CASE STUDY
Midway through a project is a complicated time to change technology tools. But when LaunchPad realized that their current platform lacked the tools they needed to succeed, the alternative wasn’t worth considering.
They made the move to Spark because Spark demonstrated a simplicity of use, stellar customer care, and potential to grow with their business that blew everyone else out of the water—making a real life daydream out of a potential nightmare scenario.
LaunchPad is a real estate sales and marketing agency headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona. They work on projects from new development presale, to lease-ups, to resale, and execute fully integrated, comprehensive campaigns that encompass the entire cycle from exploration to execution. Their team is small, efficient, and powerful.
The problem was the CRM they used to manage their ongoing projects was clunky and expensive, not to mention difficult to use.
“We were having to make a number of workarounds or having to spend a lot of money to get the program to work in the way that we wanted it to work,” said David Newcombe, co-founder and associate broker at LaunchPad, “Most importantly, a CRM is nothing unless it’s properly filled in. And our agents hated the systems that we were on.”
LaunchPad needed something better, but didn’t know what that looked like. Midway into working on their Portland on the Park project, they finally encountered that something better: Spark.
Spark is tailored for new development real estate sales and has the features to support it.
Many would say that transitioning a half-completed project to another database midstream is a bad move. Newcombe would agree.
“We were in a very unusual place to change horses, to change CRMs,” he recalled, “We had a project, a 149 home project, that was already up and running. And another couple of small ones in the wings that we wanted to start on something new. But to convert the entire project over midstream was a substantial nightmare scenario.”
But for LaunchPad, making that potentially difficult transition was worth it for the payout of a more useful and efficient platform.
“...to convert the entire project over midstream was a substantial nightmare scenario.”
Where most CRMs require plugins, add-ons, and even web developers to create a useful system, Spark is tailored for new development real estate sales and has the features to support it. Instead of having to outsource separate tools for an email campaign builder, inventory tracking, or digital contracting, Spark puts all of that into a single platform to allow for a more efficient workflow and robust reporting.
“Our decision was made on the simplicity of what Spark offered,” Newcombe said, “The mundane processes of working a CRM were just taken away, all through the fact that Spark is an all-inclusive system that doesn’t need tweaking.”
Ultimately, the transition process wasn’t as difficult as Newcombe and his team anticipated. Although there was work that had to be done Newcombe spent several days preparing their old platform for the transfer LaunchPad otherwise found the transition process to be painless.
“It’s impossible to say how good the Spark team was,” said Newcombe, “They were brilliant. It was a very simple move. Once we’d actually made the decision and gone for it, it was literally just, okay, we have to do this on day X.
“It’s impossible to say how good the Spark team was. They were brilliant. It was a very simple move.”
“Normally onboarding a team onto one bit of software and off another is an awful struggle, because they don’t know why you’re doing it,” he added, “But with Spark, that normal resistance of change was eased by the fact that the team could really see how simple it was. That just made a huge difference. The teams were kind of taking a breath of fresh air and saying, well, this is really easy.”
The near friction-less transition onto Spark allowed the sales process to stay similarly undisturbed. In fact, the platform helped Newcombe and the team take back hours otherwise spent troubleshooting a stubborn CRM. LaunchPad was able to complete the Portland on the Park project without difficulty—it was even named the fastest-selling condo property that year.
“That normal resistance of change was eased [because] the team could really see how simple it was... [We] were taking a breath of fresh air.”
Since first transitioning over to Spark, LaunchPad has on-boarded several more projects onto the platform and intend to use Spark for future ones, so that the platform manages their developments across the board.
The fact is that Spark is easy to use, and having a platform across the entire organization makes the team more efficient and collaborative. Although Spark is nominally a new development presale platform, LaunchPad has seen great success in introducing the software to their resale teams, and are even planning to use Spark to add pre-development research into their database.
Newcombe has an ulterior motive: it makes for unbelievably comprehensive, cross-project reporting pulling from their numerous projects.
“We live and die on reporting,” he explains, “It’s how we make our advertising decisions, it’s how we have our most effective conversations with our developers. Because we run marketing and sales, it makes our lives a lot easier to have quick, simple, live reporting on any of the items that we’d like to have it on.”
“In the simplest possible terms, Spark saves us considerable hours a week simply because it works,” Newcombe said. “Spark is one of the few things we can use across the board. We’re looking forward to the next steps because we know we’re in very safe hands.”
“In the simpest possible terms, Spark saves us considerable hours a week simply because it works... We know we’re in safe hands.”
Co-Founder and Associate Broker
LaunchPad Sales and Marketing Group
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