How Lamacchia Realty Enhanced the Lead Assignment Process with Salesforce
Discover how Lamacchia Realty worked with LaunchPad Lab to re-architect the existing system to deliver a more reliable, efficient, and faster lead assignment experience.
A Closer Look at Lamacchia Realty
Lamacchia Realty is a top-rated, fast-growing, privately owned Real Estate Brokerage in New England and Florida, providing expert services for buyers, sellers, and renters alike. Over the past 13 years, they have grown rapidly to where they now have close to 500 realtors and multiple inside sales staff.
The Challenge: Addressing Issues From An Inefficient, Slow Lead Assignment System
The size of Lamacchia Realty’s database in conjunction with the complex set of business rules and ever-growing list of agents caused them to hit limitations with their existing sync architecture.
The company’s existing lead assignment system was inefficient and unreliable. Leads came in through Salesforce, which synced out to AWS where the business logic was applied, and then returned to Salesforce, all through API calls. This led to a slow process vulnerable to timeouts, rate limitations, and data inaccuracies.
The Approach: Building a Reliable and Faster Lead Assignment System
The Lamacchia Realty team had the vision to continue working with Salesforce but outsource the lead assignment logic off-platform. Overall, the goal was to build a more reliable and faster lead assignment system to provide a real-time solution that determines the proper lead owner since they have multiple offices in different areas and various marketing efforts from which leads can come in.
After a rigorous search, the company chose LaunchPad Lab as their digital product agency partner for this project. It was essential to the organization that they chose a partner that was willing to take the time to fully understand the concerns of the challenge at hand as well as collaborate throughout each stage of the project to build confidence in the process and the solution.
Rewriting the Business Logic
Lamacchia provided a detailed flowchart of the current business logic. After preliminary scoping, the LaunchPad Lab team spent considerable time up-front reviewing the complex web of business logic with John Remby, Lamacchia Realty’s Director of Business Systems, and the rest of the team to fully understand the current system and the issues the company faced.
With a clear understanding, the decision was made to rebuild the code using Ruby on Rails, making the updates needed – with the two teams working closely together to ensure everything went according to plan.
Real-Time Testing and Verification
To inform the design, a diagram reflected new updates to the logic with clear direction on how to encapsulate it in code. This diagram was used to align the teams, demonstrate understanding of the complex logic, and validate the approach.
In addition, strong emphasis was placed on automated tests with high code coverage. This would help quickly verify that the correct logic was being infused before the project was ready to launch.
Utilizing Postgres Triggers to Filter Leads
Utilizing Postgres triggers would enhance the capabilities of Heroku Connect. While Heroku Connect helps to integrate the custom app with Salesforce data, it didn’t allow for discernment amongst data records. The triggers gave the ability to write some logic that could filter specific types of leads through the logic and ignore other leads.
Vetting the Speed and Efficiency
With speed being such a big focus for this project, it was essential that everything ran quickly and efficiently. To do so, the strategy included a speed plan with benchmarking tools. Once that was in place, speed tests were run, beginning with an entry in Salesforce and capturing timestamps of when it came back to and was assigned in Salesforce.
Additionally, comprehensive custom logs were introduced for every step of the lead assignment process. This provided the ability to see all the intermediate steps to catch any slowdowns in Heroku Connect, the custom app, or elsewhere, and address as needed.
Client QA Process
To help build trust and confidence, the two teams worked closely to test out a multitude of scenarios identified and ensure the logic worked seamlessly. The team adjustments wherever necessary until all inputs resulted in the proper outcomes.
The Solution: Creating a Fast, Efficient System for Lead Assignments
The LaunchPad Lab team proposed leveraging Heroku Connect for a bi-directional sync between Salesforce and a Postgres database on a Heroku app. The combination would improve the speed and reliability of the synchronization of data from Salesforce and avoid data limitations.
With Heroku Connect in place, the could then focus on developing an “invisible app” (i.e., no user interface) to encapsulate the custom lead assignment logic operating behind the scenes.
The Architecture
Since Lamacchia Realty wanted to continue utilizing Salesforce for parts of this core business process of lead assignments, we chose this specific tech stack to build their invisible app:
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Heroku
Heroku is the application hosting platform we chose to host the Heroku Connect and our Ruby on Rails app. Heroku allowed us to quickly spin up a reliable hosting environment with scaling capabilities that provided Lamacchia Realty with better control over their lead assignment system.
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Heroku Connect
Our LaunchPad Lab team chose Heroku Connect, Heroku’s Salesforce integration, as the main architecture to seamlessly connect Heroku and Salesforce efficiently and reliably.
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Ruby on Rails
We chose Ruby on Rails as the language of choice to rewrite Lamacchia Realty’s existing business logic so that it could be optimized for Heroku’s platform.
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PostgreSQL Database & Triggers
Heroku Connect could handle a lot of the data flows, but we needed a way to filter specific leads from the rest to send through to the lead assignment logic. We implemented PostgreSQL triggers, which allowed us to add our custom logic and filter leads as needed before they entered the lead assignment flow.
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Salesforce CRM
Our Heroku app development team worked closely with the Salesforce CRM to ensure that our Heroku app was properly integrated into the client’s instance and that all data was accurately synced.
The Results: Delivering ROI with a Streamlined Lead Assignment System
The Heroku app development project allowed Lamacchia to maintain their complex lead assignment process while still running the core of their business on the Salesforce platform and no longer being subject to the platform’s limits for larger data volumes.
Prior to the new process, the company had daily leads coming in and being assigned erroneously—resulting in a lot of hands-on involvement and intervention from their inside sales staff to ensure accurate assignment. Those errors went away overnight in a seamless rollout that offered abundant peace of mind. With confidence that this highly pivotal aspect of the business was working flawlessly, the team was then able to focus on other key areas of the business.
After successfully launching, the Lamacchia Realty team began work on a similar project for one of their smaller lead flows. Leveraging the new system enabled a seamlessly integration for the new flow, to continue optimizing the lead assignment system.
If your business is facing similar challenges as Lamacchia Realty, schedule a free discovery call with our digital product agency today to discuss a solution that is right for you!
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