The Challenge
HomeAway, Inc. is the world’s leading online marketplace for the vacation rental industry, with sites representing over 775,000 paid listings of vacation rental homes in 171 countries. Through HomeAway, owners and property managers offer an extensive selection of vacation homes, making it easy for vacation rental owners and property managers to advertise their properties and manage bookings online. Their mission is to have every single vacation rental in the world available to everyone and to make online booking as seamless as possible.
Since the company was founded in 2004, it focused primarily on B2C sales, talking primarily with landlords who owned only one property. However, in 2010/2011, the company started gaining traction on the B2B side and the sales team required greater resources to communicate their value proposition. HomeAway’s sales reps were approaching property managers with over 1,000 properties with current marketing spend anywhere from $10-20,000 to $1 million. It wasn’t until this shift that the team realized the need for a more analytical ROI tool that could communicate the value on this level and scale.
Before VisualizeROI, HomeAway used a wide range of solutions – everything from homegrown Excel spreadsheets to screen shots mocked up in PowerPoint or Microsoft Word documents. There was never a consistent strategy; the team used whatever resource was at their disposal to communicate with their customers. Nevertheless, it was not an efficient approach and was not effectively communicating the value of HomeAway’s products or services in a visually compelling or quantitative way.
The Strategy
Because HomeAway was working with more property managers on the B2B side, the company required a more sophisticated tool that was much more analytical, intelligent and provided a solid ROI conversation-starter. HomeAway decided to implement VisualizeROI across its North America B2B team, with approximately 10-15 employees. The solution fit their needs exactly and they moved quickly to train and deploy the solution across their team. Having the ability to communicate the ROI more effectively to its customers and present various business cases, the team was able to have more valuable conversations at the beginning, therefore limiting multiple follow-up conversations and increasing employee productivity. With success on the North American Sales Team, HomeAway extended the VisualizeROI tool to its Global Sales Team in multi-languages, with over 50-60 Account Managers.
The Result
Since implementing VisualizeROI across HomeAway’s B2B North America and Global Sales Team, the company has realized the following results:
- Significant increase in sales with new customers not attainable prior to VisualizeROI
- Growth in existing accounts yielding increase in sales
- Reduction in sales cycles based on the ability to have more impactful ROI conversations early on
- Increase in employee productivity and capacity
- Uplift in value-based conversations leading to global expansion of VisualizeROI tool across sales teams
HomeAway has also received positive feedback from both its employees and customers on the ease of use and how effective it is in presenting various outputs and ROI cases. There has been heightened communication internally amongst the sales team, demonstrating their level of understanding, liking and knowledge about the tool.
As HomeAway continues to evolve and advance as the largest online marketplace for vacation rentals, it will continue needing an effective and adaptive solution.
VisualizeROI is just that and more. With new products, payment models and services in the pipeline, HomeAway is excited to gain greater customer engagement with VisualizeROI, as well as continue to communicate the value of its offerings in a visually compelling way.
