Transaction coordination in Salesforce: contract to close on one board.

Why deals leak after the contract

Most CRM effort goes into the front of the funnel: leads, calls, appointments, offers. Then the contract gets signed and the CRM goes quiet. The deal is "Under Contract" for three weeks, and the only way to know where it really stands is to ask the TC.

That's where the expensive problems are. A seller who doesn't hear from you for a week after signing starts taking other calls. Title is waiting on a document nobody knew they needed. The inspection window passes. In states with new wholesaling rules there are now cancellation windows and closing deadlines on top of that (see what your CRM has to track).

Stages that match how a deal really closes

I keep transaction stages separate from acquisition stages. The acquisitions pipeline ends at a signed contract. The transaction picks up from there. A simple version:

Not every deal goes through every step. At Pezon Properties I rebuilt the TC app so the stages change by deal type, cash or financed, single-family or multi-unit, and the record only asks the questions that deal needs. That one change matters more than any dashboard: TCs stop skipping fields that don't apply.

The fields worth having

• Dates: contract date, inspection deadline, cancellation deadline (where the state has one), expected close, actual close.
• Parties: title company and contact, buyer, seller's preferred contact method, lender if any.
• Money: purchase price, earnest money and where it sits, assignment fee or expected profit, closing costs.
• Exit: assignment, double close, flip or keep as a rental. This is the field that makes campaign ROI honest later, because kept deals still came from a campaign.
• Checklist: a short onboarding checklist for the property (keys, utilities, access, photos). Pezon's ended up with 40+ fields because they run several deal types; most teams need far fewer.
• Last seller update: the date someone last told the seller where things stand. More on this below.

Tasks that create themselves

The point of all of this is that nobody has to remember. When a deal moves stage, Salesforce creates the next tasks, assigns them and dates them. A few that I'd always build:

1. Contract signed: send contract to title today, call the seller within 24 hours to explain next steps.
2. Opened with title: confirm earnest money received, schedule walkthrough.
3. Three days before the inspection or cancellation deadline: reminder to the TC and the acquisitions rep.
4. No seller update in 5 days: task to call the seller, and a flag on the board.
5. Clear to close: confirm closing time with seller, buyer and title; send the seller a plain checklist for closing day.
6. Closed: request the settlement statement, update profit and exit, ask for a review if it went well.
7. Fell through: reason required, then a task to put the lead back into follow-up if the seller still wants to sell.

Every one of those is a normal record-triggered Flow. No code. If your team changes the rules often, the Configuration Object approach lets ops change them without a developer.

One board for every file under contract

A Kanban view of transactions by stage, with the closing date, days in stage and last seller update on each card. That's it. At Central City Solutions every file under contract sits on one live Transactions Board, so nobody has to ask the TC where a deal stands.

Add a filter for "my deals" so each TC and rep sees their own, and a red flag for anything past a deadline or quiet for too long.

The TC scorecard

One report the owner looks at weekly. Keep it short:

• Files under contract, by stage
• Expected closings this month and next, with total expected profit
• Deals past a deadline
• Average days from contract to close, by exit type
• Days since the seller last heard from you, worst first
• Fell-through deals this month, by reason

The last two are the ones I'd watch first. When "days since seller update" is on a screen every week, people notice it.

Questions