Sotheby’s budget in technicolour

Barrett Sprowson, VP of Sales West, was feeling the budgeting pain that most budget owners feel: “We were using Excel for budgeting, and it was a challenge to get an accurate view of budget status because of formula errors, version control issues, and limited reporting.” So we set-up a demo and told Barrett we’d get some of his data into Allocadia and show him what it could do. His response was: “I'm looking forward to reviewing our sample budget in technicolour!” (We happen to really like the technicolour reference, we keep using that internally now - Allocadia is all about making budgeting friendly + visual).

Managing their clients’ budgets

Their team is responsible for managing the property development launches for their clients, which involves managing large sales and marketing budgets. They now use Allocadia to present budget plans to clients, and then track ongoing status to ensure that everyone stays on budget. They are also adding clients as Viewers, so that the client can check-in on budget status anytime they want. “Not only will our team be more efficient at budget management, now we can also do budgeting tasks that were either very hard or impossible to do in the past.” Marketing Project Manager Katherine Harper added that “Allocadia will also help us demonstrate budget accountability with our clients through clear budget information.”

Telling a different (better) story around the marketing budget

Barrett also wanted to overhaul the way they thought of their marketing budgets: instead of organizing budgets around activities such as collateral, he wanted to start organizing budgets around campaign initiatives. “Thinking about our budgets differently - and how they relate to campaigns such as increasing revenue through referral programs - helps us communicate the overall value of marketing spend.” Using the custom reports area, Sotheby’s can now view their budgets organized by programs and campaigns.

What brought us together you ask? Twitter!

As many of you reading this are marketers - and maybe wondering about the business merrits of Twitter - I thought I’d share how Sotheby's and Allocadia came to find each other: through Twitter. For the non-Twitter people out there, it went something like this: Sotheby’s Director of IT @hientran, happens to be implementing a salesforce.com solution, and he happened to be following our advisor Ryan Marples @marplesoft (who works at salesforce.com), who I happened to be following. So @hientran happened upon me @allocadia and checked out Allocadia, then sent it to his VP of Sales West, Barrett Sprowson, who then became a customer. A real-world Twitter lead-gen success story!

About Sotheby's International Realty Canada

Sotheby’s International Realty Canada is a Canadian owned and operated company. They provide their clients with superior service, marketing expertise and the highest ethical standards in the industry to manage complete real estate portfolios through five real estate divisions: Residential, Recreational, Commercial, Land, and Development. www.sothebysrealty.ca