Allam – Online sales system

As I have said to many people over the last 12 months, this is not a new idea it is just a reimagining.

In 2002, in the very early days of the internet I was running my web development company. We had a range of clients and were doing everything from basic landing page websites through to custom ebusiness solutions.

We were winning new customers weekly because we were very good at the design side of web development, so things looked good, but what set us apart was our ability to build web based systems to solve business problems, hence the term “ebusiness specialists” became synonymous with our business. 

One of our clients, Allan Homes had a problem and they were looking for an online sales solution. 

They were in the business of selling house and land packages and they had big land banks in the at the time very new areas of Kellyville in North Western Sydney.

People would literally line up over night to try and reserve the block of land they wanted when land releases happened. They would run tv ads on prime time TV and get massive volumes of leads that their sales teams would then contact and take reservations over the phone. So much sales and marketing activity, you would think it would be hard to see this as a problem.

Good times for the property market, sure

However, there were some very obvious issues the could not be avoided with manual systems. The biggest was when the same block of land was sold multiple times as people were reserving at the exact same time with different salespeople.

Then there was the issue of salespeople commissions, if you started the sales journey with one in house sales person, the manual systems of tracking who started the process were not holding up to the demands that this type of volume created.

Then there was the transparency, after a weekend of frantic sales activity it would some times take days to collate all the data and be able to report to management what the transactions were. The same went for television advertising, however it would some times take weeks to see how many calls came in from specific showings of the ads, and whether or not that led to any leads.

We had already built a website for Allam Homes which had become a very big part of their business, and we got the call to ask if I could come up with a way to solve any of these problems.

Where experience comes in handy

Having already built a number of ecommerce systems from the ground up, we figured selling a house online was no different to selling any other widget, so we got to work and built the very first version of our building management software.

What we came up with was a public facing reservation system that allowed people to pay an online reservation deposit on a house and land package rather than lining up, and once a property transaction began, no-one else could start one on the same block, so instantly online sales of the same block multiple times was gone. 

We also created a leads management system that allowed for leads to all be tracked and allocated according to their business rules no matter how they came in – via walk in, telephone, the website, or the call centre. All leads were managed through one source of truth.

These two innovations alone revolutionised the way that Allam Homes were able to manage the data in their business, however, the system continued to evolve becoming a full custom developed CRM system and management platform that gave them comfort that doing business using the internet as a leverage for productivity was indeed an idea worth investing in.

Sales reports were now live

If they wanted to know how well an ad performed they could literally watch the numbers of calls go up on the screen in front of them. They could instantly see a live stockist the didn’t need to be updated in Excel before being sent out to all the sales people, a solution which was always out of date as soon as it was done.

The big innovation was working with their internal IT team to integrate the system to their own in house systems. The system we built was written up by a government department that existed at the time called the Office for the Information Economy as a best practice use of ebusiness techniques to increase productivity in their business. That was in 2004. 

So when I say we have been doing this sort of thing for a long time, I mean we have been building technology and online sales systems for the building industry specifically for nearly two decades… the internet has not been around too much longer than that.

PIPR is not a new idea, it is a reimagining and the collection of every great idea we have had over two decades, and we are ready to bring them all to market in one package and help all builders and developers build the business of their dreams.

Since the Allam system, we have given each of our platforms a project name, these will be included in this series going forward.