Case Study

Marlin Spring

Knowledge is Power For This Toronto
Multi-family Developer

Company

Company

Building For You

Marlin Spring is a Toronto-based real estate company whose operations span across North America. Staying true to their motto, ‘Building for You’, Marlin Spring is extremely meticulous about keeping their buyers front of mind when building and strategically considers factors such as transit proximity, purchasers’ lifestyles and neighborhood amenities. Above all, Marlin Spring works to deliver exceptional real estate value with uncompromising adherence to the company’s core values. This attention to detail has led Marlin Spring to being listed in the Globe and Mail’s annual listing of Canada’s Top Growing Companies for the last three consecutive years.

Nick joined Marlin Spring in 2020 and over time, he has established himself as a go-to person for data and insights at the company and is responsible for Marlin Spring’s increasing use of Spark within their organization.

Part of my role is collecting and analyzing market data to provide feedback to various internal teams in a way that helps answer who is building what where, who is buying, what absorptions are being achieved, product mix and what price point we think we can sell at.

Nick Bicanic Associate of Market Data and Retail Sales at Marlin Spring
Project

Project

House of Assembly

House of Assembly is one of Marlin Spring’s upcoming developments set to join the culturally rich Sterling Junction neighborhood. The development is being built in partnership with Greybrook Realty Partners and will be the first of three buildings being built in the community and will host over 250 new homes.

Challenges

Challenges

Missing the Customers’
Buying Journey

Marlin Spring began using Spark before Nick joined and initially it was used only as a communication tool for email marketing to registrants. As a result, their team had very limited insights into their customers’ buying journey.

“We’ve had meetings where the topic of understanding the buyer journey was repeatedly mentioned and it seemed to me that we weren’t using Spark to its full extent,"

Initially, Marlin Spring utilized only a small set of tools available via the Spark platform. By working together with Spark support to expand their use of the Spark tools and capabilities, Marlin Spring was able to not only understand reporting tools, yet also create workflows and procedures to gain more appropriate insights into their customers' buying journey and purchasing interests.

Journey

Journey

Empowering Marlin
Spring’s Marketing

As Marlin Spring began using Spark to log communications, registrations, interactions and purchases, they were able to gain significant insights on their customer segments. Spark’s ability to track key information and events such as who their customers are and where they are coming from allows Marlin Spring to make more effective decisions when marketing and selling their projects.

“Using data collected with the Spark platform affords us the ability to make more effective decisions for pricing, marketing and selling our projects.”

In addition, Spark’s communications and customer profile features allow Marlin Spring’s marketing and sales team to consistently stay up-to-date with each individual customer and help take their customer relationships to another level.

“Spark enables us to gauge interest levels in specific unit types and sell these units more strategically to the customers we know are the most interested,” said Nick.
“We are able to tailor specific strategies towards different groups, such as investor purchasers versus end-user purchasers.”

If the buyer perceives us as always being on the ball, we can add that next level of professionalism that people appreciate. Spark really helps us save valuable time, reduce the potential for error and make our interaction with clients a little more personal.

Beyond empowering their marketing team, Spark also provides Marlin Spring flexibility in a multitude of ways. First, Spark’s system allows Marlin Spring to easily share key information between team members, such as customer profiles and their individual conversations.

“When people are on vacation or a team member leaves the project, specific notes about a customer profile can be easily reviewed and conversations can be easily continued by any other team member. Our customer knowledge base doesn’t leave with transitioning team members or sales reps and instead, it stays within the organization.”

In addition, Spark’s communications and customer profile features allow Marlin Spring’s marketing and sales team to consistently stay up-to-date with each individual customer and help take their customer relationships to another level.

“To get the full advantage of Spark, it is really up to us to make full and effective use of the platform and for us, flexibility is paramount. We can use Spark on computers, tablets, mobile phones and more. It’s one of the reasons why we like it!”

Spark’s thorough onboarding process and ability to customize the platform matched Marlin Spring’s account to their unique and specific needs.

Spark has always been one to listen.

They make an effort to put themselves in our shoes; seeing things from our perspective. Whenever I’ve had product feedback it’s often addressed by the end-of-day or soon after.

Sparks’ insatiable desire to constantly improve by understanding things from their clients perspective is something that I really value and appreciate.

Results

Results

Unlocking a New Level of Strategic Decision Making

Overall, Marlin Spring is able to incorporate a much more targeted sales strategy. By switching from their previous ‘wide-net’ strategy to a Spark-enabled ‘spear-fishing’ approach, they are able to save time and money while increasing the effectiveness and efficiency of their sales and marketing efforts.

“Before using Spark to handle our purchaser communications, we resorted to the pre-dot-com era way of doing things. Today, we make notes, log interactions, track event registrations and communicate with contracted purchasers."

Enabled by their expanded usage of Spark, Marlin Spring can now expand their data comprehensiveness which allows them to tailor their marketing strategies with more granular details.

“We are able to better target our advertising campaigns both digitally and traditionally (i.e. through print). We are far more confident now then we were 2 years ago in making strategic marketing decisions using data collected with the Spark platform.”
Future

Future

Just Scratching the Surface

Despite already bolstering their marketing efforts, Nick believes there is much more room to grow in how Marlin Spring uses Spark.

“After growing from 5 to 30 users, I still feel like we are only scratching the surface of what Spark has to offer. Spark is opening up new communications channels and we can now answer questions we couldn’t have answered before. We are continually learning more about how each tool in their platform benefits us and I can see us using Spark more and more as we launch future projects.”

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