IMANI modernises building and construction and halves the cost of marketing

IMANI was founded to help the building and construction industry solve some of its biggest pain points, including the high cost of marketing for new homes.

Products Used

Sales Cloud

Marketing Cloud

Experience Cloud

CRM Analytics

Heroku

IMANI was founded to help the building and construction industry solve some of its biggest pain points, including the high cost of marketing for new homes. According to Bevan Ross, Managing Director of IMANI, this is a widespread challenge with many developers spending tens of thousands of dollars on marketing for every home sold. Ross and his business partner saw an opportunity to cut these costs in half while helping companies digitise their operations.

“Working in this industry, I found technology was often painful to use and poorly configured and that’s why IMANI was founded. We wanted to develop an end-to-end solution that helped building and construction companies unlock the benefits of technology and run their business smoother,” said Ross.

IMANI wanted a cloud-based platform on which to build this solution and selected Salesforce because it was self-updating and the team could leverage new features and applications over time. This strategy has proved effective and allowed IMANI to solve multiple customer challenges using the one platform.

“We wanted to provide our own clients with a modern solution based on the world’s best technology and, for us, that was Salesforce,” said Ross.

Accelerating move to digital

One of the first challenges addressed by IMANI has been the high cost of marketing. Many builders and developers still rely on traditional and expensive methods of marketing, including the use of display homes. So, to help customers reduce costs, IMANI has focused on helping them go digital.

To do this, IMANI has taken the Salesforce platform and layered on applications and support to help companies manage everything from digital advertising and lead scoring through to follow up and conversion. In addition, managing all of a customers’ marketing and sales through the customised Salesforce solution, IMANI can link together previously disparate systems and deliver a true 360-view of a customers’ business at all times. The solution leverages capabilities from Sales Cloud, Marketing Cloud, and Pardot as well as apps like Get Feedback, Mission Control, and QWILR from the AppExchange. It also uses Heroku to seamlessly link Salesforce with a host of live digital assets.

Customers can access the solution through Customer Communities and manage sales themselves. Alternatively, they can engage the IMANI Marketing business for more comprehensive support, including strategy, branding, and lead nurturing. Either way, customers are able to accelerate their move to digital and reap the benefits faster.

“Some businesses take more than a year to implement a digital marketing platform, whereas we offer a solution that’s customised to their needs and they can start using it in a matter of days,” said Ross. “We can also help them to reduce their marketing costs by up to 50%”.

For developers selling 200 homes per year, this savings could run into millions of dollars. In addition, IMANI anticipates the benefits will grow as it gathers more data to measure and refine its processes and increase the speed of lead conversion through products such as Einstein Analytics.

Adapting to a new norm

IMANI launched its marketing solution in early 2020 which turned out to be just in time to help companies manage the complexity of marketing during COVID-19. The closure of display homes made the need to go digital more urgent. At the same time, companies were concerned about finance and looking to optimise every dollar spent.

For these reasons, IMANI adjusted its business model to help customers minimise upfront costs. “What we’ve done is ask customers to partner with us on a 24-month basis and in exchange we’re providing additional services to help them get started, like creating content, ads and websites. They just need to pay the advertising costs and then a commission once properties are sold.”

Providing a bespoke ‘fee for success only’ model, IMANI has demonstrated its willingness to align its financial success to the customer; disrupting Property and Construction industry norms.

Looking to the future, IMANI is focused on solving new challenges for the industry and helping them apply technology more broadly. As part of this, it has launched IMANI Framing which provides fabricators and builders new tools to manage the volatile price of steel. This includes a faster and more accurate model for quoting projects. Built using Einstein Analytics, on the CPQ platform, it reduces time spent on quoting from up to four weeks to within a few minutes.

IMANI is now experimenting with Social Studio which has been made available free for 90-days through Salesforce Care. The company was already planning to embed Social Studio into its marketing offering, and this has given it a chance to get started without incurring extra costs at an already stressful time.

Ross and his team are similarly leveraging Trailhead and using any downtime to focus on upskilling. The team has worked from home throughout the pandemic and they are in no hurry to return to the office as they can access everything they need to do their jobs remotely.

“I’ve run the business from my laptop from the beginning and five months ago we used Salesforce to transition to a paperless office. It’s made it really easy to pick up and work from home,” said Ross.

I’ve run the business from my laptop from the beginning and five months ago we used Salesforce to transition to a paperless office. It’s made it really easy to pick up and work from home.

Bevan Ross

Managing Director, IMANI

4 weeks

time saved on quoting

Adapting to a new norm

Providing a bespoke ‘fee for success only’ model, IMANI has demonstrated its willingness to align its financial success to the customer; disrupting Property and Construction industry norms.