Parkable may well be one of the best stories you have never heard of. Founded in 2015 in New Zealand, Parkable is a platform which takes unused parking spots and puts them in the hands of consumers.
Need to find a regular parking spot the Parkable App will ensure you are allocated a spot at one of its participating car parks.
It not only alleviates this major pain point for consumers in finding a parking spot but provides a regular income for the parking spot owner.
Parkable also is a management software tool used for workplaces and commercial properties making parking admin, access, sharing and revenue simpler ensuring their car parks are fully utilised.
The company is growing quickly not only in New Zealand but Australia and more recently the UK and US. Covid stymied growth and despite working from home becoming the norm, the business is growing at 20% year-on-year.
Parkable’s Head of Sales Operations, Hamish Cadigan, told ITWire at the start of today’s Salesforce’s Agentforce World Tour event in Melbourne that the company is entering a major growth phase.
“We have automated many disparate processes which is enabling our sales staff to increase our conversion rate by 38% and a 50% reduction in time to convert. We have Slack notifications that tell us when there is a potential new customer in the system and we know that if we answer within two hours our conversion rate is considerably higher,” he said.
Parkable has used Slack since its inception nine years ago and moved to Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud in 2022.
As Cadigan explains, as the company expanded, particularly overseas, the sales process became increasingly laborious and time consuming.
“With Slack so ingrained into Parkable as our communications tool, the move to Salesforce’s Sales Cloud enabled employees to get a clearer picture of our sales pipeline. In fact, without it, growth would have been so much slower.
“And the benefit for us is the connectivity between the products. That was really important as we moved into the US and UK markets as it gives us a great opportunity to look at the referral process where we are constantly testing, learning and adapting.”
Cadigan said the company is now able to track a building – like Google maps – inside Salesforce. “We can click on a building/site and see who manages it, who owns it and how many parking space there are. I can also search how many assets are owned by a certain business and go through and see where they are in the sales process. Asset mapping has opened a huge road to success for us.”
Cadigan admitted that he was excited by the opportunity to access Salesforce’s AI capabilities – “and that is one of the main reasons why I am here”. “We really want to automate some basic processes so there is a no human touch approach. For example, we have three sites on St Kilda Road and all will be at 100% capacity. But what if someone has parked in your spot, we need to find them another parking space. This is currently done manually but to have it automated would save us many hours a week.”