Mobile Deployment of Salesforce.com Accelerates Prospecting Process

Tom Groom, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Realty Segment of PropertyInfo Corporation, a Stewart Corporation, one of America’s leading providers of title insurance and related services to the real estate and mortgage industries, was urgently in need of a solution. With the real estate industry in a major crisis and competition more fierce than ever, the title insurance sales force needed a much more efficient process to help them develop new pipeline and drive revenue. However, they were handicapped by an extremely inefficient record keeping and reporting process.

“We had no CRM, no centralized sales reporting process or record keeping system of any kind,” said Groom. “Sales reps were tracking their own activities in the field using whatever system they had at hand. Some were using ACT; some just built their own spreadsheets. But the bottom line was that as an organization we had no centralized control over that data and no visibility into it that would help our sales reps build or track leads.”

The situation was complicated slightly by the type of market served by PropertyInfo. Though the actual process may vary slightly by state, title insurance is paid for by the end consumer but is often the real estate agents, builders and lenders as customer intermediaries that generally directed the business. Local customs generally dictate if the buyer’s side or the seller’s side of the transaction makes the decision on title and escrow but in either situation there was another agent involved that was not directing the business that was a future prospect. The structure creates a large pool of prospects.

Crossing the CRM Chasm

Today’s sales organizations are discovering that without a renewed commitment to a vigorous, relentless prospecting strategy, they will have problems remaining competitive in this uncertain economy. However, the key to launching and maintaining such a strategy is the ability to track, measure, and evaluate every aspect of each sales rep’s prospecting activities in order to adjust pipeline forecasts and coach in the moment.

Once upon a time, this monitoring and measuring process was a grinding, labor intensive process that stole a large amount of time away from important customer facing activities. However, today this process can be accomplished in a fraction of the time through the deployment of a CRM system. These systems, either hosted in the cloud or running on your local server, provide a vast array of features and functions that make the management of prospecting activities a breeze. Once the sales organization has fully adopted the CRM system, sales reps can create account plans, define high probability opportunities, schedule calls, record results, send out marcom, roll up proposals, update opportunity status and monitor every customer contact in a matter of minutes. Even more important, sales managers can track all of these activities at a glance and quickly assess the status of each sales rep’s pipeline, evaluate all customer-facing functions and make decisions regarding how to coach the sales rep going forward.