When Jamie Adams (right) joined real estate luxury development company The Cliffs two years ago following a 12-year career at Michelin NA, she quickly discovered that management reporting was anything but luxurious.

The Cliffs was in the process of merging its club operations and real estate business units into a master collection of seven luxury communities spread across 30,000 acres of North and South Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains and Lakes. “We were under a new ownership group and management team. Our top priority was to form a new vision and strategy,” she said. “Ultimately, we wanted to create a culture of data-driven decision making.”

The problem was collecting the data. Sales in luxury real estate is a high-touch business. Salespeople prefer to be out touring properties like the spectacular Walnut Cove golf course (above) with customers instead of filling out reports, but management knew that analytics could make the whole sales process more effective. That meant more discipline had to be applied to the marketing and sales process. The merger represented a good opportunity to standardize data and reporting with a consistent set of analytics tools.

Adams was charged with putting a disciplined reporting system in place. The new management team wanted to track each lead that came in, how many tours of the property were conducted and the conversion rates between stages of the sales process, among other things. They also wanted to understand the sales cycle better so promising leads could be given high priority. That required sales force accountability.

A team led by Adams considered several options and settled on Domo, Inc.’s Domo, a solution that excels at providing easy access to operational data for business managers to use in analysis and modeling.

“Domo is great for us because the front-end user interface is simple for our business users but it has a powerful back-end,” Adams said. “It also has connectors for popular cloud based systems like Salesforce.com and ADP, along with built-in KPIs (key performance indicators) and the ability to customize or build your own from scratch.”

Demystifying marketing

One key requirement The Cliffs had was to better understand its marketing effectiveness. The company uses direct mail along with a variety of digital marketing channels, such as search engine marketing, banner ads and social media, to spread awareness. Paydirt is when a click results in a visit to the website and a request for more information.

Such insight typically requires a dedicated marketing automation platform, but it turned out Domo was up to the task. “We’re now able to see in our Domo report how many people are submitting forms that go into our CRM system and to a sales agent, as well as how long that process takes,” Adams said. “We can see how many leads have come through our website and if those leads have converted to sales.” The website is one of the company’s primary lead generators, she noted.

The Cliffs went live with Domo in April, 2014 and quickly had what Adams called an “Aha! moment.” For the first time, managers  could track the effectiveness of  websites in generating leads. While it’s still too early to calculate the impact on sales, Adams said the time savings alone have been significant as processes have been streamlined.

“Instead of having leads sitting in the marketing queue, they can be assigned to sales agents” based upon agent availability and the likelihood of conversion, she said. The ability to track the time between each stage of the sale also indicates how efficiently reps are moving customers through the cycle.

Management conservatively expects that the improved insight will result in at least one additional land sale per year, one additional corporate and national membership, and a return of more than $200,000. They also expect closing times to shrink as managers are able to make faster decisions and close customers before they walk out the door. Domo is also making it easier for sales managers to assign leads to sales agents based upon likelihood of close.

It turns out the sales agent time required to fill out reports was more than offset by productivity gains and improved visibility on prospects and customers. That means salespeople can do what they really love: engage with people who are likely to become buyers.