From spreadsheet chaos to automated success: AZ Real Estate's journey with a CRM

The company

Founded by Alisa Zottomova in 2012, AZ Real Estate brings over 13 years of market experience to the London property scene. Though the team is lean, it's incredibly strong and focused. AZ Real Estate is a boutique agency that helps clients sell or find their perfect homes or investments in prime central London. Their mission? Simply put: turning dreams into reality. What really sets them apart is their unique blend of skills, personalized service, deep experience, and value-driven approach. They handle every aspect of every project from A to Z—which is the inspiration behind the company's name!

The challenge

Like many business owners, Alisa was juggling her growing company with whatever tools she could get her hands on; mainly Trello and spreadsheets. It worked for a while, but quickly became messy and inefficient. After watching money and time disappear into failed applications, Alisa knew she needed help. That's when she reached out to a consultant to find a proper CRM that could actually handle the demands of a real estate business.

The solution

Back in 2021, Alisa brought in Bigin to help the team deliver the best results for AZ Real Estate. Her non-negotiables? It had to be easy to use and not break the bank. The consultant she hired picked Bigin, and what really impressed Alisa was Bigin's ready-made real estate template and how flexible the CRM was to customize. That made Bigin stand out and got the green light from Alisa. 

The first thing AZ Real Estate's team did was incorporate all their existing contacts from Mailchimp, which they'd been using for newsletters. All contacts added to Bigin are organized into the correct Mailchimp audiences based on their types, and then segmented by their language spoken and contact type (client or partner or real estate agent). They then use Mailchimp to target and send different types of emails to different audiences. 

The company's main sales pipeline is pretty straightforward, with stages related to pitching, site visits, contract signatures, memo signatures, completed deals, and closed lost deals. It also has two "pause" stages: "live hold" and "long hold" for clients who aren't ready yet but might be sometime down the line. 

They also use another pipeline for partners. Alisa's agents refer business to partners and solicitors, who then pitch their services to clients and loop back to AZ Real Estate, which adds up to the company’s revenue stream. 

Automations are a big help here in ensuring leads aren't left hanging. As soon as a lead hits the pipeline, the team member who owns the deal is automatically assigned with a serious of consecutive tasks to complete. Plus, the team has integrated its Gmail account with Bigin, so emails flow back and forth without any hindrance. 

Dashboards keep everything visible so AZ Real Estate's leadership can track revenue and help the team identify where they need to step up their game.

Benefits and ROI

According to Alisa, the main goal was to work smarter, not harder, and Bigin has totally delivered. She's seen a real jump in how productive everyone is. Now, when new members come on board, getting trained on Bigin is the first thing they do.

Looking forward

Alisa and her team are excited about rolling out Bigin's WhatsApp integration, as they already have a business account set up.

Alisa is also launching an entirely new brand called AZ Alliance that will enable independent brokers to work under her umbrella—and guess what's going to power the entire operation? Bigin.