Creating a 360-Degree View of Constituents Through Salesforce With Housing First Minnesota

Housing First Minnesota (Housing First MN) is a nonprofit trade association for Minnesota’s residential builders, remodelers, developers, and building industry suppliers. They unite the housing industry to advocate for housing and homeownership, connect building industry members, and market newly constructed and remodeled homes. The group is dedicated to creating safe, durable homes and increasing affordable homeownership opportunities for all Minnesotans. Housing First MN is comprised of several other brands: Housing First Minnesota Foundation, Housing Affordability Institute, Housing Industry News, Parade of Homes, Artisan Home Tour, Green Path, and the Housing First Network.

The Opportunity and Challenge

Housing First MN sought a technology solution to replace its sales and fundraising platforms. The disjointed systems across multiple facets of business made it difficult to operate at scale. They experienced limits in their ability to track individual and corporate partnerships, including all partner communications and outcomes, outreach and engagement, and automate required tasks (such as assigning ad creation work) throughout the sales process. This limited visibility into the history of past sales and attempts meant regular reporting was also cumbersome, having to pull information from several locations.

Optimizing Sales and Fulfillment

The sales and fulfillment processes involved extensive manual effort to enter, de-dupe, and maintain data across their internal systems. While FileMaker Pro was used as the primary Ad Sales and Fulfillment database, the solution cannot integrate into other business-critical systems. Housing First MN’s Sales and Partnerships teams did not have an integrated solution to help see activities across shared clients. The siloed nature of the technology limited their ability to source opportunities to engage with clients across departments to cultivate strong relationships with them.

With these limitations identified, the Housing First MN team recognized a clear opportunity to improve process efficiency. Specifically, they needed to automate tasks and streamline key systems and processes across their Advertising, Sales, and Partnership & Fulfillment teams. To rectify this, Housing First MN sought a platform that supported a single source of truth for up-to-date information on constituents and businesses and collaboration across internal teams and departments for efficiency and transparency.

The Solution

FileMaker Pro worked for Housing First MN for a time but found it expensive to maintain as they scaled. As a result, Housing First MN and its board recognized the need for a system that could establish a solid architectural foundation to position them for future organizational growth and align with their goals of increasing revenue to support their mission.

Cloud for Good partnered with Housing First MN to help transform their sales and fulfillment processes with Salesforce to support scalable growth of Ad, Sales, and Partnership processes with the capability to ensure all sales cycle data points, processes, and communication were standardized.

Sales Cloud + Third-Party Apps For One-Stop Sales Process Management

The core Salesforce solution that Cloud for Good created for Housing First MN included Sales Cloud. This provided Housing First MN with Constituent Management, Duplicate Management, Business Process Development, Membership Details, Data Importing Templates from existing outgoing platforms, Opportunity Management, Products and Price books, Fulfillment Management, Campaign Management, Security & Profiles, and Reports & Dashboards – all in one location.

The usability of the platform was extended with third-party applications:

Salesforce for Outlook/Salesforce Inbox for syncing Outlook emails and engagements.
DocuSign for generating contracts for Housing First MN to obtain and store e-signatures.

Creating a True Partnership and Value with Managed Services

After the completion and success of their Salesforce implementation with Cloud for Good, Housing First MN chose to continue supporting their Salesforce growth through Cloud for Good’s Managed Services. The Managed Services team’s technical guidance and expertise in effectively using their new platform have been invaluable to the Housing First MN team. “I’ve been able to leverage technical resources in ways that help us manage our business,” said Kate Gunderson, Housing First MN’s Vice President, Brand Partnerships & Sales and the implementation’s Client Project Manager “I feel that where Managed Services helped and where the implementation team helped was filling in those technical gaps for us. Yes, we can tell you where we’re going or what we want it to do, but we don’t know the system’s limitations. Having a partner like Cloud for Good to step in and make recommendations based on such deep Salesforce expertise has been great for both teams.”

The Results

Increased Visibility and Efficiency

Sales Cloud improved visibility into the history of constituent engagement with the organization and increased insight across various pipelines. The implementation led to greater efficiency in key work processes; it enabled sales users to create new campaigns via guided flows, facilitated one-click renewal of opportunities, enhanced tracking capabilities for prospective members and member purchasing, and successfully streamlined Housing First MN’s contracting process through a DocuSign-Salesforce-Outlook integration. Using Chatter and Activities within Salesforce improved engagement and collaboration across different Housing First MN teams and departments.

Data-Driven Strategies

The new Salesforce solution stack enhanced Housing First MN’s ability to forecast and review revenue streams and prospects using existing data history. “Salesforce has become part of our overall sales strategy going forward,” said Gunderson. “I showed our board a recent dashboard I had made with Salesforce and the business insights we gleaned from it. I was able to use that data to understand the trends we’re seeing and pivot our strategy to account for real-time changes in the field.”

The solution has also enabled Housing First MN to achieve its goal of not just setting up the organization for revenue growth through enhanced, data-driven sales strategies but also empowering and equipping current and future staff with skills and tools to build up Housing First MN’s mission and programming with training and analytical insights of real-time data into their people, supporters, engagements, and market landscape.

Gunderson continues, “Salesforce is an incredible technology tool. However, transformation is more than just technology; it is also about people. With Salesforce, we can train our team to get real-time data on what’s working out in the marketplace, what our constituents are asking for, and current trends. All of those things are just right at our fingertips. I feel that Salesforce will influence our overall sales strategy going forward.”

Gunderson also shared that her team has felt the Cloud for Good genuinely understands their business processes, goals, and roadmap. “Cloud for Good took the time to learn our business. I’d often hear weeks later that our project team recalled something we had said earlier. They then changed their approach because of those things that were said proactively. I see that as a true partnership when you can work back and forth with someone who truly understands your business,” said Gunderson. “That has been a consistent experience with Cloud for Good.”

For more information on Housing First Minnesota and its associated brands, visit housingfirstmn.org.