Dacha Real Estate

SalesScreen: Hi Darrell, thanks for chatting with us today; why don't you start off by telling me about your role, your team, and kind of the day-to-day of what you guys do?

Darrell: I'm the Sales and Leasing manager here at Dacha Real Estate. We were established in 2004, and we’ve come a long way in 18 years, from a small office with maybe three or four brokers to now two offices and around 70 brokers. We specialize in sales and leasing from commercial to residential, so anything from apartments to big multimillion-dollar villas, so we kind of specialize across the board if you like.

SalesScreen: Tell me a little bit about your day-to-day, and maybe some of the pain points that you're feeling prior to SalesScreen.

Darrell: Before SalesScreen, we were doing a lot of things manually. It just wasn't very streamlined. It wasn't very modern. It wasn't really cool. We were still writing everything out on a whiteboard, which was very time consuming, and I felt like it was a lot easier for people to hide. So the underperformance is very easy to hide when you've just got a load of numbers on the board, and no one is looking all the way through it. And then on the flip side to that as well, like there were people that are really doing very well and they weren't they were kind of getting swept under the carpet because it's a bunch of numbers and figures on a big whiteboard.

So, yeah, it just kind of it was a bit boring, a bit bland, and a bit old school. I mean, I'm not against school. I like old school. But things just weren't very transparent.

SalesScreen: Did you have gamification in mind when you were shopping around for vendors? Did you know that gamification could help solve this?

Darrell: No, it wasn't really because we didn't realize there was something that was so in-depth. We knew that there were platforms that you could put on the big screen. But we didn't know that there was so much that you could do with it and so much play and so much fun and so much interaction that the team could have.
Again, it was very streamlined and easy to use. You know, we're not very technical. A lot of us. It's just about ease and making it nice and easy to use - user-friendly, which was good. I think when we met with Vidar(SalesScreen Customer Success Manager), we kind of felt like someone was going to be there to hold our hand a little bit, and if things didn't quite go to plan and we needed some help, that someone was going to be there to guide us through it. We got that feeling from the start with you guys.

SalesScreen: What was the onboarding process like for you?

Darrell: The onboarding process was very, very easy. Nice to use. User friendly. It's been great. I think even when we first brought this on board, our working week here was Sunday to Thursday, and I would need to reach out to Vidar, and he would always reply. And even now, I was speaking to him earlier about a few things that I wanted advice on, and he's been a dream. He's good at identifying what we could be doing based on our usage because, obviously, you can see how we've been using it and the kind of competitions we run, and the activities we're trying to monitor. He's very good at suggesting things that I wouldn't have thought about.

SalesScreen: We call our CSMs "Gamification Experts" because they really are a strategic partner for our clients meant to help you guys hit your goals. Speaking of goals, have you guys seen any improvements since implementing SalesScreen?

Darrell: One of the biggest things is probably accountability for the team. As I said earlier, it's a lot harder for them to hide today. They have to hold themselves a little bit more accountable. On the flip side, the people that are performing get a little bit more exposure. They can see themselves on a sort of live day-to-day basis, hour to hour, minute to minute, wherever they're on top.
And you know, it's always fun towards the end of the month when people are trying to rush and get last-minute deals in because you can see like the leaderboards on the screens going crazy. It's very, very good in that respect for the team. I also think it's encouraged people to work closer together and make sure that deals are happening in-house.
Again, it's good to be able to understand and monitor each month, the ups and the downs. The Good, The Bad. The general performance of the business in the company or where we're going. It's just coming up to a year now that we've had SalesScreen, so to be able to look back to see what we did this time last year, or last quarter is a very, very good tool for us. And it was a very long-winded process before SalesScreen, too much work. I don't like it. I like sales, I'm not into admin. So from a managerial point of view, it's definitely a lot easier and nicer, and more streamlined to use.

SalesScreen: Nice. I love that. Do you in the team have any favorite features?

Darrell: I know there are more people that prefer battles, and they take it very seriously, which is good. I think being able to see it firsthand on the board is important - who's on top and who's winning. Again, there's just that transparency, which is good. My favorite feature, honestly, is just having the live scoreboard and being able to see who's really performing and who's not and seeing the top performer because I just wasn't used to that for like four or five years before we started using SalesScreen.
I think the best feature for the team is probably the coins. Because I think, even from a company perspective, I think it's very easy for people to get carried away when they're always performing. When it's the same one or two people at the top, and there are one or two people continuously getting all the gifts and all the bonuses. It’s quite demotivating sometimes, and it gets a bit boring, even from our position, when we're paying this person a bonus, or we're sending this person on holiday, so now that everybody can at least get a few coins for some of the smallest things is very very good. Because we can get coins for getting a minimum fee. Before, there were people going, "okay, I'll just get this fee," now they're really pushing to get that minimum fee because they want that extra five coins. So even if you finish bottom of the pile, you can still get rewarded for your efforts.