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CBH Homes’ sales agents save 2 hours
a day with Drag

Here’s how they unified sales teams to delegate tasks and cut down on hundreds of emails to individual team member inboxes.

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COMPANY
CBH Homes

INDUSTRY
Real Estate

COMPANY SIZE
11-50 employees

LOCATION
United States

90% less emails

landing in each team member individual inbox.

2 hours

saved per agent per day.

Fast and easy

delegation of incoming tasks
and questions.

The context

Founded 28 years ago, CBH Homes is Idaho’s # 1 Home Builder. They are dedicated to turning their customers into raving fans by doing all they can to make the buying process simple, pleasant, and fun.

The sales team at CBH Homes is composed of achievers who handle a high volume of buyers in a very fast-paced environment, needing to manage up to 600 emails a day!

Their team is structured into three sales centers divided by area around the valley. Each individual makes their own sales but is often on the go in the field touring homes, so it’s important for all team members to be familiar with buyers in their area to be able to answer any questions they may have.

Most of their communication with buyers and outside realtors relies primarily on email. Frequently meeting outside of the office makes it even harder for them to coordinate all of the incoming inquiries and ensure consistency across the board.

The challenge

Before Drag, the CBH Homes team was managing their emails and workflows via a series of Google Groups, each one with five to seven team members. However, this setup had several challenges:

First, all group members were receiving all emails in their individual inboxes. This means that each enquiry or question received from a buyer or realtor was literally loading in Gmail 7 times! This was cluttering the agents’ inboxes, and making it harder for them to identify which enquiries were their responsibility.

Besides the noise around tasks assignments, the sales agents were spending a lot of time going through the enquiries and getting rid of redundant information in their inboxes. This was consuming valuable time that they should be using to sell more.

Finally, with spread and duplicated information across different inboxes, it was becoming very challenging for the management team to understand the status of enquiries and tasks.

As heavy Gmail users, they have tried to leverage Gmail labels as a way to organize incoming emails. The labels were used to identify who was working on what and the level of completion of certain tasks.

However, it did not work because each individual still had their own inbox and it was hard to create consistency across teams. One team member may have a certain label on in an email in their inbox but another team member may have another tag. And if one teammate updates an item as “Complete” in their inbox, that’s not reflected to the team and they would still have to send an additional email communicating its completion.

Then they realized they needed a solution that was more fit-for-purpose for their needs: a solution that would allow them to work collaboratively on incoming enquiries and easily assign work across sales agents while helping management to understand the status of their teams’ tasks. Then they started hunting for new solutions.

Drag is the workflow extension of my dreams, bringing together Gmail + Trello to create organizational magic!

Madison Ingraham
Data Admin & IT @ CBH Homes

The solution

Madison Ingraham, Data Admin & IT at CBH Homes, found Drag and immediately fell in love with it. Merging a visual kanban layout, collaborative shared inbox, clear assignments of tasks, and no duplication of emails, while working directly inside Gmail, which their team uses to communicate with external stakeholders the most, Drag seemed to be the perfect solution!

They first started implementing Drag for their sales workflow. Since the implementation, their sales agents immediately started saving at least 2 hours a day, while management gained more visibility on what is going on in their pipeline.

The use case

They have integrated their Google Groups to Drag boards, so incoming inquiries arriving in each Sales department now go into 1 single centralized place instead of all the individuals’ inboxes. This way, they can work with only 1 version of each email, and agents don’t need to spend a lot of time going through redundant information.

The assignment of tasks is also much clearer, and so is the status of tasks. Each task is clearly assigned to a team member and has a clear tag. They use Drag boards in kanban view and their sales boards are typically broken down by columns for the type of email or task, like “Showings” for when an outside realtor shows one of our homes and “NHO Scheduling” for when our teams need to schedule the New Home Orientation with the buyer. Some teams also have decided to give each teammate their own column to function as a task list.

The internal chat option is also a huge time saver for the teams. It allows them to quickly and easily get guidance on how to handle certain situations and they also use it to identify who has seen an informational email before archiving it.

Due dates are also extremely helpful and the teams love that it automatically adds it to their calendars to help them stay organized and on top of their task list.

The experiment with the Sales Team went so well that the CBH Homes team has decided to implement Drag for their Construction Services Team as well. And, interestingly, the Construction Services Team use case is slightly different. Instead of Google Groups, they use Shared Inboxes to manage a number of stakeholders and workflows, including communication with trade partners, constructions permitting, purchase order issuance, or even accounting.

“It’s really nice to have a universal and scalable solution that can bring consistency across different teams in our organization!”, says Madison.

Drag has completely changed the way our team uses our Email, eliminating double work, emails getting missed and creating LESS emails for everyone! We LOVE Drag!

Troy Parquer
Senior Transaction Coordinator @ CBH Homes

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