RetireAustralia creates active communities with Salesforce

RetireAustralia owns and operates 28 retirement villages across Australia, providing its residents with a choice of urban, seaside, tree-side, and regional locations. It also offers different accommodation options for independent living and the chance for residents to be part of an active community.

“We want to support residents to live in their own homes as long as they can, as well as they can. They can join in the community and enjoy their independence while knowing that we are there to check in and support them,” said Paul McAlpine, General Manager of Sales & Marketing at RetireAustralia.

The company’s focus on community means it approaches sales differently than many property providers. It strives to build communities rather than simply sell homes, and its sales team is driven to ensure the right outcomes for residents. Salesforce helps RetireAustralia to achieve these goals with newfound efficiency.

RetireAustralia came to Salesforce to simplify its processes. The company had built CRM functionality on top of its finance system and was using this to manage leads and reporting. However, the system was overly complicated and sales consultants were spending up to five hours a week on data entry.

The administrative effort detracted from time spent with customers and yet management still had limited visibility of sales activities.

Aleks Krinkovski, Project Manager at RetireAustralia, shared that the company decided it needed a dedicated CRM and conducted a thorough review of its options. Salesforce was chosen because of its strong automation capabilities.

“Statistics show that automated sales processes give your sales team more time to focus on building relationships. We wanted Salesforce because it came with that automation built-in,” said Krinkovski.

The deployment of Salesforce combined with clear performance metrics has transformed the efficiency of sales and focused consultants on what’s most important. Leads come in from the website and are automatically allocated to a member of the sales team, as opposed to in the past when tasks had to be allocated manually. This has reduced the time to contact new enquirers by up to 24 hours.

Sales consultants now also use Sales Cloud to view and manage all of their tasks and activities. This helps them to continually drive opportunities forward while eliminating the need for manual reporting. It also gives management much greater visibility of activities and trends.

“We are very clear about success and how we measure it, and if our sales consultants follow the processes we’ve established in Salesforce, they will see results,” said McAlpine.

McAlpine himself opens his dashboards every morning to see how the sales team is tracking against KPIs. It is not the sole measure of performance, but it helps him and his team to spot challenges early and reach out to consultants who need help. If one community is selling better than the others, he also can investigate why and reallocate resources where needed.

“If you are measuring your team on whether they did x or y, you won’t succeed. Salesforce gives us visibility into our consultants activities, but managers need to then have a conversation with them and find out what's really happening," said McAlpine.

With all of the time saved on admin and reporting, RetireAustralia’s sales consultants now make an average of 20 additional sales calls each week. This has led to more appointments and ultimately more residents, with RetireAustralia experiencing a 15% increase in sales since implementing Salesforce.

McAlpine partially attributes this growth to more people seeking safety and security in the wake of COVID-19. The rest is largely down to the focus and efficiency of sales. RetireAustralia sales consultants have fully adopted Salesforce and everyone is aware of what needs to be done to deliver the right outcomes.

“I’ve never experienced such smooth adoption of a new technology. Clear communication and training helped to bring people onboard, but we also have a very good in-house administrator who has helped us get the most we can out of Salesforce,” said McAlpine. “My advice to anyone getting ready to deploy Salesforce is to have someone similar who can make it work in the context of your business.”

Building on its own transformation, RetireAustralia has integrated Sales Cloud with SharpSpring to streamline lead nurturing. The company has also begun trialling Natterbox from the AppExchange. It plans to leverage this for call recording and for a new virtual call centre to support business development.

With the rollout of these and future solutions, RetireAustralia is focused on keeping its technology simple and empowering employees to do what they do best.

“At the end of the day, we are here to connect more people to our communities so they can enjoy the health and wellbeing benefits as they age. If the technology we use is too complicated, we’ve missed the point,” said McAlpine.