|
Global leader in destination resort sales and marketing delivers on corporate vision, increases sales, and enjoys
low total cost of ownership with Maximizer Enterprise
Playground (An Intrawest Company) is a destination resort sales and marketing company headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia. Playground’s sole purpose is to “connect people with ultimate places to play”. For over 11 years, Maximizer has been an elemental part of their corporate workflow, helping the company achieve excellence in vision and customer experience. With over $2 billion in sales in 2005-2007, Playground teams market and sell ownership opportunities in major resorts worldwide, including Whistler Blackcomb, Mt. Tremblant, Vail, Napa, Mauritius, and Savoie, France.
A division of Intrawest (the world’s leading developer and operator of village-centered resorts), Playground was formed in 2001 to deliver the knowledge, process and methodologies that brought success to Intrawest projects, to non-Intrawest clients. At Playground, expertise in real estate sales and marketing, human behaviour and market research is used to write and design compelling “stories” around resort real estate opportunities. These stories allow the target market to envision – and ultimately purchase – a piece of this resort experience. Playground typically pre-sells up to 79% of the real estate project before construction begins - providing many financial and risk mitigation advantages to their developer clientele.
Situation
Before Playground was formed, the team at Intrawest wanted to systemize their successful process of envisioning, marketing, and selling destination real estate to bring compelling results for all future developer partners. They encapsulated their unique methodology into what is now known as The Playground Way™. Each staff member would be introduced to The Playground Way™ as part of their training, and would use it daily as they strove toward company goals of innovation, passion, balance, and play.
The success of The Playground Way is based on intellectual property – including information about resorts, selling history, target markets, prospects, and past customers. How would they capture this information and use it – safely and securely – to help sell and market real estate? And, during the sales process itself, what tool could they use to help them achieve excellence in product and customer experience as outlined in The Playground Way?
Solution
Knowing they’d need a customer management solution for hundreds of staff world-wide and one tailor-fitted for their specific needs, Intrawest turned to Maximizer. License costs were low, the interface easy to use out of the box, and minimal resources were required to deploy and support it.
Maximizer – customized and rebranded as Playground GAME Station™ – is an integral part of Playground business process and culture. Starting with Maximizer 7.0 and upgrading by version to the now-current Maximizer Enterprise 9.5. Playground staff use Maximizer to track the results of marketing plans, track prospects, build relationships, manage customers, complete sales, and gauge the accuracy and activity of the sales pipeline. Maximizer is also used to control logistics of the Playground sales and marketing office on each resort site, including the Discovery Center where the story they’ve created takes shape in a tangible way.
Maximizer also helps teams work strategically with all opportunities. “Maximizer helps us turn lost opportunities into sales,” says Scott Simmer, CRM Database Systems Specialist at Playground. “If a prospect really wanted a south-facing suite – or three bedrooms and only two were available – this information is funneled to the developer. Developers are then better able to deliver product based on customer feedback. Later, Playground staff can reengage prospects with targeted new opportunities that meet their specific needs.”
”With more than 7,500 customers, Maximizer Enterprise is one of the world’s most popular and proven full-suite customer relationship management products. Maximizer Enterprise is designed to help sales companies leverage knowledge to build stronger relationships,” says Peter Callaghan, Chief Sales Officer, Maximizer Software. “At Playground, Maximizer Enterprise tracks not only contact information, but also a client’s complete history throughout the sales process, including relationships with other specialists and products they wanted previously but were not available.”
Easy to use
Playground sales staff find the Maximizer interface simple and easy to use.
“It’s less intimidating than other tools we evaluated,” says Simmer. “This simplicity and ease of use allows the sales team to focus on customers and building the relationship – the software itself is transparent.”
“A lot of CRM tools were too simple or not sophisticated enough – others are too complex, which meant our sales agents don’t like them.”
Flexible Customization
Playground staff experience high productivity and satisfaction because any data entry is paced with workflow as part of The Playground Way. Using Maximizer’s Customization Suite, Playground’s internal IT team, with help from ICRM (www.icrm.ca), a Maximizer business partner in Burnaby, British Columbia, added over 100 specific fields.
“At Playground, we’re very concerned about our customers’ privacy and respecting their wishes on how they want to interact with us,” states Simmer. “Because Maximizer is so highly customizable, we could get the exact functionality we wanted. For example, we added fields to help us contact a prospect when they wanted to be contacted. Email at one address from this to that time, call me at this number at this time, this number at that time, and so on.”
ICRM‘s assistance helped Playground’s developers add an advanced data import feature to allow us to the team to process thousands of new opportunities in a single step.
“We’ve loved working with ICRM,” continues Simmer. “They’re an experienced yet affordable team that have over 10 years experience with Maximizer and are poised to help you to get the most out of it.”
Low Cost of Ownership
“What sets Maximizer apart is its unbelievable low cost of ownership,” comments Simmer. After a few sales staff asked Simmer and his team to investigate newcomer SalesForce.com, Simmer conducted a cost-comparison analysis. The results reinforced Simmer’s belief in Maximizer’s cost-effectiveness. Not only was Maximizer Enterprise’s license cost 2/3 less per seat than the competition, but Playground’s actual costs for implementation, customization, infrastructure, and support with Maximizer Enterprise were significantly less than those recommended for SalesForce.com on the SalesForce.com website itself.
For example, in terms of support resources, Playground successfully runs more than 350 seats of Maximizer at less than half the cost than recommended for SalesForce.com, saving Playground $135,000 annually.
Similarly, customizing Maximizer was inexpensive. Whereas SalesForce.com suggests allocating a dollar figure “equivalent to the software license” for customization, Playgound completed its customization project in 11% of that figure, saving nearly $150,000.
Adaptable Deployment
As a Maximizer customer for over 11 years, Playground has grown and changed their IT plans to include new technology, new offices and new teams. Maximizer has been part of each subsequent step.
At present, Playground sales specialists across the world connect to Maximizer through Citrix and one of 3 main application servers which all talk to a redundant Microsoft SQL Server database environment. “We’re glad Maximizer products have had the flexibility to accommodate changes in our technology approach,” says Simmer. “Despite how things in the back end have changed over time, we’ve maintained the workflow that’s integral to our business process – and kept the easy-to-use interface our sales associates are productive with.”
“We have a great relationship with Maximizer – they listen to their customers, they follow-through on promises, they exceed our expectations. We’ve built a great trusting long-term relationship with them”, says Playground Director of Information Technology, Jason Boyes.
Return on Investment
- Enabled $2 billion in sales over 2005-2007
- Saved $420,000 annually on infrastructure costs compared to those recommended for competitor solutions
- Integrated company vision with easy-to-use tool, now fundamental to business process and success
- Improved sales specialists’ ability to turn knowledge gained from lost opportunities into development concepts and future sales
- Provided flexible architecture for growth and changes in IT strategy
“At Playground, we create spaces for people to play, to recreate, and to reconnect with one another and with themselves. Maximizer helps us better connect with, understand, and serve these customers,” says Simmer.
|
