Sunflower Home Buyers Saves Hours on Reporting

Introduction

Kyle Eisenbarger, CTO and Owner at Sunflower Home Buyers, has spent years building the Kansas City real estate company's data foundation inside Podio, structuring it from the start like a relational database (a database, that organizes data into rows and columns that form a table consisting of data points that relate to each other) so it could one day support real reporting. For years, that structure sat unused, because the team had no way to see what it held.

Pairing Podio with Plecto's real-time dashboards changed that: Kyle and his team now track every acquisitions rep, inside sales agent, and marketing channel individually, and use that data to reverse-engineer what it actually takes for a rep to hit a specific income goal. Daily activity, once invisible, is now visible enough to gamify, coach, and pay people against.

The Challenge

Sunflower Home Buyers started the way most small real estate teams do: one person, Joseph Ientile, Co-Owner, running sales out of his head, with no structured way to track leads or follow-ups. Kyle remembers those early days clearly.

"Joe's always had a background in sales, but it was always very much just him on his own, kind of flying by the seat of his pants," Kyle says. "For the first probably year and a half, there really wasn't a lot of process or workflow."

Podio gave the team its first shared home for that information, and it grew with them as they hired their first employees. But Podio's flexibility comes with a learning curve. Kyle, who came from a software engineering background, found the platform's logic familiar but its specific quirks demanding.

"As anyone who's deep into Podio knows, it's very particular, and there are workarounds, and things you have to know to make it good, because it's a fairly old system. If you didn't know the little quirks and gotchas, it was very overwhelming."

To close that gap, Kyle worked directly with a Podio partner for nearly two years, learning the platform hands-on over shared online sessions until he could build and maintain it himself.

"We essentially pair-programmed, where he would drive and share his screen and teach me everything he was doing. I just absorbed everything and learned the system over two years, until eventually I was confident to do 80 percent of everything myself," he recalls.

By the time Kyle had that command of Podio, Sunflower had a well-structured data foundation, built like a relational database, with records connected in a way that could eventually be reported on. What the company didn't yet have was a way to see any of it.

"We didn't know we needed (this data). We'd never done this before," Kyle says. It's kind of crazy to think about now, because we live in dashboards."

Kyle noticed other companies in his industry running Plecto dashboards on screens in the background of their YouTube and Facebook videos, and was immediately hooked. He remembered the exact moment that happened: "Yep, I can remember distinctly one guy out of Las Vegas that was posting (on Youtube or Facebook), and I could see his dashboards, and I'm like, We need that. That's so cool."

Having access to the power combo of Plecto and the data Kyle had spent years structuring in Podio meant that he could finally put the numbers on a screen and that they could be used, not just stored.

The Solution

Plecto's native integration with Podio made adoption simple from day one. The first dashboard Sunflower built was simple: one monthly view of leads, scheduled appointments, completed appointments, contracts, and closings, with conversion percentages at the bottom of the screen. It gave Joe, as sales leader, the first real tool to hold a three-person team accountable.

As the company grew, that evolved into an inside sales activity tracker dashboard that monitored the following metrics:

• dials made,
• ringless voicemails dropped,
• talk time,
• custom "quality conversations" metric
• calculated field measuring call depth and duration
• appointments scheduled.

The team now opens every day with a 20-minute huddle built directly around these numbers: "They go through yesterday's numbers, and they talk about today's plan, either to get back on track or keep the momentum going," Kyle says

Sunflower tracks individual KPI dashboards by month and year, giving the team accurate averages across the whole group. From there, they can tell any rep exactly how many calls and appointments it takes to hit a specific income goal: "Now we have the data and the history of all the people on that team to say, if you want to make that, you have to schedule this many appointments. And if you want to schedule this many appointments, you have to make this many calls," he says.

To keep the team engaged day to day, Sunflower's inside sales floor in Olathe runs a rotating Plecto dashboard carousel on a shared TV. Currently it displays a head-to-head monthly contest between two teams, and reps trigger a personal walkout song when they book an appointment: "It plays 20 seconds of their video of choice from YouTube, which is always great because you can rub it in your colleagues' faces."

The Results

Since implementing Plecto, Sunflower Home Buyers has extended tracking to every part of the business, not just sales. Every marketing channel is now measured individually, including return on ad spend by channel, and the team follows a lead through the full funnel: leads, scheduled appointments, completed appointments, contracts, and closings, broken down by both marketing channel and individual rep.

"Every area that we expose to tracking has improved. We track every single channel individually, and that's something we never used to do," Kyle says.

"Now we have the whole funnel from acquisition all the way to closing. We can see where the problem is in the process, look at it by employee or by marketing channel, and either throw more training that way or take some action."

That visibility has also reshaped how leadership runs its weekly meetings. Sunflower's leadership team reviews a red-yellow-green stoplight report every week, a process that used to mean manually pulling four to twelve metrics per person out of Podio and other systems by hand. Every team member now has a pre-built Plecto dashboard, already configured for the meeting, so the team pulls up accurate numbers instead of hunting them down.

"Every single thing that we use Plecto for saves us, if not hours, definitely lots of minutes. It's almost impossible to put a real number on it, but it's a lot of time saved," Kyle says.

Kyle is equally direct about Plecto's staying power. Sunflower has evaluated other systems as the company has grown but hasn't found anything that matches Plecto's depth and price point for a business their size.

"I haven't found anything comparable that does it at that level and at that price point for a small to mid-size business. Any business needs a tool like this, especially in real estate. It can be very unstructured in small business, and that can get interesting. Being able to create those KPIs and the process and structure, to have more predictable outcomes, is invaluable."

Turn your data into a system that pays for itself

Looking ahead, Kyle wants to take Sunflower's per-channel tracking a step further, pairing leads with the reps best suited to close them: "I'd love to be able to say, Steve is really good at Google Ads leads, he converts so much better than so-and-so, so we should give him more of these leads. Pairing leads with people's natural abilities, I think, is the next level for us."

That's the kind of precision only possible once every rep, every channel, and every deal is already visible in one place, exactly what Sunflower built with Podio and Plecto together.

Is your real estate business still running on instinct instead of data? See what happens when your team's activity, and performance all live on the same dashboard. Sign up for a free Plecto demo or two-week trial below.

*Disclaimer: We are committed to data privacy. All dashboard images in this customer story have been provided by our customer, Sunflower Home Buyers. Names, identification photos, and some data have been altered for security. Plecto does not access customer dashboards without written consent.