A CRM for a residence that didn't exist yet

Journal Student Living's first student accommodation residence opened in early 2019, and its CRM had to be ready first: built and customised with no existing sales process, no data and no residents to model from. The Garden built the engine before the doors opened.

Client: Journal Student Living
Industry: Property
Solutions: Marketing Technology
Services: CRM, Digital Marketing Workshops, Marketing Automation
Region: Australia

The challenge

Build and customise a CRM to manage a pipeline of leads that didn’t exist yet, for a sales process that had never run. The platform needed on-demand components like live chat so prospective students could reach the brand in real time, while staying manageable for facility staff, and it had to scale as new residences opened.

Our solution

An incremental build took it step by step: a CRM and automation platform audit landing on Salesforce and Pardot, a customer journey workshop mapping the consideration and purchase process into a sales framework, then the build and integration of four platforms, Salesforce, Live Agent, Social Studio and Pardot, with automation doing the heavy lifting at every opportunity and custom dashboards for reporting. Weekly check-ins kept timelines honest.

Onboarding made it stick: Salesforce sales training, Pardot best-practice sessions, Live Agent training, and a sales training user guide so future staff onboard smoothly as the team grows.

The results

The sales process launched established and automated: Live Agent passing website conversations straight into Salesforce, marketing automation nurturing prospects to conversion, and the sales team free to focus on filling the pipeline and retaining residents. The CRM was built to scale, ready for every product and location Journal adds next.

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