IMKAN Properties builds more Soulful Places with Salesforce

Since its launch in 2017, IMKAN has seen explosive growth from a handful of employees to a team of over 200 spread across three global offices. When manual processes started impacting productivity, it decided to centralise sales, marketing and customer care operations onto a single platform.

“Salesforce has a big footprint in the real estate industry, which made it a really good base on which to build our own customised platform,” explained Rami Samour, Senior Manager of CRM and Sales Operations.

The company partnered with Cloudworks to help tailor the solution and integrate it with its ERP system. But, as the UAE rolled out its COVID-19 lockdown measures, the team had to implement a whole new platform remotely.

“Implementation could have been really challenging, but everyone rallied together to make it a success,” commented Samour. “In fact, the timing worked out well because working from home would’ve been a lot more difficult without Salesforce. We were able to digitalise a lot of manual processes to make them more efficient.”

Selling a property that hasn’t been built yet involves a lengthy sales cycle grounded in high levels of trust between developers and their customers and prospects.

IMKAN earns and maintains this trust through two core values:: ‘Made for You’, which focuses on putting the research back into development so the company can create the best possible places and communities for people, and ‘Here for You’, a promise to deliver long-term value to customers when the sale is completed. And they use Salesforce to assist in delivering both.

“Salesforce helps us stay closer to customers throughout the sales cycle,” explained Neill. “We now have an overview and insights of every customer, where we are in negotiations, and a better understanding of their needs and interests.”

Their sales team uses the Salesforce Mobile app to manage meetings with approximately 100 customers a week with better efficiency. Sales Cloud helps them stay on top of when to follow up with clients so every interaction feels relevant and valuable.

Cloudworks also built custom functionality to automate lead distribution. “We wanted to make sure work was distributed evenly to ensure no one was overloaded with leads and every customer gets the best level of service,” added Samour. “With Salesforce, we’ve still got the flexibility to go in manually if a customer has a preference for a specific sales rep based on language needs, for example.”

Before Salesforce, Neill faced the challenging task of managing agent performance via multiple spreadsheets. Now, she has a 360-degree view of all sales activities from a centralised dashboard. “Sales Cloud dashboards are incredible. Everyone up to CEO level can instantly get a snapshot of what they need,” commented Neill.

Monitoring the sales team also helps to convert more leads and optimise opportunities – if an agent hasn’t had time to follow up on a hot lead, it can be escalated to someone else in the team. But it’s not just the in-house team benefitting from richer insights.

IMKAN’s marketing operations are split between a small in-house team and several external agencies. Marketing Cloud is helping the in-house team orchestrate campaigns between external partners more effectively, driving up ROI through better targeting and more meaningful KPIs.

Likewise, Datorama makes monitoring campaigns much faster and more effective. “Having real-time insights on Datorama dashboards means we can see what’s working and what isn’t so quickly we can actually make improvements to existing campaigns,” said Neill. “Previously, wading through spreadsheets would’ve taken so long we could only apply insights to future campaigns, which was much less effective.”

These insights have helped IMKAN optimise KPIs for its partner agencies to ensure campaigns are relevant and effective. By analysing historical data, Datorama helped identify customers for a retargeting campaign with people who had expressed interest in a product that hadn’t yet been launched. Meanwhile, they use Pardot to send more personalised campaigns based on region or topic.

“Salesforce helps us to make the most of every opportunity, and sales have increased exponentially as a result,” Neill revealed. “Having a central platform for sales and marketing works really well – we can make the whole customer lifecycle seamless, even with a distributed operation. The next step is to use Salesforce to support cross-selling.”

With phase one of the Salesforce implementation underway, the next phase will be to implement Service Cloud and Community Cloud to further streamline the customer experience. “Service Cloud will help us to continue earning trust with customers through greater transparency,” explained Samour. “For example, if a customer spots a defect at their property, they can take a photo that will be uploaded straight into Salesforce for us to address, building trust in us as a developer.”

The customer community will enable people to access their portfolio of properties, payment history, and manage instalments quickly and easily from a central log in.

“In our industry, time is money. Salesforce helps us stay ahead of the game and gives us the agility to adapt to changes quickly,” said Neill. “We’ve always set out to be a people-centered company, and with Salesforce we can turn our relationships into partnerships that work better for everybody.”