1. Get organized, automate the manual work, and make employees and management happier.
Like many businesses, SmartRent’s story began in spreadsheets. Founded in 2017, the company landed its first client the next year. But it took a little longer until it found the right technology to support the way it worked. “We spent a year and a half operating in spreadsheets and Google docs,” Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Demetrios Barnes said. During that time, company agents managed apartment complexes the hard way, through endless paperwork.
“An apartment community is somewhere between 250 and 500 units,” Barnes explained. “Imagine trying to print out 500 checklists and then filling them out and scanning or taking pictures of them to send back to me on a nightly basis.” Barnes’ technicians were spending roughly two hours a day reporting back to HQ on their day’s work — time that could better have been spent making additional service calls.
After a short trial of a business solution that just couldn’t do what the company needed it to, SmartRent adoptedSalesforce Field Service (SFS) in late 2019. The difference since has been night and day. “We had thousands of dollars a year in salaries going just to managing spreadsheets and calling technicians to get an understanding of what they were doing,” Barnes said. SFS organized the process and automated data flow so Barnes and his team at SmartRent’s Scottsdale, Arizona, headquarters could always check on progress at any site, and see when a tech was finished with a service call and was ready for the next one.
3. Leverage technology to expand your business.
Beyond its success with Salesforce Field Service, SmartRent has also adopted a range of other Salesforce offerings, includingSales Cloud,Service Cloud, andSlack. Originally, all of SmartRent’s teams were working out of individual spreadsheets just like the ones used to track field technicians’ work. Moving the entire business onto a unified platform allowed SmartRent’s different teams to share data and collaborate, resulting in companywide efficiency gains and — just as importantly — better customer experiences.
SmartRent is also seeing great early results withSalesforce Voice, which the company’s sales and support teams are using. The technology allows SmartRent to integrate its call center with Service Cloud, turning incoming support calls into Service Cloud cases. One use case was to expand SmartRent’s offerings in the single-family home rental market, as Barnes explained. “We were doing upgrades for one of the largest single-family renters in the country, and our dispatch team would send letters out to renters with an 800 number they could use to schedule appointments.” Routing the calls through Salesforce Voice lets call center agents check field technician availability in real time, often making same-day appointments possible. The technology also allows for capturing call notes and recordings, useful for updating clients on specific cases as well as overall project progress.
While SmartRent’s use of CRM has been customized to fit its specific business needs, Barnes’ advice about adopting Salesforce applies to any growing business across any industry. “First and foremost, do it,” he said. “Salesforce embodies that white-glove, hand-holding approach, and I think that's extremely important for any company that's trying to grow their business. Just having experts behind you, guiding you down those various paths, is invaluable.”
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