Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate is a clear choice for single- and multi-family home builders and other real estate industry firms looking to increase operational efficiency, gain competitive advantage, and meet the challenges of a market slowdown.

1. Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate
CRM That Fits Your Business

2. “With tighter integration to our ERP system, Pivotal CRM gives our marketers,
salespeople, and customer care employees the comprehensive customer information they
need to provide great service—all from a single, easy-to-use system.
”Diana Walker, CIO, WCI Communities

3. Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate 3
In response to economic challenges, firms in the real
estate sector can’t rely on market demand alone to
drive homebuyers their way. They need to become
more sophisticated in their marketing efforts, utilizing
cost-effective online channels to their advantage and
stretching their marketing dollars further. Similarly,
they need to be more diligent in their pursuit and
qualification of the leads they receive, ensuring no lead
falls through the cracks and placing more emphasis on
low-cost nurturing strategies to maintain contact with
leads over the long term. They need systems in place
to methodically capture, qualify, and distribute leads to
the sales force, and they need to establish structured
sales processes to ensure sales personnel are using
their time as productively as possible. In the wake of
industry consolidation, they must also manage complex
organizational structures with geographically dispersed
divisions, uniting the entire enterprise in the pursuit of
common goals, processes, and information‑sharing across
business lines.
As home building and real estate organizations look
for growth in a more challenging economy, many
are realizing that their most valuable assets are their
existing customers. With the significantly lower cost
of second and subsequent home sales, re-financings,
and sales resulting from customer referrals compared
to standard cost-of-sales, home builders and other
real estate businesses are recognizing the quantifiable
benefits of high customer satisfaction. As such, they are
looking at strategies for maximizing the total lifetime
value of their customers. Such an approach requires
realignment toward customer‑centric organizational
goals. It requires a commitment to delivering outstanding
post-sale customer care, to maintaining a relationship
with customers throughout their lifetime, and to
creating a seamless, branded, and finely tuned customer
experience—from first contact though to repeat sale,
and beyond.
To support new customer-centric business strategies,
single- and multi-family home builders, property
managers, and title and mortgage companies are turning
CRM That Fits Your Business
Firms in the home building and real estate
sector are experiencing new pressures to
increase efficiencies:
• Responding to ongoing market changes
• Consolidating operations in the wake
of mergers and acquisitions
• Incorporating their online channels
into their sales processes
• Integrating their systems and operations
enterprise‑wide
In response, they are adopting new strategies to
sustain revenue growth and achieve higher levels
of customer satisfaction:
• Shifting toward a customer-centric business
model to leverage lifetime value
• Streamlining sales efforts by following
structured sales processes
• Automating time-consuming sales,
marketing, and customer care tasks
• Creating a highly responsive and agile
business through enabling technologies
Companies in the home building and real estate industries have been through a roller-coaster over the last
few years, from tremendous highs to challenging lows. The winners through these challenges have been the
companies that understand the need for continual innovation, whether it’s to deal with skyrocketing demand
or to survive cuts and leaner times. Forward-thinking firms are looking to strategic technologies such as
customer relationship management (CRM) to help them realize the business efficiencies required to continue
to grow revenues in any market, recognizing that with market changes come true opportunities to excel.
to customer relationship management (CRM) to become
more competitive in selling, marketing, and providing
service to their customers. Whether they process 300
or 30,000 home sales each year, Pivotal CRM for Home
Building and Real Estate puts critical relationships at the
core of their strategy. It offers comprehensive, integrated
capabilities that increase insight into operational
performance, streamline processes across the company,
and improve responsiveness to customer demands.
Whether a company is in the business of financing,
building, selling, servicing, or managing residential or
commercial property, Pivotal CRM provides the systems
and infrastructure needed to reduce costs, shorten sales
cycles, and increase productivity, while helping create
customers for life.

