KLAS GROUP: Veteran real estate firm goes digital.

The Background

Under Israel Lev's leadership, the LYO Group has emerged as one of Israel's most prominent real estate companies. During the past decade, it has established itself as a national powerhouse in the Israeli real estate industry, especially in the greater Jerusalem area. Established in 2003, LYO has been integral to numerous large-scale projects for prominent Israeli real estate developers.

Given the company's success and the growth of the real estate business in the greater Jerusalem area, KLAS Group's management knew they needed to incorporate information technology to keep up with the expansion and even thrive in it.

The Challenge

For the past twenty years, LYO Group has successfully run its business using a combination of manual and Personal computer-based processes.

To help the company grow quickly, they needed a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system to efficiently handle new leads and guide them to the sales team. Additional tools would enable sales personnel to manage more prospects with enhanced efficiency, ensuring each potential buyer receives the individualized attention they merit. This CRM system could also oversee marketing activities internally, utilizing all data generated throughout the marketing and sales processes.

It would also help track customer interactions and deliver critical data for future marketing campaigns.

The Solution

Introducing a dynamic and user-friendly marketing and sales platform like HubSpot to an organization that hasn’t yet embraced a central information system can be an exciting challenge!

To set up HubSpot in a way that genuinely meets the needs of the KLAS Group, we first took the time to understand their experiences with the current setup. We needed to grasp the management’s goals—those key metrics they use to gauge the success of their operations. Additionally, we wanted to learn about how the incredible team at the company goes about their daily tasks. By understanding all this, we could tailor HubSpot’s CRM, marketing, and sales tools to support their activities seamlessly.

This journey unfolded through several thoughtful iterations. Each step involved engaging with the individuals participating and carefully gathering their insights to create a clear set of process steps and actions. We invited their feedback and confirmed our understanding before tailoring HubSpot’s configuration to align with everyone’s needs.

The gradual, iterative approach simplified the users' learning process. As they worked with the system over time, we discovered ways to adjust it to suit their needs better, often trying different ideas to find the best way to support their activities.

Our Accomplishments

Sales

• The initial focus was on creating an agreed-upon sales process and configuring HubSpot to support that process as frictionless as possible. As most members of the sales team were new to the company, it was a gradual process, guided by the sales manager. Eventually together we developed a process that melded the strengths of the sales representatives while empowering them with the powerful support tools of HubSpot.
• The agency encountered a challenge in utilizing HubSpot due to the actuality of a two-way business model, which encompassed both B2B and B2C. Clients of the agency were developers who engaged the agency's services to promote and sell their housing projects. Conversely, the agency actively pursued potential homeowners and successfully concluded transactions with them. Creative structuring of the Contact and Company databases was necessary to substantiate this actuality.
• One final concern was the manner in which HubSpot manages its "products" catalog. The Products list comprises templates that HubSpot implements to generate duplicates in the Deal records. This implied that we were unable to modify the status of a specific property in the catalog, whether it had been sold or not, through automation. In 2024, HubSpot resolved this issue by introducing an optional 'Listing' object.

Marketing

• The KLAS Group started doing more and more of the promotion of the projects they sold in-house; in the middle of 2024, it added the HubSpot promoting Hub Professional to its platform. Over the next few months, we taught and coached the marketing team how to use the HubSpot Marketing Hub to keep track of and analyze how well their marketing campaigns were working. 

Management

• Once the sales team, followed by the marketing team, began utilizing HubSpot proficiently, it enabled the generation of insightful reports on sales and marketing activities.

• Just as crucial as the reports for KLAS Group’s management team were the reports for their clients, the housing developers, showcasing the success of their efforts. By offering developers automated reports sent directly to their inboxes and granting them access to relevant data within HubSpot, KLAS Group delivered an enhanced level of service to their customers.

Key Takeaways

• Without the in-depth investigation and documentation of the existing business processes, no amount of changes to the HubSpot CRM hubs would have achieved the same success.
• Ultimately, the involvement of all the stakeholders and direct users in this learning and planning process directly contributed to its ultimate success.
• Despite the initial challenges of configuring HubSpot to support a two sided real estate business model, HubSpot's flexible configurability enabled us to meet the client's needs to everyone's satisfaction.