Leobit
Commercial Real Estate CRM
Enhancing the functionality and competitiveness of the legacy CRM system through advanced integrations
ABOUT the project
- Client:
- ClientLook
- Location:
-
USA
|California
- Company Size:
- 50+ Employees
- Industry:
- Real Estate
- Solution:
- Web App
Leobit helped a customer enhance their commercial real estate CRM to gain a competitive edge in the proptech sector. They recognized the pivotal role of email marketing for commercial real estate (CRE) professionals and aimed to establish integrations with top marketing automation platforms.
The system, though, wasn’t ready to handle new features, so Leobit stepped in and helped ClientLook enhance CRM performance. Our team successfully made minor system improvements, revamped various third-party integrations and in-house email solutions, and performed seamless integrations with Mailchimp, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and HubSpot.
These improvements and integrations enabled commercial real estate CRM users to create campaigns, manage distribution lists, send emails, run efficient analytical workflows, and identify prospects without switching between multiple tools.
The biggest challenge lay in addressing unscalable legacy code and an outdated architecture. By undertaking minimal refactoring efforts, we were able to substantially enhance the overall system performance and successfully accomplish the two-way integration with HubSpot and Mailchimp, as well as enhance the solution through the integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
CUSTOMER
ClientLook is an American company that provides customer management software to commercial real estate (CRE) brokers and brokerage firms. The company operates across all USA states, serving over 10,000 CRE professionals involved in buying, selling, leasing, and investing in commercial real estate.
ClientLook’s commercial real estate CRM platform combines contact management, deal tracking, corporate social networking, and client collaboration with a property module to help users keep and manage all their deals under one roof.
In 2020, ClientLook was acquired by LightBox, a real estate information and technology platform that delivers end-to-end broker solutions.
BUSINESSCHALLENGE
The customer’s commercial real estate CRM had a monolithic architecture and required substantial improvements. Yet, due to time and budget constraints, ClientLook rejected Leobit’s code refactoring suggestions and wanted us to do minimal system enhancements and proceed with the development of new features.
To keep the legacy system up and running, the Leobit team came up with the idea to slightly reorganize existing interaction points and wrap up legacy code into a separate unit. It allowed building upcoming features on top of existing ones without high dependency on existing architecture and required only minimal refactoring efforts.
WhyLeobit
The client opted to seek a new vendor after their prior outsourcing partner delivered a subpar codebase and exhausted the project budget. They selected Leobit due to the vast company’s experience in proptech software development, specialization in .NET and other solutions from the Microsoft tech stack, and extensive expertise in modernizing legacy solutions.
Project
in detail
Before commencing the project, our experts conducted a thorough code review. Given the client’s limited budget, our team focused on making minor system enhancements and began the implementation of new features.
The uploading of a substantial dataset for processing strained the system, causing a notable decline in performance. In response, the Leobit team integrated the Hangfire open-source library, allowing us to move time-consuming and resource-intensive tasks out of the main application flow. This improvement significantly enhanced the overall performance and responsiveness of the CRM, offloaded time-consuming tasks, and ensured reliable background processing.
The poor-performing integration of multiple email service providers had a detrimental impact on the integrity and transparency of email-related processes. To address this issue, Leobit conducted a thorough investigation and subsequently migrated to the Mailchimp and HubSpot email marketing services. This transition delivered the utmost simplicity and stability for all email-related features. To ensure more efficient data synchronization across business workflows and offer the customer an efficient interface for analytics, we integrated the platform with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Errors made by the previous development team during data backups led to the database’s size growing to approximately 200 GB. The considerable data load necessary for specific actions adversely impacted server response times, significantly hindering overall performance. Our team enhanced the customer’s database by eliminating redundant space, resulting in a fourfold reduction in data file size.
Our experts categorized the data into separate buckets and extracted the non-SQL-friendly data to separate dedicated storage. This structure facilitated the use of specialized data processing services for each data type, leading to a substantial improvement in data analysis efficiency.
HubSpot Integration
Our technical experts developed an algorithm to seamlessly synchronize data entries with HubSpot, empowering CRM clients to efficiently manage and update user data across both systems.
With this integration in place, CRM clients can now easily transfer contacts to HubSpot and access their email campaign activity within ClientLook. This has been instrumental in eliminating duplicate entries and ensuring instant access to all the necessary information.
Mailchimp Integration
Following the Mailchimp integration, real estate representatives gained the capability to easily segment their extensive contact lists into smaller, manageable groups and seamlessly synchronize them with Mailchimp.
This streamlined process allows CRM clients to effortlessly launch campaigns to specific groups via Mailchimp without the need for manual data entry or the repetitive import/export of contacts.
Campaign Analytics Dashboard Integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365
Leobit developers enriched the customer’s commercial real estate CRM with valuable insights that enhance the effectiveness of every interaction with both prospects and existing clients. Thanks to the user-friendly dashboard our team added to the CRM software, users can easily access and view real-time statistics for every email marketing campaign. The dashboard was further enhanced through Microsoft Dynamics 365 integration. This suite ensured efficient unification of data on email campaign performance, sales pipeline metrics, deal metrics, deal values, and financial outcomes, ensuring greater consistency and precision of the customer’s analytical workflows.
With such functionality, real estate agents can monitor the number of email recipients, engagement levels, bounce rates, and unsubscribe counts to ensure more efficient strategic planning.
Technology Solutions
- Performing two-way custom HubSpot and Mailchimp integration.
- Improved data consistency and analytics through the integration with Microsoft Dynamics 365.
- Allocating separate on-demand computing services to handle background work in a scheduled and predicted manner.
- The use of the specifically designed data processing service per each data type to greatly optimize data analysis.
- Organizing information into separate data buckets and segregating non-SQL-friendly data into dedicated storage to significantly improve data analysis efficiency.
Value Delivered
- Powerful email marketing thanks to two-way integration with Mailchimp and HubSpot.
- Improved visibility into prospects thanks to the ability to configure full email campaign reports with engagement statistics and improved data consistency through the integration with Dynamics 365.
- 60% reduction of manual efforts thanks to adopting process automation.
- Effective pipeline management and thorough tracking of each transaction stage to drive the completion of deals.
- Skyrocketed prospecting success by eliminating duplicates and making every required piece of information instantly accessible.