4. 4 Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate
Pivotal CRM is a leading suite of customer relationship
management software applications, proven by more
than a decade of customer success. Pivotal CRM offers
rich functionality, a full application suite, and best-in-
class customization abilities, all with a low total cost of
ownership. Through our experiences implementing
CRM systems with more than 1,800 customers in over 35
countries, we’ve learned how to help firms in the home
building and real estate industry craft and achieve a CRM
strategy that gets real, measurable results. We understand
the industry, and we deliver CRM that fits the needs of
home building and real estate businesses today—while
offering the flexibility to help them seize the emerging
business opportunities of tomorrow.
Our team has worked with the country’s top builders to
develop a leading enterprise solution for home building
and real estate that fits the unique requirements of the
industry right out of the box, while also offering the
flexibility to customize to individual companies’ needs.
The Pivotal CRM team, which includes a professional-
services group dedicated specifically to home building
and real estate, boasts unrivaled domain expertise and
experience, extended even further through partnerships
with leading firms such as integration specialists Pervasive
Software and options‑management solution Envision by
New Home Technologies. Pivotal CRM’s home building
and real estate team members are recognized as subject
matter experts within the industry, regularly called
upon to offer expertise and best practices by industry
publications and media; a Pivotal CRM representative also
participates in the Technology Workgroup of the National
Association of Home Builders Business Management and
Technology Committee.
By choosing Pivotal CRM, home building and real estate
firms are assured of solutions that:
• Fit specific industry and business processes: Pivotal
CRM comprises a full range of software that delivers
built-in best practices specific to the most pressing
challenges faced by single- and multi-family home
builders and other real estate businesses. Our end-
to-end suite of integrated sales, marketing, service,
and partner applications is designed to make all
customer-facing departments work in unison to attract,
win, and retain profitable relationships. The result is
less customization and integration, leading to lower
implementation and maintenance costs.
• Fit unique customer strategies and imperatives:
Pivotal CRM is the industry’s most flexible, scalable,
easy-to-customize CRM platform. Built on an inherently
flexible three-tier architecture and metadata-driven
design, Pivotal CRM is easy to modify, integrate, deploy,
and maintain. The industry-leading Pivotal CRM
customization toolkit provides the ability to cost-
effectively adjust processes, enabling home building
and real estate firms to capitalize on unique business
processes to reinforce competitive advantage.
• Fit each company’s timeline, budget, and
expectations: Our commitment to providing CRM
extends far beyond our product offerings. We offer a
continuum of services designed to help home building
and real estate firms implement, maintain, use, and
support CRM at a pace that produces reliable results at
a lower total cost of ownership.
In addition to helping companies put customers at the
center of their operations, the Pivotal CRM suite provides
powerful productivity tools that produce measurable
business benefits in terms of process efficiency, employee
collaboration, data accuracy, sales effectiveness,
streamlined communications, cost-effective marketing,
and much more. Home building and real estate firms can
deliver a first-class customer experience that distinguishes
their company, attracts customers, and strengthens
customer loyalty—while also reducing costs and
increasing revenues.
A Partner You Can Trust

5. Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate 5
Pivotal CRM: The Solution of Choice across the Home Building
and Real Estate Industry
“Being a part of the Pivotal Homebuilder User Group has added tremendous value to
our experience as a Pivotal CRM customer. The group allows us to interact and share
experiences with fellow users and industry peers, giving us new ideas and best practices to
follow. Beyond that, providing a forum through which we can have a direct impact on the
product roadmap proves that CDC Software is itself a truly customer-centric company.
”Toll Brothers
Developed in close collaboration with customers and
partners, Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real
Estate is uniquely tailored to industry best practices.
Forward-looking businesses are investing in technology
strategically to support consistent, differentiated
customer-facing activities. Pivotal CRM has helped
companies across the home building and real estate
industry deploy optimal CRM processes, helping them
realize tangible and quantifiable results that improve
operational effectiveness and customer loyalty.
Pivotal CRM Customers
• S&A Homes
• WCI Communities
• Wayne Homes
• The Olson Company
• California Pacific Homes
• Centex Destination Properties
• Boca Developers
• Loreto Bay Management Company
• Toll Brothers
• Mercedes Homes
• CMG Mortgage Insurance Company
• Savills
• 20/20 Properties
• Schumacher Homes
• Southern Homes
• Intracorp
• M/I Homes
• The Bonita Bay Group
• Elliott Homes
• Newland Communities
• Irvine Company
Pivotal CRM was awarded Best
Sales, Marketing, & Customer
Service Automation product
and overall IT Product of the
Year at the Innovative Housing
Technology Awards
Pivotal CRM has also been recognized for its
outstanding ability to extend the value of Microsoft
technologies for customers, earning CDC Software
the Partner of the Year Award for Information Worker
Solutions Office Deployment on the strength of Pivotal
CRM’s integration of Microsoft solutions.

