Case studies · Real estate
Every lead in one pipeline, from portal enquiry to booking.
A residential developer with nine projects and sixty sales staff. Leads from portals, brokers and walk-ins sat in separate sheets, followed up from memory.
What was going wrong
A family enquires about a two-bedroom flat on a property portal on Saturday evening. The enquiry lands in a shared inbox. On Monday a salesperson sees it, or does not. The same family also called a broker, who has their details on a notepad, and walked into the site office on Sunday, where a third person wrote their name in a register. By Wednesday the developer has three records of one family and no idea they are the same people, and two salespeople have each rung them once.
Nine projects, three cities and sixty sales staff made that the normal condition rather than the exception. Every project had its own spreadsheet, every portal its own inbox, and every broker their own way of passing on a name. Whether a lead was followed up depended on which salesperson was diligent that week.
Management asked two questions every Monday and could not answer either honestly: how many enquiries came in last week, and what happened to them. The bookings were known, because money moves. Everything before the booking was anecdote.
What we built
One pipeline for every lead source. Portal enquiries arrive automatically, broker leads are entered against the broker who brought them, and walk-ins are recorded at the site office on a tablet. Duplicates are caught as they arrive, so the family who enquired three ways is one record with three sources on it rather than three families.
Every lead gets an owner the moment it lands, by a rule the sales heads agreed rather than by whoever was quickest. Follow-ups are assigned and reminded: the salesperson sees today’s calls when they open their phone, and a lead nobody has touched escalates rather than quietly dying. Nothing depends on remembering.
Visits and bookings sit on the same record as the first enquiry, so the path from portal click to site visit to booking is one story. Management opens a screen and sees the day: enquiries in, calls made, visits done, bookings taken, by project and by person. Broker performance stopped being a matter of opinion, because the leads each brought and what became of them are on the same page.
What the owner was left with
Every lead in one pipeline from enquiry to booking, with its source on it. Management sees the day’s visits and bookings without asking anyone to compile a sheet. The sales heads own the assignment rules and can change them without calling us, which matters, because those rules change with the season.
The training was the hard part and was treated as such: sixty salespeople, project by project, in their own site offices, with the screen kept to what a person can do between two phone calls. Adoption was one of the measures, not an afterthought, and the handover review reported it honestly, including the one project that took longest and why.
This is business systems work: nothing here needed a model, and we said so on the first call rather than after the invoice.
What changed, and by how much.
- Demand converted
Leads with a logged first response inside a day
45% changed to 96%
of every lead arriving from a portal, a broker or a walk-in
- Leakage closed
Leads that went cold with no follow-up logged
1 in 3 changed to 1 in 25
an enquiry that reached nobody and was never worked again
- Cash cycle
Site visit to booking paperwork
12 days changed to 5 days
from the visit a buyer decided on to a completed booking record
Each measure was agreed in writing before the build, and the starting number taken before it began. 45% → 96% is the same measure, counted the same way, after.