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Case Study – Apartments.com
"One of the biggest rewards of using Model Metrics was their keen leadership in the execution of integrating our internal systems with salesforce.com."
Company:
Apartments.com
CRM Project Elements:
Requirements Study
Salesforce.com implementation
Data conversion
Systems Integration
Outlook Integration
Training
Reports and Dashboards
Documentation
Client Background
Apartments.com is a leading national online apartment Internet Listing Service (ILS) distinguished by its personalized searches, highly visual ads and affiliation with 170 local Web sites of major newspapers across the country.
Apartments.com services two audiences nationwide. The site connects renters with apartment communities through engaging virtual tours, professional community photos and detailed descriptions. In addition, Apartments.com advertising solutions provide management companies with a cost-effective means to visually advertise properties and reach millions of renters. With the most page views for any rental category Web site*, highly qualified leads and one of the industry's lowest cost-per-lease advertising solutions, Apartments.com provides value to nearly thirteen thousand properties across the nation. Apartments.com currently services 45 of the 50 largest apartment managers named in the NMHC's 2004 list of top management companies.
Identifying Goals
In May 2004 Apartments.com identified a need for implementing a sales automation business system to improve sharing and protection of relationship data currently residing with their salespeople and in other internal systems. The goals of their initiative included:
• Improving sales activity tracking and metric analysis, giving their managers greater visibility over their remote national sales team
• Integrating their existing business systems to create centralized account profiles along with key contact information, giving their salespeople faster access to customer data and increasing productivity
• Optimizing business processes
Introduction to Model Metrics
Apartments.com was not very familiar with salesforce.com but thought it might be the right vehicle to help them move forward with a more unified, strategically focused business system solution. However, to ensure they were making the right choice, they decided to ask a third party to determine if it could meet their requirements and provide the feature set and functionality they sought.
They were introduced to Model Metrics in June 2004. After seeing a demonstration of Apartments.com's current business systems and reporting spreadsheets, Model Metrics was retained to begin a comprehensive information gathering process to determine if salesforce.com was indeed the right choice for them.
Research Gets Underway
Model Metrics developed a brief questionnaire and distributed it to approximately 15 people who were responsible for a variety of roles within Apartments.com including: senior management; client retention; finance; account management; sales (affiliate and direct channels); and information technology. The questionnaire was an important tool to help prepare people for one-on-one and small group interviews designed to document each person's specific business system needs.
Model Metrics compiled all of the information gathered during the interviews into one document and organized it according to major sales automation feature sets that aligned with salesforce.com. The requirements were then reviewed by the Apartments.com project leaders and distributed to key interview participants. They were asked to prioritize features on a scale of 1 to 4 to determine which items should be included in the implementation plan. Then Model Metrics tabulated and analyzed the data.
Following the interviews Model Metrics held a general education session where the fundamentals of both sales automation and salesforce.com were covered. This gave the sales users more exposure to salesforce.com to ensure they were comfortable with the tool and its functionality.
Action Plan Development
Based on the interview information it was determined salesforce.com would meet the business system needs of Apartments.com. The following two-phase plan was developed.
The first phase focused on:
• Sales activity tracking and reporting
• Critical process improvements
• Property ownership knowledge
• Account executive-enablement
• Senior management intelligence
• Security and access offline access
• Outlook integration
• Integration
The second phase, which is slated for 2005, will focus on:
• Marketing
• Affiliate tracking
• Contract tracking
• Billing data integration
Technology Integration Begins
The information technology group at Apartments.com met with Model Metrics to review the goals and objectives outlined in both phases. Then Model Metrics began reviewing all the data Apartments.com gathered to date, discussed where it was located, where new information needed to reside, and other key criteria to ensure a smooth transition to salesforce.com.
There were three central things being focused on: 1) Deciding what format the data needed to be in; 2) How often the information need to be updated; and 3) The code had to be written to enable it.
Representatives from both companies moved forward quickly. First, they agreed on the visual elements of salesforce.com. They decided how information would appear on screen, as well what data would be available on- and off-line. The creation of reports and dashboards were key for Apartments.com, since they provide critical information in easy-to-use formats and track progress pertaining to individual and organizational goals.
Because representatives from Apartments.com are heavy users of Outlook, which has very strong integration with salesforce.com, the ability to move information between the two was also important. Sharing, updating and disseminating information on a daily basis was a top priority.
Next Model Metrics spent long hours developing code in Java. When the code was ready they transferred the application to Apartments.com and made sure it was installed properly. When everything was in place they did a test run and then went live.
In only four weeks all of the phase one initiatives were successfully achieved on time and within budget.
Rollout, Training and Support
In October 2004 Apartments.com organized a sales summit/training session in Chicago , where they rolled out salesforce.com. The event began with an introduction to the new business system and included a demonstration of the live application showcasing the integrated data that would now be available to the users. Then they broke the team into smaller groups and began formal training.
Model Metrics and Apartments.com co-taught two user training sessions. The first session was developed by Model Metrics and covered 12 specific "day-in-the-life" scenarios. It gave users an idea of the most common things they would experience while using salesforce.com and provided valuable step-by-step instructions. The second session focused on the salesforce.com offline version and Outlook integration, which are key to successful implementation of the system.
The rollout went very smoothly and the users left the meeting excited about salesforce.com. They understood its value and were anxious to begin increasing their productivity. In the two weeks following the rollout, Apartments.com offered ongoing user support and training by holding three subsequent training sessions via conference call to answer additional user questions.
They also sent out follow-up training documents pertaining to the offline edition and Outlook syncing. This ongoing support helped the initial user adoption phase run smoothly and now salesforce.com is used to recap weekly and monthly account executive activities as well as pipeline data for various regional and sales meetings.
In December 2004 Apartments.com provided additional salesforce.com training during the company's annual meeting in Chicago . At that time, the users expressed how thrilled they were to have such easy access to customer data and how simple it is to log information pertaining to customer meetings, phone calls, and other opportunities.
This training session built upon the users' first-hand knowledge of the system and included more advanced items, such as creating views, updating hierarchies, and reporting.
Conclusion
Apartments.com rolled out their new sales automation business system in October 2004 without incident--which is a major accomplishment for a project of this magnitude. To date, they are experiencing 100% user adoption for the online version of salesforce.com and 80% for the offline version. Apartments.com is on-track to enter phase two of their implementation plan in Q1 2005.
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