Boosting Revenue and Productivity in Off-Season with IoT: A Case Study of a Single-Family Home Rental Company

• Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Event-Driven Application

• Buildings

• Maintenance
• Sales & Marketing

• Inventory Management
• Real-Time Location System (RTLS)

• System Integration

The customer, a large provider of single-family home rentals in multiple U.S. markets, was facing a challenge to increase incremental revenue and productivity during the off-season. The company manages and owns tens of thousands of properties and has a national team of 27 inside sales agents who manage between 10,000 and 20,000 leads per month. These leads are generated by traffic to the company’s website, Trulia, and other online real estate listing sites. Despite using Marketo’s marketing automation suite for driving inbound leads and scoring them, along with Salesforce for tracking and managing sales activity, the sales teams lacked sufficient information to engage, qualify, and convert the leads. The company had set two key corporate goals: to reduce customer acquisition costs and create 6,000 rental opportunities by the second quarter of the year.

The customer is a large provider of single-family home rentals in multiple U.S. markets. Unlike typical real estate brokers, the company not only manages tens of thousands of properties but also owns the homes. The company has a national team of 27 inside sales agents who are tasked with managing anywhere between 10,000 and 20,000 leads per month. These leads are generated by traffic to the company’s website, Trulia, and other online real estate listing sites. The company had set ambitious corporate goals to drive down customer acquisition costs and create 6,000 rental opportunities by the second quarter of the year.

The company integrated Conversica's sales conversion management software with Marketo and Salesforce applications. The Conversica persona, named Jeffrey, was implemented in less than a week. Conversica, being a cloud-based application, required no updates or maintenance. It integrated with Marketo to automate processes across the entire sales cycle, from demand generation through contact, engagement, conversion, and follow-up. Marketo drove leads for the company by tracking the activity or click-throughs of visitors to the company’s website and scored the leads based on the sections of the website accessed. Conversica qualified high scoring leads and determined the reasons for their activity and quick move. The company could quickly address red flags and weed out undesirable customers before agents spent a lot of time engaging them. Conversica's sales conversion management software worked seamlessly with Marketo, complementing the generalized one-way email communication with personalized two-way emails designed to get leads to respond with more information.

• The implementation of Conversica's solution led to significant operational improvements. The three-month Conversica pilot to re-engage dead or dropped leads generated more than 80 closed rental agreements, resulting in nearly US$1.6 million in additional annual revenue. The company achieved a real-time engagement rate of 53 percent across 9,600 total leads worked by Conversica. Among those leads, agents set 2,600 appointments, contributing to incremental monthly revenue of US$128,000. Conversica also enabled the company’s agents to prioritize leads and manage their time more efficiently since they were confident that the leads they received from Marketo had been qualified by Conversica. Furthermore, 944 leads left valuable feedback that the director of inside sales could use to guide decisions on how best to train and manage the company’s agents, as well as determine the effectiveness of various lead sources.

• 9,600 leads worked by Conversica
• 53 percent real-time engagement rate
• 2,600 appointments set