits include increased transparency and visibility into sales processes thanks to the ability to see agent activity and track lead progression through the pipeline. Additionally, CBR has significantly reduced manual effort throughout the sales process and introduced a standardized approach for all agents.

Specifically, CBR reports several key metrics that demonstrate their return on investment in Salesforce, including:

• 100% data-driven decision-making by connecting sales and operations planning processes
• 20% increase in sales management efficiency through streamlined reporting

Following this initial success, the CBR team plans to continue working with AllCloud to expand their Salesforce footprint. The next project the team will tackle is bringing property and unit allocation tracking into Salesforce.

“Salesforce has made an immense difference in how our sales team operates by giving us the visibility and standardization we needed to continue growing our business. AllCloud made all of that possible, leading us through an expert implementation that we were able to complete on time and without hitting any roadblocks. We thoroughly trust the AllCloud team to help us continue to realize even more benefits from Salesforce.” – Doug Shanefield, Vice President, Projects Director at CBR