Salesforce CRM implementation for a real estate company

Itransition implemented and configured the Salesforce CRM solution to help a real estate company improve its sales workflows and foster collaboration with tenants.

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Salesforce CRM implementation for a real estate company

Context

Our customer, Bruntwood, is one of the largest commercial property management companies in the UK, offering virtual, serviced, managed and leased offices, coworking spaces, retail spaces, and meeting rooms. The company has more than £1bn in assets and owns more than 100 landmark properties that span 2.1 million square feet along with 7,000 managed car parking spaces. Bruntwood has a £1.4bn development pipeline and a team of 800 people.

Prior to approaching Itransition, the customer was using several outdated systems that their employees were using rarely for the following reasons:

The systems were disintegrated, hard to scale, and falling short of the company’s needs, particularly related to the business growth.
The technologies in use required a lot of time-consuming manual work.
Business intelligence could only be accessed through labor-intensive methods ridden with human errors.
Overall data quality was low, so the company couldn’t leverage the software for decision-making.

Bruntwood aimed at following the client-first approach, yet poor data and inefficient processes forced them to move their focus away from their clients to solve the software issues.

Therefore, they decided to create an enterprise CRM solution from scratch. The customer opted for the Salesforce platform since it met all their business requirements. The platform was to automate existing business processes and become a convenient collaboration tool for the employees, real estate agents, and tenants. The customer chose Itransition for this Salesforce implementation owing to our Salesforce expertise and a proven track record of projects for the real estate sector.

Solution

Itransition analyzed the customer’s requirements and business workflows and carried out end-to-end Salesforce CRM implementation, configuration, and customization, using the built-in Salesforce features and creating custom pages and business logic. We also tuned the Salesforce CPQ package and integrated such systems as DocuSign, SMS Magic, and CheckFront.

The newly configured functionality covered the company’s entire sales continuum and cooperation workflow with tenants, enabling Bruntwood to improve the sales cycle and get a 360-degree view of their customers. The solution allowed the company to automate such processes as:

Lead qualification and management
Opportunity tracking and management
Scheduling of property visits
Asset management
Creation of reminders, milestones, and appointments
Preliminary price calculation and creation of detailed commercial offerings
Contract management and signature processing
Generation of new quotes based on a client’s aggregated contract history
Case management during contract approval
Tenant onboarding and fit-out management
Customer experience management

Itransition customized Salesforce CPQ, enabling the customer to track leads and automatically create opportunities based on the lead status. We created a set of reminders for sales managers and automated task management.

Our team also implemented a custom logic for quote generation and contract management. We created customizable templates enabling the customer to quickly edit quotes and automatically calculate prices and discounts. When the quote is approved, the system generates a contract by putting together all the necessary data. Commercial and sales data gathered within the system is automatically transferred to the accounting system for tracking and processing invoices.

Besides, we implemented real-time reporting. It enabled the customer to make informed decisions by relying on automatically generated reports on property availability, fixed assets disposal, live contracts, upcoming lease closure, sales agent KPIs, and more. All reports can be sorted by specific parameters, for example, by their contract status, contractor, date, etc.

We also applied Power BI with integrated AI features to help Bruntwood’s in-house analysts predict trends and customer behavior.

Integration

Apart from the Salesforce CRM implementation, our team integrated the solution with third-party systems, including:

FinancialForce to process invoices
DocuSign to sign digital documents
SpringCM to manage document and contract lifecycles
GetFeedback to collect customers’ feedback after their interaction with the agents
SMS Magic to create and send reminders via SMS
CheckFront to book meeting rooms online

Process

We followed the Agile methodology with two-week sprints and daily meetings with the customer. Our team provided a large set of user stories documented using the Confluence collaboration platform.

To ensure a stable, predictable and repeatable delivery process during the project, we applied continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) practices coupled with continuous code review and quality assurance. This way, all changes could be stored in the source control and, after the code review, be automatically deployed with the Jenkins-based CI. This approach is optimal for rapid development and allows multiple developers to work simultaneously, ensuring frictionless releases.

Additionally, we involved our own QA team that implemented automated tests and delivered resilience testing so that the solution performed well in real life. The team also carried out user acceptance testing to validate the solution’s features.

Our team partnered with the customer’s technology consultants at the user adoption stage to ensure a seamless transition from the old system to the new one. We contributed to developing the Salesforce adoption strategy, which helped the company’s employees to better understand the new system and leverage its features. As a result, the new CRM was adopted successfully.

Results

Itransition provided the Salesforce CRM implementation to automate Bruntwood’s business processes and workflows, from lead and opportunity management to quote generation and contract management.

The delivered solution allowed Bruntwood to benefit from:

The sales cycle shortened from 20 weeks to 18 (a 10% improvement)
The time required for preparing board papers reduced by 60%
The conversion rates increased by 15%

The solution also brought the following advantages:

Accurate real-time data. The implemented Power BI with its AI features combined with automated reporting allowed Bruntwood to predict customer behavior and make informed decisions.
Reduced costs. The system helped the company shorten the sales cycle and reduce the costs associated with unoccupied real estate (for example, heating, cleaning, service management, etc.).
Centralized business process management. The delivered solution replaced the previous disparate systems, enabling Bruntwood to manage all their assets in one place. It also improved cross-business unit collaboration, so that all the teams could easily access any information they needed.
Streamlined invoice processing. We performed integration with FinancialForce to facilitate billing and invoice tracking.
Reduced manual work. The system allowed the company to reduce the time that employees spent on adding new data manually and minimized the risk of human errors.
Better scalability. The Salesforce cloud-computing model enabled Bruntwood to scale quickly and handle the increased volumes of data painlessly.