Jones Lang LaSalle: A CRM Case Study - Salesforce.com

CUSTOMER CASE STUDY
Jones Lang LaSalle Thrives with
Help from Salesforce
In terms of functionality, Salesforce delivers everything
we need. Salesforce is also an extraordinarily smart solution
for financial reasons. Why buy a client/server system when
salesforce.com effectively allows you to rent one at a very
reasonable price?
— Bob Best
Senior Vice President
Industry
Real Estate & Insurance
Geographies
Worldwide
Challenges
Jones Lang LaSalle needed a way to
effectively gather and share critical
information about owners of the
hundreds of commercial properties
it manages across the United States.
The firm also wanted to enable better
collaboration between employees in its
widely dispersed offices so that existing
clients received higher levels of
support and opportunities for new
clients did not fall through the cracks.
Solution
Salesforce.com’s on-demand CRM
service provides Jones Lang
LaSalle with a centralized way to
collect, consolidate, and share data
about current and prospective
property owners.
Results
The organization can now collaborate
on everything from leveraging the
existing customer base to upsell new
services, to approaching new clients
with a complete portfolio of leasing
and/or investment operations.
Real Estate Powerhouse Renowned for Online Innovation
The Transamerica Building in San Francisco (more commonly referred to as “The Pyramid”) and
Fox Plaza in Los Angeles—these and other landmark properties are managed by the venerable
200-year-old real estate investment firm, Jones Lang LaSalle.
With nearly 7,500 employees and $930 million in revenues in 2000, the London-based firm
is one of the largest and most respected commercial real estate investment management firms
in the world. Its “owner” clients include institutional investors such as pension fund managers,
corporations, and high net worth individuals whose portfolios include commercial properties.
A recognized leader in its strategic use of information technology—it was one of the few real
estate services firms named by Forbes as “Best of the Web” in 2001—Jones Lang LaSalle was an
early proponent of leveraging the power of the Internet to deliver the highest quality services to its
far-flung client base.
“We are completely comfortable using the Web to create solutions to business process or
organizational challenges,” says Bob Best, senior vice president at Jones Lang LaSalle. “The notion
of an online CRM service made perfect sense to us.”
Legacy Offline Processes Undermine Timeliness and Efficiency
Given the highly decentralized nature of its organization, Jones Lang LaSalle executives had
always wanted an easy way to get their hands on real-time data about their commercial real estate
clients. This was particularly critical when it came to major accounts, most of which were also
decentralized and national in scope. “If you wanted to know precisely how much business we were
doing with Company A, you’d have to make a lot of phone calls and send a lot of emails—and even
then you wouldn’t be guaranteed that you’d tracked all of it down,” explains Best.
The firm’s most recent attempt to get a handle on its customers involved asking marketing
personnel to collect basic information about accounts, enter that information into Excel
spreadsheets, and transmit the spreadsheets to headquarters. An administrator collected all
these spreadsheets—which were coming in from more than 80 different sources—consolidated
them, and distributed the aggregated spreadsheet back out to interested personnel throughout
the enterprise.
There were a number of problems with this method. Chief among them: timeliness. By the time
data had been sent in, consolidated, and redistributed, it was out of date. Since no one could
depend on the data in the consolidated spreadsheet, no one used it. “Our marketing personnel had
to do a lot of tedious paperwork, but got nothing in return,” points out Best.

Best briefly considered implementing a conventional CRM system, but quickly dropped the idea
after evaluating the costs involved and, more importantly, after calculating that it would take too
long before such a system would be operational.
Salesforce.com is
an ideal solution for a
distributed enterprise
like ours. Anyone in
our organization can
access it at any time
and from anywhere
using a standard
Internet connection.
— Bob Best
Senior Vice President
Sharing Information in Real Time
After a Jones Lang LaSalle executive read about salesforce.com in an in-flight business magazine,
Best set up a trial account. Before the trial period was up, he had activated a nationwide Salesforce
account for all field marketing professionals and executive management. The system was operational
within 30 days, and the organization began reaping the benefits within 90 days of implementation,
says Best.
Today, the company uses Salesforce to track and store clients’ personal information as well as forecast
future opportunities. Marketing personnel and managers at any location now have a single place to
look for information on its properties and clients. The service has enabled managers to gain a better
understanding of individual building owners, investors, and prospective new clients.
Best can log onto Salesforce and immediately get a 360-degree view of any customer account—no
matter whether that customer is an investor, tenant, or facilities placement client. He knows how
investment returns vary across geographic regions, and he can compare prices and availability as well
as long-term trends in both areas on any property the firm manages.
“I get a real-time view of our entire operations from my desktop,” explains Best. The biggest benefit
that results from this transparency is easy collaboration across the enterprise regardless of geographic
region, business unit, or job title. “We tend to be an entrepreneurial business anyway, and this has
put a terrific tool for enabling creative new sources of revenue and marketing programs throughout
all our business units,” he says.
For More Information
Contact your account executive to
learn how we can help you accelerate
your CRM success.
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CS - Jones Lang LaSalle - V2 - 3/06