Tell Us Your Tales

1. Client Overview

  • Industry: Commercial real estate
  • Company size: 10-20
  • Existing tech stack: Salesforce, third-party document generation app

2. The Challenge

Problem Statement

  • The brokers were generating Confidentiality Agreements manually – they had to check first if the requesting party is in Salesforce or not and create a record if not, and only then generate a Confidentiality Agreement. The whole process was taking about 5 minutes per requesting party

Business Impact

  • Third-party document generation app was too expensive
  • Manual process meant brokers spent time generating agreements instead of making calls
  • Emails from requesting parties sometimes went to spam, leading to lost opportunities
  • Difficulty finding records in Salesforce led to duplicate Contacts for the same requesting party

Constraints

3. The Solution

Approach

  • A free document generation app was proposed. Initial tests proved that the free document generation app can replace the current document generation app
  • Scripts were developed to allow the web forms to send data to N8N

Tools & Platforms Used

  • N8N
  • Free document generation app
  • Salesforce

Architecture Summary

  • Website form sends data to N8N
  • N8N checks if the requesting party already exists in Salesforce. If it is then that record is used, but if not then an Account and a Contact record are created
  • A Marketing record gets created for that Listing and the requesting party
  • A Confidentiality Agreement gets generated for the requesting party for the specific Listing and gets delivered to the requesting party

Key Technical Decisions

  • Sometimes Salesforce might fail to deliver a Confidentiality Agreement. A retry mechanism is implemented in Salesforce to allow the brokers to resend the document to a requesting party
  • Upon submission the form notifies the requesting party to contact the brokerage in case the Confidentiality Agreement is not delivered within 5 minutes
  • If the requesting party is related to more than one Company the requesting party’s Contact record gets connected to all its Companies without creating a duplicate record 

4. Results

Quantified Outcomes

  • 5 minutes per Confidentiality Agreement are saved
  • Saved around 4000 USD/year by using a free document generation app

5. Why It Matters

  • This pattern – check-or-create in Salesforce, then auto-generate and deliver a document – can be applied to any document-heavy process in real estate brokerages, such as disclosure forms or signing agreements 

6. Next Steps