From Leads to Leases: How Aptaria Helps Colliers Get the Most Out of Salesforce
A Commercial Real Estate Interview
Kurt Stout is the National Director of the Government Services Group at Colliers International, a $2 billion commercial real estate company with over 500 offices in 61 countries. We recently talked to Kurt about his team's work with Aptaria.
Thanks for joining us Kurt. What challenge was your team facing that prompted you to reach out to Aptaria?
We're a resource-strapped team that's intensely focused on one sector: the government. We need to leverage existing data as effectively as possible. We'd been long-time Salesforce users but didn't feel that we were harnessing its full power.
For example, we were using custom objects but not in a smart way. We needed to reorganize the fundamental structure of the system to make data more useful. So we initially we brought Aptaria on to help us restructure our database. But we quickly moved onto Salesforce enhancements – and that's where some of the most interesting work has occurred.
Tell us about one of these enhancements.
Well, as a real estate company, geography is a critical part of our business. It struck us that it would be really useful to add a visual mapping component to the data in Salesforce. So Aptaria helped us add some fairly sophisticated mapping features –using a Google Maps mashup – that have given us a much better understanding of where our properties are.
"Tenant in the Market" page showing a Google Maps mashup that allows Colliers to explicitly 'draw' the delineated area in which the client would like to find a property to lease. Also graphically shows nearby properties that were involved in a sale or lease.
How specifically do you use this visual mapping feature?
There are a few ways but here's one example. When the government wants to procure a property in a new market, we can draw their geographic boundaries directly and precisely on a map within Salesforce. We can then save it to our database and overlay it with account data – seeing all sales and leases that have occurred there. This streamlines the process of capturing client requirements, saving us a great deal of time when we visit a new market.
Besides time savings and efficiency gains, what impact has Aptaria had on your business?
I think there are 2 main other ways. First, they've made the data in Salesforce far more useful. And second, they've helped us better track and manage our business development processes.
This second point is hugely important because as a small group it's easy to get caught up in execution and lose track of the business development pipeline. We knew this and we knew that we needed something to provide discipline – we just didn't know how to do it. Aptaria helped us figure that out.
Google Maps mashup showing an Account page with all Leases (L) and Sales (S) with which this client has been involved.
On a day-to-day basis, what do you like about working with Aptaria?
A lot of things but the thing I like most is that they are extremely well-organized in their approach to each task. They always have an organized approach. They always have an agenda, milestones, and deadlines.
They're great at breaking projects down for us so it's easy to understand the scope of what they're doing. Each time we have a meeting we get exactly what we need out of it. Over the course of a complex project, this disciplined approach makes a huge difference in the quality of the result.
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