Overview
Bruntwood is a family-owned and run property company that specialises in creating the right environments for a wide variety of businesses to succeed. With 110 properties across four UK cities, Bruntwood provides office space, serviced and virtual offices, meeting rooms and retail premises to companies across a range of different business sectors.
The challenge
Bruntwood’s existing CRM system had been developed sporadically over time and was originally a simple system intended to manage customer emails. Over the last 12 years, additional features and functionality were bolted on, however this left Bruntwood with a system that was simply not user friendly and failed to meet the requirements of a fast expanding business.
Some of the key challenges were as follows:
- Pulling together data for reporting was a manual and labour intensive task – this resulted in data inaccuracy and a lack of trust in the system.
- With 70+ users, the system was not supporting the diversity of requirements in a user friendly manner.
- Sales were unable to gain a single-view of the customer leading to lack of cross- selling and up-selling across the business.
- Due to the lack of visibility of sales activities, there were difficulties in ensuring the company was able to maximise agent productivity, retention and overall customer satisfaction.
- Information silos were causing difficulties in cross business collaboration.
The solution
First step – selecting a Salesforce partner
After meeting with several Salesforce partners, Bruntwood engaged with makepositive who came highly recommended by Salesforce themselves. makepositives’ reputation for delivering 300+ Salesforce projects, all with exceptional customer satisfaction ratings, gave Bruntwood the confidence that makepositive were the right partner to work with.
makepositive followed the following process to address the challenges and requirements of Bruntwood:
The workshop
During the initial stages of the project, makepositive held a number of scoping workshops to clarify the business requirements and objectives. The workshops engaged a number of stakeholders from across
the business including; Sales, Retention, Professional Services, Marketing, Project Management, Customer Service and Finance.
During the workshops, information was gathered on specific requirements and how they aligned to the business objectives of:
- Increasing sales conversion rates.
- Delivering accurate, real-time reporting more efficiently.
- Increasing revenue potential.
- Building a system that would facilitate the growth of the business.
Once the requirements were identified, makepositive presented Bruntwood with a proposal that detailed the higher level project plan and costs. During this workshop stage, it was evident that both companies had excellent cultural alignment and fit and were well suited to work together.
The Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation
Once the proposal was approved, makepositive started working on a full Salesforce Sales Cloud implementation. This solution was selected because of its capabilities in managing the full end-to-end process of sales management and reporting.
The implementation allowed Bruntwood to manage their entire Serviced, Conventional Office Space and Retail Unit sales processes across multiple locations. It enabled them to:
- Capture leads submitted via their website plus those entered via an Agent Portal. These leads were then progressed seamlessly through to an opportunity on the Salesforce platform.
- Manage their extensive property portfolio, record suite viewings and feedback, lock out suites that are occupied and create detailed lease records against suites upon completion.
The project went live successfully and opened up doors for further discussions on how Bruntwood could streamline processes, improve efficiencies, increase revenue and leverage the power of the no. 1 cloud based CRM tool – Salesforce.
The result
Bruntwood now have a single-view of their customers, including leases, suites, previous viewings and other historical information. The Sales team are able to see all opportunities against a single customer, making cross-business unit collaboration a dream! The teams are making full use of Chatter against customers, opportunities, proposals and leases to ensure that all discussions can be referenced going forwards.
Now that all of Bruntwood’s data is in one place in Salesforce, they are able to take advantage of the extensive reporting and dashboard capabilities to give a real-time view of their business and sales pipeline. This has eliminated the need for sales data to be stored in spreadsheets and on emails.
Users now have the ability to create and edit their reports themselves, allowing them to analyse the data that is important to them.
Users have mobile access to important business data, and can post viewing feedback into the system in real-time on- site, saving time and ensuring that this important information is captured.
Cross business unit collaboration has been greatly enhanced due to all teams being able to access the information and especially being able to discuss various customers and proposals over Chatter.
The time spent on manual data entry and updates has decreased, allowing users to focus on value-add activities.