6. “In our search for the hottest technologies available to homebuilders, we identified
two key categories; new products that show great potential and products that are already
producing very compelling return on investment for forward-looking builders. Pivotal
[CRM] is clearly in the latter category—having worked with the nation’s top builders to
develop a system that is now making significant improvements in the way they operate
their businesses and create life-long relationships with their customers.
”Constructech Magazine
“We could probably staff the planned projects we
have on the table at half the rate that we would
have in the past... Pivotal CRM has really helped in
our ability to scale and grow.”
Boca Developers

7. Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate 7
The award-winning Pivotal CRM solutions for home
building and real estate are industry-specific solutions
that enable single- and multi-family home builders,
title and mortgage companies, commercial property
managers, and real estate developers to better manage
relationships throughout the customer lifecycle and
across the enterprise. Designed in collaboration with
the industry’s top builders and real estate companies,
Pivotal CRM solutions provide functionality that reflects
the business processes and data models used by the
industry, right out of the box, offering a superior business
fit. Built on the highly flexible Pivotal CRM enterprise
platform, Pivotal CRM solutions can also be easily tailored
and customized to meet individual companies’ business
requirements—and quickly adapted to evolving needs.
Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate is the
only comprehensive solution for managing front-office
home building and real estate operations, empowering
home builders and adjacent real estate businesses to
deliver superior responsiveness and performance. Its
flexible platform allows it to be seamlessly connected
to the entire enterprise, including back-office enterprise
resource planning (ERP), construction-management, and
loan origination (LOS) systems. With the right technology
tools in place, home building and real estate firms can
accelerate the return on their investment and lower their
total cost of ownership.
Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate provides
tools that help firms:
• Attract and Manage High-Quality Leads: Empower
your marketing team to launch sophisticated,
multi-wave automated marketing campaigns and
manage incoming leads to ensure qualified prospects
are promptly pursued and colder leads are cost-
effectively nurtured.
• Streamline the Sales Process: Offer productivity tools
that increase sales effectiveness and accelerate the
sales cycle by supporting structured sales processes
and centralizing prospect communications, quotes,
and contracts.
• Deliver Outstanding Customer Care: Give service
teams the tools and information they need to log,
track, and resolve service issues; maintain ongoing
relationships with customers; and provide consistent,
exceptional post-sales support, backed by a
360‑degree view of the customer.
With an end-to-end suite of best-of-breed solutions for
marketing and lead management, sales, and customer
care and a proven commitment to home building and real
estate, only Pivotal CRM offers the depth of functionality,
domain expertise, and flexibility that companies need to
gain a competitive edge in the market. Adaptable to the
needs and budgets of individual firms, Pivotal CRM for
Home Building and Real Estate can be implemented in
phased, manageable steps or as discrete sales, marketing,
and customer care suites. The combination of industry-
tailored and custom components, along with the inherent
flexibility of the Pivotal CRM platform, enables home
building and real estate firms to obtain a custom system
without the high cost of in-house development.
Integrated, Comprehensive, and Highly Targeted to the Needs
of the Home Building and Real Estate Industry
“Firms can cut their implementation length—and budget—by finding an
industry-specific edition that comes preconfigured with objects, fields, and reports that
they would have to customize in a generic product.
” Liz Herbert, Forrester
“The Forrester Wave™: Midmarket Sales Force Automation, Q4 2005,” November 22, 2005

