Customer: Ackman-Ziff Real Estate Group

Background
Our company is one of the largest equity capital advisory firms based in New York, with offices in Boston, Washington, San Diego and Miami. We represent some of the most prominent property owners across the country in closing close to $ 2 billion worth of complex financial transactions in the capital markets this year. However, when it comes right down to it, we are a personal service business. Our core strengths are our talented people and our team environment – both of which have enabled us to expand in the competitive capital markets game. Our challenge was that we found that our team was not collaborating effectively. We had critical customer, financial and property data, scattered in different systems and no cohesive communication platform to keep us all working together. The Salesplace CRM solution, including the Lotus Notes email and calendar engine, has helped us work significantly better as a team. Our company has a reputation for successfully closing transactions. Salesplace and Lotus Notes help us do just that.

Salesplace Value
We have been very happy with the value that Salesplace has delivered. Creative solutions to complicated problems are what we've based our business on and Salesplace is no different. They worked closely with us to understand our unique business processes and they developed an efficient method for us to track institutional lending information against existing quotes to expedite the sales process. Salesplace provided us with a one-stop resource for acquiring key opportunity information. And then, by leveraging the mail and calendar features of Lotus Notes, Salesplace was able to give us seamless integration of our client and prospect information with mailing and scheduling functionality.

Salesplace Advantage
We act as our clients' financial advisor and lay out all of the alternatives for them. We seek to bring them the best rates, structures and terms of a deal. The Salesplace solution helped us centralize our key client, property and capital source information. Through the mobile productivity features of Lotus Notes combined with the Salesplace BlackBerry Edition, our team has full access to this customer and deal information while on the road. Salesplace has dramatically improved our ability to manage the sales process and track qualified opportunities through to closure. And that's what it's all about.

Salesplace Team
We are very happy with the Salesplace technology and their professionalism. Most of all, we are very happy with how they were able to incorporate our business processes into their software to give our business a competitive edge.

I admit that we were initially somewhat skeptical of taking such a big leap from a Microsoft environment to a Lotus environment. We were referred to Salesplace through IBM. The Salesplace Team took the time to explain the significant benefits – especially in terms of security, mobility and collaboration – that the Notes platform offered to us. We are now believers.