“Then What?” Why Retail and Industrial Owners Choose VTS over Salesforce
Retail and industrial owners across the globe are increasingly looking to cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software for its convenience in data tracking and reporting. Naturally, many industry professionals are turning to known quantities like Salesforce to manage customer relationships, but they don’t always realize its limitations within the commercial real estate industry.
Why retail and industrial owners choose VTS over Salesforce
Anyone who knows anything about real estate knows the difference between “fixer-upper” and “turnkey.” One property requires time and money to customize to fit a client’s needs, while the other is a perfect fit from the start. What does this have to do with customer relationship management?
Simply put, when it comes to CRM software for commercial real estate, Salesforce is the fixer-upper, while VTS is turnkey. With enough engineering, Salesforce is certainly capable of becoming the CRM software you need to manage CRE properties, but it’s definitely not a natural fit. VTS, on the other hand, is already engineered for the ins and outs of commercial real estate, and it’s ready to deliver actionable insights at scale –no “force” required.
Contacts vs. Context
Salesforce is a one-size-fits-all tool for sales-based companies to keep track of their contacts in one place. It’s great for general use with standard products and inventory, but unless you do some serious tweaking, it doesn’t allow for the deeper context leasing teams need to manage properties and tenants.
VTS gets to the heart of each relationship with data fields that include in-place lease terms, active deals, upcoming expirations, and more. VTS also helps you see how specific tenant contacts were involved in past deal opportunities across the portfolio so that you can have greater success in closing current and future deals. Instant messaging features and ongoing occupancy updates allow you to connect with your team and your tenants for real feedback in real-time, so you can close deals more efficiently. With VTS, every touchpoint with tenant contacts is made through the wide-angle lens of relevant data.
Data-driven deals
With lots of specialized engineering help, you can get any data you need from Salesforce. The million-dollar question is this: What do you do with that data?
Let’s say your firm has invested in a Salesforce report that highlights upcoming lease expirations, and you see that a number of leases are expiring in six months. Naturally, you’d then want to know a couple of things:
- What are the in-place lease terms for each of these deals?
- What have the financial trends looked like for recently executed leases, and how can you use that data to negotiate a deal that keeps pace with the competition?
Your Salesforce instance may not have been built out to easily reflect those levels of insight, and even if it has, how easy is it to use that data to have your leasing teams kick off the renewal process?
VTS not only gives you real-time data insights into all relevant leasing information and deal trends out of the box, but it also provides tools like automated deal tracking and proposal generation, so that leasing teams can quickly take action on any opportunities revealed by the data.
Flexibility with framework
One of Salesforce’s strengths is its flexibility–again, like a fixer-upper or one-size-fits-all clothing, it can be customized to meet many different needs. However, it’s designed to be customized to an organization’s specific needs at any one moment in time. As your organization evolves– whether that’s through employee turnover, updated processes, or a changing portfolio–getting Salesforce to evolve with you can present several challenges.
Salesforce needs:
- A dedicated employee to navigate organizational changes as people enter and exit the firm, as these shifts will impact how Salesforce is used
- Constant (pricey) engineering upkeep to make Salesforce usable for your teams as requirements change
- Consistent time and attention from you and your team to ensure that stakeholders are all using Salesforce and trained on any interface updates
In a couple years’ time, the net result is usually a very expensive, seldom-used Salesforce instance.
In contrast, VTS already has:
- An easy-to-use, out-of-the-box interface that is purpose-built for commercial real estate - no expensive third-party engineering or upkeep necessary
- The ability to flex to custom reporting requirements, if needed (though its out-of-the-box CRM and insights capabilities are the industry standard)
- A customer success framework that emphasizes change management and data governance so new team members can hit the ground running and you can focus on tenants, not technology
From the minute you become a VTS customer, our implementation team works cross-aisle to establish evergreen data governance workflows and processes to ensure you get the most out of VTS– no matter how your organization changes.
Salesforce vs. VTS: The bottom line
Whether your commercial real estate firm is newly in the market for a cloud-based CRM and reporting tool or you’re looking for a better alternative, VTS is the chosen platform for retail and industrial owners across the globe.
Our Solutions team knows CRE and will work with you to identify the business challenges you want to solve with technologies like Salesforce, then explore how we can help solve those challenges with a mix of VTS technology, insights, and ongoing advisory.
Learn more about VTS Lease for Industrial and Retail
