Lasso Brings Lead Management, Structure, and Accountability to Growing Builder

It’s been a while now, but Jason Harper still remembers the days before Hunter Quinn Homes started managing its sales and marketing efforts with the Lasso™️ CRM solution from ECI. Those memories aren’t exactly pleasant ones.

Jason has been the sales manager for the Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina based company for the past six years. He has played a vital role in growing the company in these hard-charging years. Growing from a single piece of land with just Jason and one salesperson, today, Hunter Quinn is a thriving organization. Twenty-five hard-working, service oriented professionals—including seven full-time salespeople and an online sales consultant—operate in eight different communities and are on track to close over 200 homes this year.

A growing organization needs more sophisticated sales management tools

“In the early days, when there were just one or two salespeople on the payroll, it was easy for me to manage their activity, and they manage their prospects,” he recalls. Back then, the company could rely on a paper-based system, working off registration cards that model home visitors would fill out. While that may have worked fine when the company was starting, once real growth got underway, it became clear that a much different approach was needed.

“We were in a really good market, and traffic was strong, but not every visitor was getting the follow-up they needed, just because of the volume of people we were seeing,” says Harper. “We were suffering from all the inefficiencies involved in working with handwritten notes that we would have to look through repeatedly to decide who needed a call that week and who didn’t.”

As the company continued to build in more communities and added more salespeople, including a new online sales consultant position, the situation only worsened.

“We realized it was time to ditch what we had—a hit-or-miss system that was becoming more and more of a burden—and put something in place to make sure that we did our follow-up with customers consistently and correctly,” Jason explains. The Hunter Quinn management team already knew about Lasso. They also wanted to look at some of the other CRM options, most notably, Salesforce® and the Microsoft® Dynamics® CRM solution.

“Both Salesforce and Microsoft were more than we needed, and both were also more complicated to build out than Lasso,” says Jason. “Either option would have required us to hire a third party implementation team to set the whole thing up for us, while Lasso did everything in-house. They would put us in touch with one of their Client Directors who would work with us throughout the process and then continue to offer support whenever needed.”

“It also made a difference that some of the new salespeople we were hiring back then came to us from companies that were using Lasso, and they had a lot of good things to say about the program.”

After finalizing the decision to go with Lasso, the Hunter Quinn team, supplemented and supported by their dedicated Lasso client director, started building the back-end elements. That included mapping out the prospect follow-up process, developing customized email templates, and defining various “what-if” scenarios.

“Lasso gave us all the technical support we could need throughout the implementation process,” Harper recalls. “They were always available to speak with us and focused very much on our priorities as users, including our business needs and what we want the program to do.”

Lasso’s implementation specialist and local sales rep handled user training, combining online and in-person courses. The training proved remarkably easy for a program that offers so much in the way of features and functionality.

Intuitive program design enables users to hit the ground running

“Lasso is not a hard program to learn, and that was one of the things we liked most about it,” says Harper. “There’s a real point-and-click aspect to the program, and you can learn the whole thing in just a couple of hours.” Once the program was live, life at Hunter Quinn got a whole lot easier and more productive.

“Bringing in Lasso has made all the difference in the world,” reports online sales consultant Madison Putnam. “I use Lasso every day—from the minute I walk into the office to the minute I leave. I’m talking to 10 or 12 people a day every day, and not only does Lasso allow me to organize the leads, but it also provides me with a follow-up process. When I open up the program in the morning, it tells me whom I need to follow up with, whether to call or send a text, check on whether they had an appointment or not, and so on. And Lasso tracks all our customer and prospect communications, so we can go into a lead’s profile and see all the phone calls, texts, and meetings we have had from the initial point of contact. It really does make an OSC’s job very easy.”

“As a sales manager,” Harper reports, “I get a daily email from Lasso that tracks our traffic numbers in each of the communities we work in, as well as an end-of-the-month report that rolls those numbers up into an overall summary.”

Harper also gets a weekly email reporting on the sales team’s activities, highlighting any prospects not followed up on properly. “Lasso has not only taken a lot of the complexity and difficulty out of the follow-up process for our sales team, but it has also given us the functionality to generate a high level of accountability for them,” he reports.

In addition, Lasso is providing a robust, scalable platform that comes with everything needed to support Hunter Quinn’s continued growth. “Lasso is important for Hunter Quinn today, but it’s only going to become more important in the future,” says Harper. “We’re still a very growth centered organization. As we expand into new communities and new markets, Lasso will play a key role in helping us continue to manage our customer base and prospects efficiently as we grow.”