PRODUCTS USED: Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Conga, HubSpot

As multifamily owners/operators themselves, founding partners at Madera Residential struggled to find affordable, innovative technologies to streamline operations. In their search for solutions that could simplify this experience, they quickly found that many of the solutions on the market either weren’t built for the multifamily space, or weren’t optimized for operator use. 

So, the partners at Madera Residential began developing their own solutions — Quext, an industry-differentiated property technology company designed “by operators, for operators.”

Quext is quickly sizing up from their start-up phase. With ambitions to expand into more avenues of multi-family properties and a need for sophisticated operating tools that could keep up with their growth, Quext set their sights on implementing specialized platforms for nearly all of their departments.

In order to streamline processes and implementation of new technologies, Quext originally reached out to Kicksaw to assist in their Salesforce implementation and solution research. “We are highly selective when choosing technology partners. They must have proven success in developing complementary solutions and ideally have experience in the multifamily space. Together we can work to achieve our ambitions.” said Jeff Lansdell, VP of Operations at Quext. 

Jeff lives by his company’s operator-forward motto: solutions should be built by people who understand their real-life function. For him and Quext, industry knowledge was just as important as tech-market know-how — they found both in Kicksaw. 

As they needed to find more internal operating efficiency, Quext was faced with a staggering challenge. They needed to identify and onboard different operating systems across various departments and integrate them to communicate with each other company-wide. A tall order for any business, but even more challenging when you don’t have systems experts at your disposal.  “Some of these platforms we’re implementing, we don’t have user knowledge in-house. We are developing user knowledge as we’re onboarding and implementing as well,” said Jeff. 

With simultaneous implementations at varying stages of completion, tracking the progress and keeping the projects on time was also a concern. The speed and scope of the overhaul proved to be more than what Quext could handle in-house while still keeping their business running.

Quext needed Kicksaw’s market-wide software expertise to build out their various business platforms, train and onboard their staff to leverage those solutions to their fullest power, and create the connective tissue that would allow all the systems to interact and share information.

With NetSuite already in place as their accounting solution, Quext worked with Kicksaw to explore options for their other departments. Several Quext sales representatives were familiar with Salesforce, which became the easy choice for their CRM solution. After researching Salesforce’s compatible solutions with Kicksaw, Quext continued to improve their business software suite with additional solutions: Service Cloud to handle their ticketing and customer service, document maintenance and contract management through Conga, and a HubSpot to Salesforce integration that, as of this writing, is still under construction. They’re also working with Kicksaw to build workflows and integrations that will allow all their platforms to communicate and pass along information between departments seamlessly. 

Jeff shared that working with partners who have experience in their industry makes all the difference — processes move faster and are more accurately specialized right out of the gate. “It's been really good. We appreciate the knowledge of our industry that they have, and of course, with the platforms that we’re implementing, they have a vast knowledge, so we’ve enjoyed having them to understand our perspective. 

“You’ve got to have somebody who has some base knowledge of onboarding enterprise-grade systems,” continued Jeff. “Somebody that can basically listen to your needs and requirements and be able, in a short time frame, to come back to you with a suggestion on how to move forward.”

Since working with Kicksaw, Quext has significantly reduced the amount of emails required to complete any given task with a new notification system in place. They’re pleased with the day-to-day improvements they’re already experiencing and expect to see measurable improvements within the next few months once the systems are fully integrated. 

We’re delighted to have been a part of Quext’s journey thus far, and we’re excited to watch them continue to grow their capabilities and further improve the prop tech industry.