Success Story
Enabling Colliers to Unify B2B Marketing in 12 Regions
We enabled Colliers to unify CXM efforts across 12 markets with an integrated, compliant, and scalable B2B marketing automation solution powered by Marketo.
Industry
Real estate
Date delivered
July 2025
Length of project
15 months
Solution provided
Understand Customers as Individuals, Deliver Personalised CX at Scale, Connect Customer Journeys Across Channels, Measure Incrementality & Effectiveness, Manage Efficient Operations
Technology
Marketo Engage, Marketo Measure, Custom Development
The Project
$108B in assets under management. 24k professionals in 70 countries. Colliers is a household name in commercial real estate. It’s a diverse business that’s grown through 125 years of acquisitions and expansion. Boldness and diversity are key to Colliers’ resilience. But they also challenge the company’s CXM strategy. Especially in Europe, where a disconnected approach was affecting B2B marketing performance.
The Challenge
Colliers’ European marketing was fragmented across 6 different email marketing platforms across 12 major markets, resulting in:
- Disjointed Martech: Multiple platforms created compliance risks and data silos.
- Operational inefficiency: High costs, lack of standardised workflows, and low platform usage.
- Limited personalisation: Inconsistent messaging and no preference management.
- Growth Constraints: Legacy systems hindered automation and scalability.
The individual systems also slowed growth. They prevented Colliers from leveraging the latest martech developments like automation and AI, and didn’t have the capacity to scale.
When we joined the project, Colliers had selected Marketo Engage to unify marketing operations. Our role was to align Marketo’s capabilities with Colliers’ growth pillars and architect a scalable solution. Without compromising compliance, performance or data quality.
- Phase 1: Assessed market-specific needs and designed a scalable architecture.
- Phase 2: Implemented a single Marketo instance, integrated with local Salesforce CRMs, ensuring personalised marketing and GDPR compliance.
Under the unified setup, a new Centre of Excellence houses best practices, templates, and resources. We also designed custom CRM integrations, bespoke consent solutions, and a middleware solution for data to flow between Marketo, Salesforce, and Colliers.com, while pulling from digital touchpoints.
This project serves as a blueprint for future initiatives, setting a standard for how we approach digital transformation across our organisation. By streamlining processes and consolidating platforms, we’re not only increasing our competitiveness and operational efficiency, but also ensuring that our audiences receive relevant, personalised, and seamless experiences at every touchpoint. The learnings and best practices from this project will guide our teams as we continue to innovate and adapt to market changes, while delivering an enhanced experience to our clients, and opportunities to our client facing teams.
Silvia Zanfrini, EMEA Head of Digital Marketing, Colliers
- Unified platform: Reduced from 6 to 1, covering major European markets.
- Compliance: Standardised GDPR processes with a central consent program.
- Performance visibility: Improved tracking and optimisation across the funnel.
