Cross Street saves over 250 hours a year on lead capture with Zoho Flow

About the company

Cross Street is a full-service real estate brokerage headquartered in Chicago, with offices in Denver and Cleveland. It started as a leasing company in 2019 and has grown into a brokerage covering rentals, sales, development services, and property management across all three markets.

Automating lead capture from the website

Website inquiries used to arrive by email, leaving lead details spread across individual inboxes rather than tracked in one central system. The process wasn’t slow, but it made it harder to maintain a complete, consistent view of leads across brokers and markets. Now, each inquiry goes straight into their CRM and is routed to the broker responsible for that property or market.

"Every website lead now flows directly into our system and is assigned to the right broker based on the property or market. We have a much more complete view of website lead activity, which gives us better data and makes it easier to monitor leads at scale."

Ari Weil, Director of Process Innovation, Cross Street

The flow connects their WordPress.org Contact Us form to the Zoho CRM Leads module by webhook. The moment a visitor submits the form, the webhook triggers the flow and creates a lead in CRM.

But the flow doesn't just create the record. It filters out submissions based on set criteria, routes the lead by market across Chicago, Denver, and Cleveland, then matches it to the right agent or broker using CRM's user and account modules. It saves at least an hour a day and handles around 30 leads a day, though the developer is clear the bigger win is data integrity.

Accelerating integration development

Before Zoho Flow, connecting two systems was a project on its own. The software engineer had to build functions and workflows from scratch and dig through scattered API docs. Each integration meant starting the research over.

"Custom functions and built-in connections let me build exactly the logic I need and call any app's API directly, without stitching together workarounds. That's what keeps me coming back."

David Tung, Software Engineer, Cross Street

Because Zoho Flow gives him ready connectors and lets him call any app's API through custom functions, he can build integrations much faster than coding them from scratch. This has significantly accelerated the process of building and deploying flows, with a developer noting that Flow enables integration development to be seven times faster. The flows are also easy enough that a non-developer on the team builds his own.

Automating invoicing, leave, and onboarding

A CRM-to-QuickBooks flow automates their invoicing. It creates a new invoice when a deal is moved to the invoice stage, and takes on branched actions based on deal type and market, at roughly a hundred executions a week.

Another workflow automates employee leave management. The flow connects their Zoho People with Google Calendar and syncs approved leave between the apps.

They also have a flow to automate their broker-onboarding process, where it adds new brokers as new users across Zoho One, Zoho CRM, and a custom team module when HR adds them.

Benefits and ROI

Zoho Flow has helped us save over 250 hours/year of manual work.

David Tung, Software Engineer, Cross Street

Over a working year of around 250 days, the hour a day that the company is saving on lead capture adds up to at least 250 hours the team no longer spends checking the website and keying leads into CRM by hand. That's more than six working weeks spent on the work itself instead of the admin around it.

Integration has seen similar improvements: A job that used to fill a full business day, sometimes two, now takes an hour at most.

Those are the headline numbers, but not the whole picture. Nine WordPress-triggered flows run across lead capture, invoicing, HR, and onboarding, with the CRM-to-QuickBooks flow alone running roughly a hundred times a week. Even more impressively, a non-developer on the team now builds his own flows, which takes the load off the developer entirely.

For the developer, though, the hours saved are only part of it. The bigger win is data integrity. Nothing slips through the cracks, and the day's record is one they can trust.