As a developer, builder, and manager of apartment communities, Gables Residential serves both individuals and companies needing temporary housing for employees for short-term projects or relocations. To better serve the latter, the company established Gables Corporate Accommodations (GCA), a subsidiary that markets and leases fully furnished apartments within Gables communities to corporate housing divisions of large enterprises. While this arrangement should drive profit for both Gables Residential and GCA, over time, Gables Residential sales associates became frustrated by special requests, such as last-minute queries and lease term extensions. GCA agents couldn’t understand the issue, as increased revenue would benefit both GCA and Gables. The result: multiple, consistent missed revenue opportunities.
In late 2010, Learning & Development (L&D) and GCA collaborated to develop policies, procedures, and training to clarify and facilitate the relationship for sales associates. Together, they performed a needs assessment that identified challenges such as an unclear referrals structure, competitive pricing that often worked against closing leases, and unstructured pricing. The teams addressed these obstacles by reengineering policies and procedures, and defining the mutual benefits of working together to maximize profits.
Program Details
To train both GCA and Gables associates on the new standardized policies and benefits of collaboration as quickly as possible, L&D and GCA partnered to develop a 60-minute virtual instructor-led training (VILT). By offering a virtual solution, Gables was able to deliver 27 live Webinars over a six-week period to 309 associates in 150 locations. Content included GCA’s top- and bottom-line contribution to Gables, and the potential for increased referrals—and, therefore, revenue—for both GCA and Gables with the new policies and procedures. This addressed the all-important WIIFM (What’s in It for Me?) for Gables sales associates.
To create positive buzz about these mandatory training sessions, and to begin to change mindsets about GCA, Gables sales associates received promotional e-mails. These e-mails highlighted reasons to partner with GCA and sneak peeks at new policies and statistics about what GCA currently was offering Gables. For example, the average GCA lease term extension of three months results in $3,300 in additional income for a community. Ongoing training is provided to new associates within their first 90 days of employment.
Results
This learning program helped meet Gables’ corporate strategic goal of revenue growth as in year two since the initial training, GCA has seen more than a 60 percent increase in prospective clients referred by sales associates, which increased subsidiary Net Operating Income (NOI) by 31 percent (well exceeding the corporate goal of 5 percent subsidiary NOI growth). This also led to a 16 percent increase in the revenue stream paid from GCA to Gables and a 17 percent increase in the initial length of new contracts.
