Stanbrooke Custom Homes was building a new kind of business model for a custom home builder: a catalog of pre-designed floor plans with limited customization, aimed at offering better prices than fully custom competitors, which meant leaning much more heavily on localized advertising than custom builders typically do.
A Lead Flow That Outran the Process
That created a new problem: a strong flow of incoming leads that the sales team, working an 8-12 month sales cycle off spreadsheets, post-it notes, and ad hoc follow-up calls, simply couldn't track effectively.
Rebuilding the Sales Process Around the CRM
As Director of Marketing and Sales, the fix was implementing Salesforce Sales Cloud and rebuilding the sales team's internal process around it, rather than trying to bolt CRM software onto the existing, informal workflow.
Once the team was trained, real-time lead tracking and automated follow-up let the sales team sell smarter and faster, driving sales growth of over 50% year over year and giving management accurate forecasting for the first time. If you're considering a similar project, start by asking whether you need a Salesforce consultant — that decision usually determines how smooth the implementation goes.