- ShowingTime
ShowingTime improves the productivity of sales reps and delivers a personalized customer experience by modernizing their sales process
Location
United States
Industry
Software Development
Company size
201-500 employees
A real estate software company impresses their customers and gains efficiencies of scale.
Key Results:
- Modernized the sales process to an automated, scalable approach
- Significantly reduced the amount of time by reps to produce proposals
- Impressed clients with mobile-friendly agreements that can be signed while on the road
- Improved cross-functional collaboration on agreements
ShowingTime, now part of the Zillow Group, is the leading showing software and market stats service provider for the residential real estate industry.
Their mission is to innovatively create the simplest ways for real estate professionals to connect with buyers and sellers via lead generation, scheduling, call coordination and market data, from contact to contract. Founded in 1999, ShowingTime has experienced rapid sales growth with innovative offerings and tools that support real estate professionals in managing their growing businesses.
The challenge
As a dynamic business with 15-20 sales reps, ShowingTime’s sales process wasn’t supporting their employees or customers in an effective, scalable way to meet their business needs. Reps were producing proposals in PowerPoint, with larger deals needing to be reviewed by the VP of Sales, meaning that customers were often left waiting for days to receive information. Customers were then receiving those proposals in PowerPoint format, which wasn’t conducive to their time spent on the road.
The business recognized that it needed to simplify the sales process for greater efficiencies and modernize its approach that would support the switch from a customized billing process to a products and price books approach.
“The process just wasn’t working. We needed a solution that could be automated to reduce the amount of time that reps were spending on building a new PowerPoint for every client, and we needed a solution that was better suited to a mobile customer base. Real estate agents don’t spend a lot of time sitting at their desks.”
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
The solution
Led by Veronica, the team quickly identified that they needed a proposal and agreement solution, that was easy for reps to create proposals quickly, and accurately, and could also offer insights into buyer behavior.
“Another consideration was we were in the process of transforming our billing process, so a seamless integration with Salesforce was a critical requirement. We already had Docusign licences, but we disqualified that as we didn’t write contracts in the same format. We also considered Pandadoc, but it didn’t compare to the ease of use and integration capability of Qwilr. In fact, we weren’t sure if we’d find a mobile-friendly solution that would all meet our requirements until we found Qwilr!”
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
Sales reps love it!
From the outset, Veronica received a lot of positive feedback from sales reps about how easy Qwilr is to use.
“Our sales team are tech-savvy, but they’re not designers. They couldn’t believe how easy it was to create a legally binding document that looked so good.”
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
To start with, Veronica and her team built templates for the sales reps to use at a product level.
“We didn’t want to overwhelm sales with too many options as they got used to the software, so we started by creating proposal templates, with branded blocks that they could drag and drop into the templates, customizing them to the needs of each customer and the products they were selling. This made it super easy for the reps to build customized proposals quickly and on brand.”
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
Veronica estimated that implementation took 3-4 weeks to set up the templates in Qwilr, during which time they also integrated with Salesforce.
“All in all, our reps were using the system within a month of purchase.”
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
The value of automation
As ShowingTime was in the process of switching from a customized billing process to products and price books within Salesforce, it was important that they found a solution that could complement that.
“We have different templates for different customer types, and both the proposals and agreements use tokens to pull data and pricing directly from Salesforce, reducing the chance of an error. Having that certainty of accuracy means that many proposals no longer needed to be reviewed, which has saved our VP of Sales valuable hours."
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
Veronica also utilized an integration feature which means that the customer receives a timestamped PDF as soon as they sign an agreement, which is also automatically uploaded into Salesforce. Having a clearly defined and automated process to save and share agreements has significantly reduced the need to audit opportunities.
Cross-functional benefits
Veronica found there were additional efficiencies to be gained for their legal department.
“All of our templates have an embedded terms and conditions page so we know they are always up to date and accurate. There is also a change to data privacy laws coming into effect this year, which means we can’t have agreements sitting forever on a 3rd party site. To help comply with this new requirement, we have implemented Qwilr’s link expiry function which means if an agreement hasn’t been signed within the set expiry period, it will automatically be deleted.”
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
The impact
Qwilr has enabled ShowingTime to sell according to their customer's needs.
“Having a true, mobile-friendly solution has been a game changer in a competitive market. Our customers can now easily view proposals and accept agreements while on the road, which has added velocity to the sales process."
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
And as their reps get more comfortable with the software, they are getting more creative.
“It’s great to see our sales team add more personalization to their proposals, like featuring landmarks of the suburb they’re focused on. Our clients love that. And with the analytics functionality, we’re able to gather insight on what content is resonating to improve the impact of proposals generally, and also gauge interest levels from individual customers. There’s so much more we can do with Qwilr. We’re also looking into utilizing the Slack integration so our team knows when an agreement is signed - it gives them something to celebrate which is great for morale.”
Veronica Parker, Sales Operations Manager at ShowingTime
ShowingTime also utilized Qwilr to pilot a test program of a new offering, creating beautifully branded materials to use during the Beta stage with a professional contract attached while they assessed demand, saving marketing resources and costs.
By modernizing the sales process, ShowingTime has benefitted from productivity gains across multiple functions while impressing its customers with a personalized approach that meets their expectations.
