How to Maximize your Salesforce Investment for Real Estate

You have invested in a multi-year contract with Salesforce and feel you are not getting maximum value? Do not give up on technology yet. And definitely do not rip anything out only to start all over again, even if you are insistingly advised to do otherwise.

Just because Salesforce is not a real estate focused tool by nature, you might want to leverage a partnership with an external real estate technology expert who would recognize what you have done to your Salesforce to date and tweak it the way your initial investment in the platform would pay off.

Being both Salesforce implementation partners and real estate technology enablers, we will cover 2 practical strategies that real estate businesses can use to maximize the outcomes of their Salesforce investments, increase technology adoption levels, and ultimately gain a competitive edge in the market. You can make sure your Salesforce investment pays off by:

1. Getting a CRM audit from a Salesforce consultant company
2. Customizing your Salesforce CRM to make it compatible with unique real estate workflows

Get CRM Audit from a Salesforce Consultant with Real Estate Expertise

The beauty of Salesforce is that it gives the flexibility to do almost everything you need — but only when you know how to work with it. Having someone by your side who really knows Salesforce can make all the difference. And it is even better if that ‘someone’ has real estate domain expertise.

By hiring a real estate oriented Salesforce consultant like Ascendix, you’ll define your business needs to be met with technology and then translate them into a particular Salesforce instance. We, as a Salesforce consulting team, serve our clients as business analysts, solution architects and specialists for all Salesforce configurations.

What is Salesforce Audit and What Can You Get Checked

Salesforce audit is a thorough examination of your Salesforce instance in order to assess the overall performance of the platform, define if it is well set up to meet your specific business needs, diagnose potential or real issues, and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Depending on your particular business challenges, Salesforce audit may include the assessment of:

• Security: access controls, user permissions, profiles, roles, and security policies
• Data Quality: data accuracy, completeness, and consistency
• Performance: the response time of various components and database load
• Workflows: whether your platform caters to your unique business processes
• Customizations: custom fields, objects, and code
• Integrations: whether integrations between your Salesforce and other systems are functioning as expected.

When Would CRM Audit be Needed?

• If you have a long history of having built out commercial real estate concepts in the platform and you have got a lot of data in it.

Data is the lifeblood of the CRM. It needs to be groomed and respected. But of course, as years tick by, your database expands, making it increasingly difficult to maintain the responsible attitude towards your data – it’s often duplicated, fractured, fragmented, and incomplete.

This is where our Salesforce consultants step in: during the audit process, we will assess the quality of your data and then tidy it up ourselves or guide you how to do it on your end.

• If you have invested in a multi-year contract with Salesforce but do not use it to the full potential

In this case, we’ll analyze the terms of your current subscription, explain the capabilities of the platform, and determine what Salesforce editions and features can bring maximum value to your business.

To make sure every member of your team is up to speed on the platform, we can provide comprehensive training sessions and ongoing support.

• If the current version of Salesforce does not align with your business model.

For example, your company has property management aspirations – you’re not brokering deals for lease or for sale, but just managing the properties in question. To automate this process, you need a specific feature set that isn’t included in a standard Salesforce CRM. In this case, we analyze your property management workflows and current design of your Salesforce CRM. Once the audit has been done, we’ll provide you with a deep explanation of what features you would need in your Salesforce CRM to make it align with your business model.

• You need to evaluate the maturity of the current Salesforce CRM system to ensure it can support the growing needs of your real estate business.

With the help of our Salesforce consultants, you’ll get an in-depth analysis of the pain points that affect the productivity of your Salesforce, as well as evaluate your CRM’s overall health. As a result of this analysis, you’ll identify whether your current Salesforce CRM can be scaled to the growing needs of your real estate business, or it needs to be augmented.

In either of the above-mentioned scenarios, you will receive a report on the overall health and performance of your Salesforce.

Armored with this information, you can then take action to optimize the performance of your platform on your end or proceed to the next stage of your partnership with a Salesforce consultancy to customize your platform.

Customize Your Salesforce for Real Estate (CRE)

It is very unlikely that out-of-the-box Salesforce solutions will cater to the complex business processes in large-scale real estate companies with multiple business units. For such, some level of customization is typically required. Salesforce customization for real estate is the process of adding new features and functionalities not available in the default Salesforce real estate CRM system.

This approach, however, involves a deeper understanding of Salesforce customization concepts.

In the passage below we’ll analyze the feature set that is missing in standard Salesforce and that you might want to implement within your platform.

What Features Are Missing in Standard Salesforce for Real Estate?

There are several features that standard Salesforce CRM may lack for the real estate industry, which you can consider adding to your platform. Some of these include:

• Property and Lease Management

Standard Salesforce can’t be used as custom centralized data storage of properties and tenants information, e.g., transactional data, square footage, number of rooms, and amenities. It does not have built-in features for managing properties and leases, which are crucial for real estate companies, too.

