Avison Young's CIO explains how the company moved 1,600 North American brokers to HubSpot, jumping adoption from 23% to 90%. A small in-house team now handles configuration, and the platform powers email automation and revenue forecasting across global operations.
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Avis and Young is a full service real estate service provider. And we do everything from find the land to lease up the building, manage the property, sell it on your behalf, and then go on to the next deal. Over the last five years we've gone from about 1100 employees, close to 6000. I came into an environment nine months ago as the CIO where we had a single CRM system in Canada and North America, which was different than the CRM system we had in the United Kingdom, different from the CRM system we had in the eu. So none of the systems spoke to one another. So a lot of our focus has been that consolidation and simplification for our brokers because our brokers need to know everything we're doing with one company, everything we're doing with one client, and not just in their backyard, but across the globe. And that's what HubSpot has allowed us to do. Avis and Young ultimately made the decision to move to HubSpot as our global CRM because of the simplification that the system brought. And a lot of what we could do with the HubSpot platform was bring in our own in house team of two to three people and they could do all that custom configuration on the spot, on the fly for us without having to hire expensive outside talent. So if I look back four months before we rolled out the HubSpot instance, we had about 1,600 users in North America of which we only had 23% adoption. When you have only 23% of your revenue producers using a CRM, it's ultimately a loss. We've actually already gotten it up to a 90% adoption rate amongst those 1600 brokers. The email configurations, the meeting configurations, the ability to embed your auto signature with book time with Mike has saved our brokers significant amounts of time. The impact of HubSpot's full CRM capabilities has, has been significant on our business. Right now we feel like we're only maybe scratching the surface of everything that HubSpot can bring to the table. But what we've started to do is work with the product teams. We start to look at different features that have been rolled out. An example of that is our forecasting. We're now taking all of our revenue producers, target revenue for the year, loading those into the system, and then we're taking what the forecast revenue that they have is on a monthly basis to understand how they're trending to performance. In addition, we're also getting our senior leaders to use the systems. I would say what most excites me about the future of HubSpot. Navis and Young is just our ability to grow together. We see us being partners both on the real estate side of things as well as on the technology side of things. Using your overall tools.
