Enhancing Lamacchia’s Lead Assignment Process & Data Sync With Salesforce
To ensure a more reliable and faster lead assignment system, Lamacchia Realty turned to LaunchPad Lab, a Salesforce partner with extensive experience in Heroku app development, to re-architect their existing system to help achieve the speed needed to ensure leads got assigned quickly and efficiently.
The Client
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
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.
Lamacchia Realty’s existing lead assignment system was inefficient and unreliable as it consisted of the leads coming in through Salesforce, which then 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 Vision
The Lamacchia Realty team had the vision to keep 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.
Choosing a Collaborative Partner
After a rigorous search, Lamacchia Realty chose LaunchPad Lab as their digital product agency partner for this project. It was essential to the Lamacchia Realty team 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.
The Solution
The solution our LaunchPad Lab team proposed was to leverage Heroku Connect for a bi-directional sync between Salesforce and a Postgres database on a Heroku app. With this solution, we could improve the speed and reliability of the synchronization of data from Salesforce and avoid data limitations.
With Heroku Connect in place, the LaunchPad Lab team could then focus on developing an “invisible app” (i.e., no user interface) to encapsulate the custom lead assignment logic operating behind the scenes.
Our Approach
Rewriting the Business Logic
Lamacchia provided our team with a detailed flowchart of the current business logic. After preliminary scoping, our team spent considerable time up-front to go through 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 they were facing within it.
Once we had that understanding, we began rebuilding the code using Ruby on Rails, making the updates needed, and working closely with the Lamacchia Realty team to ensure everything went according to plan.
Real-Time Testing and Verification
Through high collaboration with John and his team, we were able to develop a diagram that reflected new updates to the logic as well as how we encapsulated it in code. This allowed us to demonstrate our understanding of the complex logic and receive real-time validation.
In addition, we placed a strong emphasis on automated tests with high code coverage. This allowed us to quickly verify that we were writing the correct logic long before the project was ready to launch.
Utilizing Postgres Triggers to Filter Leads
By utilizing Postgres triggers, we were able to enhance the capabilities of Heroku Connect in a unique way for Lamacchia Realty. While Heroku Connect helps to integrate our custom app with Salesforce data, it doesn’t allow for discernment amongst data records. The triggers gave us the ability to write some logic where we could filter specific types of leads to put through the logic and ignore other leads.
Vetting the Speed and Efficiency
With speed being such a big focus for this project, we wanted to ensure that everything ran quickly and efficiently. To do so, our LaunchPad Lab team created a speed plan with different benchmarking tools. Once that was in place, we ran speed tests that began with an entry in Salesforce and captured timestamps of when it came back to and assigned in Salesforce.
Additionally, the LaunchPad team introduced comprehensive custom logging for every step of the lead assignment process. This provided our team the ability to see all the intermediate steps as well so that we were able to catch any slowdowns in Heroku Connect, our custom app, or elsewhere, and address them as appropriate.
Client QA Process
To help build trust and confidence with the client, we worked with John to test out a multitude of scenarios he identified, to ensure the logic worked seamlessly. The team made adjustments wherever necessary until all inputs resulted in the proper outcomes.
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.
Expanding the Project Scope
While the initial scope for the Lamacchia Realty project included rebuilding logic for one core lead flow within the lead assignment process they rely heavily upon, they have other types of leads and lead flows that require different logic and processes.
After successfully launching the initial scope, the Lamacchia Realty team came back to us asking what it would take to complete a similar project for one of their smaller lead flows. Our LaunchPad Lab team was able to easily take the system we had created for the initial scope and seamlessly integrate this new flow, to continue optimizing their lead assignment system.
The Outcome and Results
The Heroku app development project we completed with Lamacchia Realty allowed them 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, Lamacchia Realty 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 their business was working flawlessly, the team at Lamacchia Realty was then able to focus on other key areas of the business.
Partner With LaunchPad Lab Today
Our LaunchPad Lab team is proud to have been able to partner with Lamacchia Realty to help optimize this core business process. 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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