8. 8 Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate
According to NAHB statistics, 70% of homebuyers use the
web as their first resource when looking for a home. While
most builders, recognizing the skyrocketing importance
of the web to their operations, have established websites
and begun advertising their properties through websites
such as NewHomeSource and Homebuilder.com, the truth
is that few have adequate systems in place to properly
manage effective online campaigns—or to handle the
massive influx of leads from online sources. This results
in poorly qualified leads, inconsistent follow-through,
and missed opportunities. Home builders and title and
mortgage companies looking to get more out of their
marketing budgets—and benefit from the full potential of
the web—are turning to Pivotal CRM.
Execute sophisticated, targeted online
campaigns
Take advantage of low-cost online communication
vehicles to broaden marketing reach while also bringing
more precision to marketing efforts, including print
direct mail campaigns. Pivotal CRM enables companies
to segment customers and prospects according to
demographic criteria, interests, preferences, region,
and other features, allowing them to target offers,
communications, events, and messaging more effectively,
bringing in higher-quality leads. It also provides tools that
enable marketers to map out and execute complex multi-
wave campaigns that reinforce efforts at multiple touch-
points and automate follow-up and literature fulfillment.
Qualify and distribute leads to the right sales
agent efficiently
Put the right lead in the hands of the right sales agent
at the right time. Pivotal CRM captures lead-qualifying
information from prospects and automatically distributes
leads to the right salesperson based on pre-defined
criteria, such as region, community, or expertise. The
system classifies and prioritizes leads for the sales force,
enabling them to focus their efforts more productively to
increase revenues.
Focus sales agents on the most
qualified buyers
Automate lead nurturing to reduce labour costs. Pivotal
CRM allows users to designate the hottest leads for
follow-up by the sales force, while channeling
longer-term prospects into cost-effective—but still
personalized—lead-nurture campaigns, automatically
sending them ongoing communications to build
relationships and bolster brand equity. These campaigns
can incrementally qualify prospects until they are ready
to be taken on by the sales team, while simultaneously
educating the buyer, resulting in a shorter, lower-touch
sales cycle down the road.
Tie marketing efforts more closely to
sales results
Gain insight into the real cost and value of marketing
projects. Pivotal CRM offers reporting tools that help
home builders and real estate firms track costs and
revenues on all projects and individual campaigns,
generating return on investment (ROI) reports that shed
light on the most effective use of marketing dollars. The
system also tracks lead sources through the customer
lifecycle, delivering insight into the full lifetime value
of customers relative to initial lead cost. Marketers can
use this information to hone their marketing efforts,
increasing success rates and campaign value over time.
Attract and Manage High-Quality Leads
• Lower marketing costs by using online channels
to their full potential with sophisticated multi-
wave campaigns
• Focus the sales team’s efforts more profitably on
better-qualified leads
• Automate ongoing communications with
longer-term prospects until they’re ready to buy
“Pivotal [CRM] provides some of the best marketing capabilities in the midmarket.
”Liz Herbert, Forrester, “Midmarket Sales Force Automation Scorecard Summary: Pivotal,” November 22, 2005

9. Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate 9
In a business such as real estate, where the products
being sold are big-ticket items with longer sales cycles,
sales productivity is critical. Home builders and real estate
firms need to ensure that their sales personnel—whether
internal sales agents or external brokers—have the
structure and support they need to take the guesswork
out of the sales process and focus their efforts on sales, not
administration. The first step is supplying the sales force
with high-quality prospects that are serious about buying.
The next step is furnishing sales agents with the tools they
need to manage their schedules, communications, and
activities for the highest sales impact.
Give salespeople the information they need
to close deals
Empower sales agents by providing true insight into
their prospects. Pivotal CRM makes valuable prospect
information instantly accessible, including interests,
preferences, financial data, and all previous contact with
the organization, such as marketing touches and visits
to other neighborhoods or divisions. This information
leads to more focused, strategic sales efforts with better-
qualified leads. Management, meanwhile, has full insight
into revenue pipelines for forecasting.
Provide a personalized one-stop destination
for all sales activity
Centralize sales operations around a critical hub that
fits the way salespeople work. Pivotal CRM gives each
sales employee a fully customizable dashboard, packed
with productivity tools. As the launching pad for daily
sales operations, this dashboard can be personalized
to list daily activities and task assignments, often-used
links, hot prospects, and even third-party data feeds.
This convenient tool improves user adoption, increases
performance, and enhances salesperson loyalty.
Structure the sales process for
consistent results
Implement proven sales methodologies across the
organization to ensure systematic adherence to best
practices. Pivotal CRM supports structured sales
methodologies, allowing home builders to consistently
implement the sales processes that have proven most
effective. Modeling the success of the most productive
sales professionals maximizes revenue and improves the
efficiency of the entire homebuyer lifecycle.
Maintain active relationships with buyers
with less effort
Ensure thorough follow-up by implementing sales action
plans. Pivotal CRM allows sales agents to create account-
specific action plans that automatically schedule regular,
appropriate prospect contact. Additional features allow
team members to assign each other action items and
tasks, facilitating collaboration.
Streamline the Sales Process
• Increase sales productivity using automated
quote, contract, and home-configuration tools
• Reduce sales cycles and increase conversion
rates by implementing proven, structured sales
methodologies
• Gain better insight into homebuyer behaviors as
well as the sales pipeline

10. 10 Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate
Manage sales territories and assign the right
sales teams to each account
Assign exactly the right salesperson or combination of
team members to each prospect or property. Pivotal CRM
allows sales managers to customize sales assignments
based on geography, division, specialty, community,
or virtually any other criteria. Complex territory
configurations can be easily realigned in the wake of
mergers, acquisitions, sales agent or broker departure,
and consolidation.
Streamline the quote-to-contract process
Shorten the sales cycle by managing and storing
options and quotes within the Pivotal CRM system and
progressing them more smoothly to contract closure.
Pivotal CRM features a built-in financial calculator
that helps sales agents calculate financial scenarios
for homebuyers. The workflow templates help sales
automatically distribute quotes and contracts to
management for approval. This results in more accurate
quoting and better management oversight, as well as a
streamlined contract-creation process that saves valuable
selling time, selling homes faster and more efficiently.
“Pivotal CRM tools are integral to ensuring Wayne Homes maintains
market share and profitability in the long term. We have established an
extremely cost-efficient automation system for our sales and marketing
efforts that will set us apart in a downturn when other companies are
searching for ways to save money.
” Wayne Homes

11. Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate 11
The next battle in the home building and real estate
sector is for customer loyalty. As fewer homebuyers enter
the market, home builders and adjacent businesses must
work harder to retain the customers they have, striving
to earn follow-on sales, refinancings, and referrals.
The customer experience in its entirety becomes a
critical differentiator in such an environment. Customer
satisfaction with post-sales service gains as much
importance as sales technique, demanding that home
builders refine their strategy for providing winning
customer care.
Give service personnel a 360-degree
view of the customer
Ensure every customer receives informed, personalized
service by putting comprehensive customer information
at service agents’ fingertips. By creating a shared
repository of customer information for sales, marketing,
and customer care teams, Pivotal CRM supplies members
of each department with insight into customer history—
and future predictors—for faster, more satisfying service,
better-targeted post-sale communications, and timely
up-selling and referral incentives. The ability to easily
implement automated customer surveys helps monitor
satisfaction and uncover new opportunities.
Manage service requests efficiently for high
satisfaction
Fulfill service requests rapidly and seamlessly. Pivotal CRM
enables service agents to create detailed service requests,
including requests that contain multiple service items
and work orders, and then easily assign the appropriate
tradesperson to the request, leading to quick resolution.
When necessary, incident escalation to management is
fluid and automated, and it generates a valuable audit
trail that maintains a record of homesite history.
Administer home inspections and reduce
warranty costs
Manage the home-inspection process consistently using
customizable templates to create customer walkthroughs
and quality inspections. Pivotal CRM enables service
agents to track itemized scores and follow-up service
requests. Furthermore, it enables service personnel to
manage service levels and control warranty costs.
Track and analyze service to understand
causes and metrics
Gain insight into the cost, value, and causes of service and
warranty activities. Pivotal CRM provides built-in reporting
tools that enable home builders and real estate firms to
analyze root causes, vendor performance, service-request
and work-order aging, defect and warranty trends,
charge-backs and billable services, and inspection profiles.
These analyses help home builders manage expenses and
recover warranty costs from vendors and subcontractors,
as well as spot and respond quickly to trends.
Deliver Outstanding Customer Care
• Increase referrals and repeat customers by
improving customer satisfaction
• Increase cross-selling potential with better insight
into homeowner profiles and homesite history
• Track and manage service requests for rapid
resolution, while generating audit trails to
manage litigation risk

12. International
Pivotal Corporation Ltd.
Pioneer House
7 Rushmills, Northampton
United Kingdom NN4 7YB
+44 (1) 604 630050
Contact a Pivotal CRM representative today to learn more about how Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Esate can
address your unique needs. Call 1-877-PIVOTAL (1-877-748-6825) or visit us at www.PivotalCRM.com.
Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate
Create Customers For Life
Copyright © CDC Software 2010. All rights reserved.
The CDC Software logo and Pivotal CRM logo are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of CDC Software.
North America
2002 Summit Boulevard
Suite 700
Atlanta, GA 30319 USA
+1 877-748-6825
info@cdcsoftware.com
As the only comprehensive, enterprise-class CRM system
designed specifically to meet the needs of the industry,
Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real Estate is the
clear choice for single- and multi-family home builders
and other real estate industry firms looking to increase
operational efficiency, gain competitive advantage, and
meet the challenges of a market slowdown.
By giving companies a 360‑degree view of their
customers, Pivotal CRM for Home Building and Real
Estate enables them to achieve insight into customer
preferences and behaviors that can inform and refine
their entire business strategy. Pivotal CRM helps firms
precisely manage a consistent and personalized customer
experience that builds lasting relationships, from the
initial lead through the entire customer lifecycle and into
subsequent home sales, mortgages, and refinancing.
Smart home builders and real estate companies are taking
immediate action to implement systems and processes
that can help them meet the challenges of a moderating
market and help them continue to thrive. With Pivotal
CRM, companies can maximize customer satisfaction as
they derive economic value from every customer touch-
point, building customer loyalty and creating customers
for life.