Cushman & Wakefield is the world’s largest privately-held real estate services firm, with 221 offices in 58 countries. It represents a diverse customer base, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.
Challenge
With the economic downturn forcing many UK businesses to reduce costs associated with real estate and generate revenue or release capital, Cushman & Wakefield saw an opportunity to strengthen its customer relationships and forge new ones. It needed to, because in 2008, occupiers only generated 19 per cent of turnover for the company – the remaining 81 per cent coming from investors and developers.
By its own estimation, Cushman & Wakefield knew only 20 per cent of the relevant UK businesses. The campaign’s primary objective therefore was to increase the number of known occupiers, build relationships with key individuals and generate revenue from those leads.
Solution
The campaign comprised of two distinct phases and was designed to increase the amount of revenue Cushman & Wakefield generated from occupiers of real estate. It was broken into two stages. Phase one was designed to generate new leads from clients who already had a relationship with the business, whilst stage two sought to nurture new leads from previously unknown businesses, utilising market intelligence gained from phase one.
The first step in phase one was to trawl various CRM systems and create a single, de-duped database of known occupiers. This was the first time Cushman & Wakefield held all of this data in one location. Previously, there were a total of 114 contact owners within the business who held information on occupiers. After cleaning the data, Cushman & Wakefield appointed a single contact owner for each client; a first for the business.
The database was segmented according to specific markets, namely retail business space and private equity. Capitalising on the market’s desire to reduce costs and release revenue from expensive property portfolios, Cushman & Wakefield designed Top Ten Tips which differed according to the specific needs of each sector. Personalised emails were sent to 1071 individuals in client companies. From there, it could work out which of the top ten tips were most useful and create a profile for each client.
After week one, Cushman & Wakefield’s contact owners telephoned clients, tailoring conversations according to profiles. During this conversation, contacts were invited to one of a series of five seminars held throughout the UK. Content was directly influenced by the insights gathered from the emails – the topics most important to clients were matched to seminar content.
Phase two, which shared the ultimate goal of seminar attendance, was a DM campaign. Cushman & Wakefield subscribed. Named individuals at companies with an least 500 employees and a turnover of more than £40 million were targeted – at 3789 businesses in total.
Four postcards, introducing the company and its market expertise, were sent over a three week period, followed by a personalised letter that came bundled with a sector-relevant Top Ten Tips brochure. This was then followed by a telephone call to the named individual and an invitation to one of the five seminars.
Results
Cushman & Wakefield’s main objective was to increase revenue from this largely untapped group. Six weeks after the campaign ended, it had generated in excess of £1.5 million worth of business from phase one of the campaign, and £200,000 from phase two, having spent just over £28,000 on the campaign itself. The business has also increased its database of occupiers by 35 per cent.