"We had no system. Salesforce transformed our marketing and sales department with a simple process."

Learn how Jerry Suhrstedt leveraged CRM fundamentals (without a bajillion bells & whistles) to streamline productivity and create a solid system for this home builder's marketing and sales team.

The Situation

It's easy to get caught up in the present. To forget about the simple things in life. I enjoy thinking back and remembering those moments when simple but good technology made your life so much better. So much so, it made you a bit giddy. That was me.

Back in 2003 I joined a custom home builder as the Marketing Director and was immediately thrust in to developing a system. It was early in their journey to become a notable, Seattle and Tacoma area home builder. This custom home construction company was forging a new business model with built on driving marketing and sales.

Historically, custom home builders garner new clients via word-of-mouth. But this company wanted to offer lower overall pricing to having a custom home built on your land. In order to accomplish this, they knew they would have to offer a catalog of pre-designed floor plans, limit client selections and limit floor plan customization.

The Problem

In order to hit their annual revenue targets, this would require lots of localized advertising, which to this point wasn’t typical of custom home builders. They knew they could capture a good amount of prospective home buyers, and that their dedicated sales team could convert those prospects in to buyers. The owner's were sold on the concept of advertising... and lots of it!

The problem was realized that the sales team would have to focus their energies mostly on prospect follow-up. Management soon found that the sales cycle with semi-custom homes was around 8-12 months. At this point, the sales team was utilizing a confusing web of spreadsheets, post-it notes, and hap-hazard follow-up processes. It wasn't working very well.

The Solution

Salesforce to the rescue! At this time, I was the director of marketing and sales. I knew I would have to put together some sort of holistic solution and build a process as incoming sales leads were flying in the door, and the sales team simply wasn’t able to track leads, follow-up, and sales.

After much research I implemented a Salesforce Sales solution and began transforming internal sales team procedures to match the systems that are inherently part of the Salesforce platform. In other words, we didn't have a system. The simple fact that Salesforce is built on solid CRM principals, this forced both the marketing and sales department to rethink their cobbled together processes and follow CRM fundamentals... which by the way is actually a solid system. Why reinvent the wheel?

Once the sales team was trained on the Salesforce's system, the sales department began to flourish. 

The Benefits

The sales team was now able to track real-time incoming prospects from lead to sale with lead contact management. This also allowed them to prioritize leads and opportunities.

The Sales Team was now more productive with lead follow-up because of automation with Salesforce. This freed them up to do what they do best, engage with their prospects rather than worrying about "when" they should follow-up.

Salesforce allowed the sales team to drive sales growth by over 50% year over year because they were able to sell smarter and sell faster.

Sales management was able to now accurately forecast sales and revenues from the dashboard with fully customized reports.

Marketing could now track advertising campaigns, project ROI, and with customized dash boards was able to visually see sales funnels come to life.

The Outcome

The company grew annual sales from $3MM to $11MM in just under three years. They were ranked the 6th place for Washington States Top 100 Fastest Growing Companies in their 3rd year.