Latch unlocks the power to scale with Salesforce.

October 2021
See how Latch uses Salesforce to help its sales team save time and be more efficient.
 
 
Latch is a high-growth company that strives to make spaces better places to live, work, and visit. The company combines software, hardware, and services into LatchOS, a full building operating system that makes it easy to manage guest access, package deliveries, smart home services, and more for commercial and residential buildings. The company leveraged Salesforce to help its sales team save time and be more efficient while continuing its high growth trajectory.
  • Latch became a public company in June 2021
  • More than 1 in 10 new multi-family apartments in the U.S. is built with Latch devices
  • 7 in 10 of the largest US developers (according to the National Multifamily Housing Council) are Latch customers
  • Latch is live in more than 39 US States
  • The company partnered with Salesforce at the end of 2019, migrating from a less-robust CRM
  • Salesforce implementation began in early 2020, culminating in a full launch in October 2020
How did Latch do it? Here are three steps your business can take to emulate Latch’s success.

Contents

1. Adopt technology to support and scale your processes.

As growth quickly picked up, Latch realized it needed a CRM tool that provided the executive level data needed by the leadership team, but provided a user-friendly experience for sales reps. At the same time, the platform also had to support the company’s unique business processes. “We needed to start capturing new and more impactful data points,” Senior Product Manager Arun Jayakumar said. “And we realized we needed a CRM that could scale to match our growth.”

Accustomed to moving fast, Latch’s leadership set an aggressive timeline for its Salesforce implementation. The team was able to go from sign-up to launch in 10 months, as compared to the standard 12 to 18 months for a rollout of that size and complexity. Even within the accelerated time frame, Latch’s CRM team migrated all of its legacy data and built support for internal and partner-facing business processes. The implementation came in under budget, as well.

Salesforce by far had the most — and easiest — integrations with other applications of all of the CRMs we looked at”

Arun Jayakumar | Senior Product Manager, CRM, Latch

Latch + Salesforce — A timeline:

  • Latch migrated to Salesforce in 2020 from another CRM
  • The company needed more flexibility to support its growth and increasingly complex sales motions
  • As part of the migration, Latch launched a partner community built on Salesforce. “Having an official portal for our channel partners added significant value for our partners and helped them better collaborate with our internal team,” Channel Program Manager Kathleen Manly said
  • The Latch CRM team built complex workflows to support its unique sales processes, without writing any custom code
 
 
 
 

2. Move fast and collaborate.

Latch has grown quickly over the past few years, resulting in new markets, customers, and sales motions. The company started using Salesforce Anywhere internally to support its new field project managers team, as part of a new direct sales process. Salesforce Anywhere helps field managers track milestones and capture data on site during installs, which is used later for analysis and reporting inside of Sales Cloud.

The field teams also use Salesforce Anywhere to take detailed notes on individual installations, and Latch has plans to get sales teams using the tool to collaborate on deals.

Not only is Salesforce easily digestible for non-admins or non-technical people, it can also enable complexity. It serves many types of stakeholders”

Arun Jayakumar | Senior Product Manager, CRM, Latch
 
 

3. Be flexible, and don’t be afraid of change.

Asked what advice he’d give to his peers at other high-tech, high-growth companies, Jayakumar noted the importance of remaining flexible. “Always create flexibility in the way you design your systems,” he said. “As you continue to work with new types of customers, you may see an increased demand for flexibility in your designs to elegantly accommodate larger and more complex deals,” Jayakumar noted.

Jayakumar also advises embracing change. “Don’t be afraid of change. You may find you need to adjust your process to meet the ever evolving needs of your customers. Adopting technology like Salesforce to ensure your team can remain agile can make all the difference for high-growth organizations like ours.”
 

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