• Stacking Plans

Real estate companies need to have accurate visualizations of vacant spaces with lease expiration dates for each of their properties. Such a feature is not available in Salesforce by default but can be added through custom development or by using third-party apps available on Salesforce AppExchange.

• Commission Management

Salesforce lacks commission management capabilities to track and calculate commissions based on sales and lease transaction data, like those within our real estate focused CRM system AscendixRE

However, you do not necessarily have to switch to another system to benefit from industry-oriented commission management (especially considering how much you must have already invested in your current Salesforce platform to date!), as thanks to the platform-as-a-service nature of Salesforce, that functionality can be easily added through custom Salesforce development.

• Mapping and Geolocation

Real estate companies need to be able to visualize their properties on a map and search for properties within a particular location. You could bridge this gap with Ascendix Search – a robust mapping and geolocation tool that allows brokers to search for properties based on a given location, view properties on a map, and analyze market data by geographic area.

• Integration with Industry-Specific Data Sources

Real estate companies often use industry-specific data sources, such as CoStar, LoopNet, and Real Capital Analytics, to access market data and research properties. To make sure that these sources are seamlessly linked with your platform, a set of custom integrations is needed. Our team of consultants will design complex Salesforce integration scenarios with industry-specific solutions to make this process effective and coherent.

Why Is It Important to Choose an Industry-Oriented Salesforce Consultant?

Despite the large number of Salesforce consultants on the market, only few of them are familiar with the real estate industry and have a good understanding of business processes and the landscape overall.

If you align with a partner who isn’t real estate in orientation, you’ll get lackluster results. Due to the lack of knowledge and experience in Salesforce consulting for real estate, such companies operate mostly as order takers, and unfortunately wouldn’t provide you with strategic guidance in this direction.

On the other side of the coin, there are Salesforce consultants targeting real estate specifically, just like us.

We have been in real estate for nearly two decades helping businesses of various scales and verticals solve industry-specific challenges, so you will not need to educate us on your business model. We already speak your language.

From the very first hours of our engagement, we will get right to the point by asking intelligent questions, like:

• How do you profile your tenants and how does your current Salesforce instance address this process?
• How do you manage your listings and what are your marketing efforts around them?

Another key reason for partnering with an industry-oriented Salesforce consulting firm is the likelihood that the solution to a problem you are trying to solve has already been found and justified with other clients, whereas a generic Salesforce consultant will most likely have to waste long hours trying to reinvent this wheel.

On the bottom line, you will greatly benefit from partnering with somebody who is not only a Salesforce consulting services provider, but also a certified AppExchange developer.

For example, over the long years of engagement with real estate organizations around the globe, from Colliers Canada to JLL, we at Ascendix shaped a crystal-clear understanding of common industry problems and how those can be addressed with a particular toolset. That toolset morphed into a library of real estate focused extensions for Salesforce:

• Powerful Reporting and Marketing Tool – Composer (integrated with the CRM)
• Tool for Advanced search of Contacts/Companies/Properties/Leases/Inquiries – Ascendix Search
• Secure virtual Collaboration and Deal Rooms for signing NDAs and contracts – MarketSpace.

And while you might not want to subscribe to these products for a variety of reasons, but you certainly can benefit from our knowledge and ability to execute these business models to augment your Salesforce accordingly. And that’s oftentimes what we’ve done.

Innovative Capital is a commercial real estate brokerage and private capital lender. The company had been using Salesforce but not to the full extent. They had been looking for a reliable and mature Salesforce consulting company that would speak their language and be able to act as their guide and strategic partner, not an order-taker.

Having recognized our decades-long record of real estate focused Salesforce consulting practice reflected in numerous positive testimonials, Innovative Capital contacted Ascendix. The results of fruitful cooperation were the following:

• Improved security of data exchange through implementing Experience Cloud;
• Implemented Pardot for marketing automation;
• Created custom solutions for loan processing.

The Ascendix team helped Innovative Capital get the most out of their Salesforce CRM, and they are still contentedly using Salesforce. To get more information, read the case study below.

Summing Up

If you already have invested in CRM and don’t feel you’re getting the results and the returns out of that instead of coming with it, let Ascendix team take an objective analysis of your Salesforce and see how we can help you leverage and maximize current investment in the platform.

Ascendix has a unique offering: we are both a product company and a services company in the CRM realm for commercial real estate.

Because Ascendix is a mature market player, everything you expect from us, such as professionalism and trust, carries over to our services and products.

We have a confluence of 16 years of commercial real estate consulting and 26 years of Salesforce consulting experience. With our CRM product and services, our clients reduce the sales cycle by 8-14% and gain up to 25% profit.

Contact us for an expert Salesforce consultation and experience the power of cooperating with a partner that speaks your language.