Case Study
Company Name:
Hestia Marketing Group
Company Type:
Marketing & Sales Consultancy
Founded:
2008
Headquartered:
Vancouver, BC
Notable Projects Sold:
Vancouver House - Vancouver, BC
ONE Water Street - Kelowna, BC
The Residential Suites at the Ritz-Carlton, Kapalua - Maui, Hawaii
Roxanne Reid, President and CEO of Hestia Marketing Group, has used nearly every type of sales and marketing software in her almost 30-year career of selling New Development Real Estate. Prior to using Spark, her team managed their project sales through a wide variety of systems, including pen and paper, house built solutions and industry-agnostic CRMs such as Hubspot, Microsoft Access and Salesforce.
“When customizing an enterprise CRM like Salesforce, people often don’t consider the human capital costs in addition to the initial financial capital outlay. It can give you major headaches to perform all of the customizations necessary to match our industry's sales process.
Building a CRM is only half the battle, maintaining and supporting the platform is a hidden cost that usually isn’t considered until it’s too late.”
Roxanne’s experience demonstrates that building an internal CRM is extremely time consuming and resource exhaustive. Worse, it often carries the greater cost of distracting a sales team from their primary goal: Selling New Development Projects.
“Everyone believes they can make their own tools in-house. I've been through in-house builds several times and, unfortunately, I know the amount of pain that can occur from trying to build something that often couldn't even get off the ground. I’d rather go with a platform that’s already built out than start from scratch.”
Unlike generic sales tools, Spark is specifically designed for New Development Sales and Marketing and Roxanne appreciated the ability to get up and running in a few short weeks. With previous CRMs, Hestia was forced to hire external consultants to properly make use of the technology in addition to requiring at least two internal staff to become heavily specialized in the software. This resulted in a significant bottleneck as the rest of the team was forced to channel their work through the specialists.
“It felt like you needed an advanced degree to build reports and analysis with one of our old CRMs. You needed complicated formulas like boolean chains and that really limited the number of people able to use it,” said Roxanne.
However, with Spark, Hestia has been able to onboard their entire team to the platform with ease.
“It's important that everyone on our team has access to the most important data at their fingertips to sell effectively. Unlike some other platforms that overpromise, with Spark, what you see is what you get. Everyone I’ve worked with intuitively understands how to use it and I’ve never had to sit down with a salesperson and explain to them how Spark works once they start using it.”
Dedicated onboarding meant less time spent on training for Hestia’s team, allowing them to quickly learn the full platform and continue operations without delay.
“The platform puts everything right at the fingertips of the sales people in a very visual, easy to access manner. It's easy to build groups. It's easy to build and deploy emails. It's easy to quickly see how many leads have come in and see where my sales are. Unlike other platforms, we’re able to focus our people on the selling itself rather than setting things up to be able to start selling. The funny thing is that our only problem is that people are too excited about using Spark and they kind of have to be reined in because there is so much they can easily do,” Roxanne said laughing. “Usually that's not a common thing to have with a CRM.”
By switching from Salesforce to Spark, Hestia was able to save between $150,000 and $200,000 per year in CRM and related administrative expenses for their upcoming project.
Not only does Spark provide better value, but our Feature Suite makes sales processes and administration cleaner, faster and more efficient for Hestia. Since adopting Spark, their team has been able to reduce the number of third party integrations they previously needed by 75%.
“Technology really should be there just to support the process and ultimately make it easier for you to do your job and be that catalyst, which is something Spark does well. It streamlines everything. It takes away the need for third party email deployment, third party consultants, in-house specialists, and external data analysis & reporting and just simplifies all of them into a single, robust platform.”
Hestia has recently onboarded their first project to Spark and expects to expand their usage of the platform to future projects as well.
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