Founded in 2007, Jacaruso Enterprises provides remote hotel sales service and training that gives small to medium-sized hotels an affordable and flexible solution for increasing revenue. Jacaruso’s customers include approximately a thousand major hotels and boutique properties in the U.S., Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America.
Starting with a complex, custom Salesforce environment
With a Salesforce platform highly customized to the company’s unique needs, Jacaruso’s team uses Salesforce for not only its hotel customers but also its hotel customers’ customers – which is close to a million contacts.
Jacaruso defines an account and opportunity differently than typically intended and has a lot of custom objects to track everything in its system. They were searching on the AppExchange for a Salesforce calendar integration that would work for its custom Salesforce environment and provide its sales team with a better calendar visualization.
“We typically find a Salesforce app that kind of works for us, and then we have to do a lot of customization because it can be difficult to use apps in their native way,” said Jason Webb, Vice President of Digital Operations at Jacaruso.
Webb tried a few calendar apps which did not work for their environment. Then he found that CalendarAnything exceeded his expectations. “CalendarAnything worked perfectly for what we were looking for. There wasn’t a lot of customization that we needed. It was plug and play, which very rarely happens for us.”
Lacking visibility to efficiently conduct hotel bookings
Jacaruso’s approximately 100 highly experienced regional directors of sales each oversee a portfolio of eight to ten partner hotels. The regional directors of sales take incoming calls and make outgoing prospecting calls to increase group and corporate bookings for each of the partner hotels.
Prior to implementing CalendarAnything, when working on a booking, Jacaruso team members would have to log in to a hotel’s system and scroll through hundreds of bookings in a list view. Not only was it inefficient, but it made it difficult to see all of the information needed for the sale. The team needed a calendar view of all the bookings for all the hotels so they could have all of the relevant information displayed at a glance.
Quickly and easily increasing visibility and efficiency
It was easy to implement the CalendarAnything solution and quickly get it into users’ hands. CalendarAnything was rolled out at Jacaruso’s bi-annual meeting, and the team was excited to have the new tool with a visual representation of their hotel bookings. Now they can pull up Salesforce to see the information they need, rather than having to log in and out of each hotel’s system multiple times per day.
“It’s relatively simple what we’ve put in Salesforce, but incredibly efficient. Our team had a need, and CalendarAnything helped satisfy that need as quickly as possible,” said Webb.
Jacaruso has already leveraged CalendarAnything’s capabilities for future projects including event tracking for their Sales & Marketing teams and project management.
“There are many more things that we could use CalendarAnything for in Salesforce. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of the potential uses for us.”
