One CRM Across Every Location for a Flexible Workspace Operator

#The starting position

Flexible workspace is sold one conversation at a time. A founder looking for a private office, a remote team wanting a few dedicated desks and a freelancer after a day pass all start with an enquiry, and most of them want a tour before they sign. How quickly a location answers, how well the tour goes and how carefully the follow-up is handled decide whether the space fills.

The operator in this engagement runs several locations, each led by a general manager. Before this work, intake and follow-up varied from location to location, and the CRM did not give the business one repeatable way to handle an enquiry. Ownership was not always clear, so an enquiry could be answered twice or not at all. Tours were booked but not measured. When an enquiry became a membership, the details collected at the start were often lost and had to be gathered again.

Leadership felt the gap most. Without consistent data, it was impossible to compare locations fairly. A site with a low occupancy rate might have a demand problem, a tour problem or a follow-up problem, and there was no way to tell which.

The operator also wanted to use an AI chat assistant on its website to answer enquiries at any hour. That raised the obvious question: once the assistant has done its part, who picks up the conversation, and how does the CRM know about it?

#What we built

01 A Sales Cloud QuickStart shaped to the business

We implemented Sales Cloud with lead and contact records designed around how flexible workspace is sold: the location of interest, the type of space, team size and timing. Fields that the team would actually fill in made the cut; the rest did not.

02 Ownership and location rules

Every lead carries its location and an owner. Ownership rules assign enquiries to the right location team, so each enquiry has one accountable person from the moment it arrives.

03 Tour reporting and conversion mappings

Tours are recorded and reported, because they are the strongest buying signal in this business. When a lead converts to an opportunity, we mapped the fields so the space type, team size, timing and notes travel with it.

04 Location, manager and executive dashboards

Each general manager has a dashboard for their location: new enquiries, tours booked and completed, and conversions. An executive dashboard puts every location on the same measures, and we have since refined it as leadership's questions changed.

05 Managed support and enhancements

After the QuickStart, the operator moved to ongoing support. Enhancements have included executive dashboard changes, tour reporting, lead to opportunity field mappings, and investigations into revenue-funnel email automation and Mailchimp packages for nurturing enquiries that are not ready to tour.

06 The AI chat assistant hand-off, designed as its own scope

We scoped the integration between the operator's AI chat assistant, Uniti AI, and Salesforce as a separate statement of work. The design covers webhook signature validation with HMAC, so only genuine messages are accepted; duplicate detection and matching to existing leads and contacts; a record model that stores the conversation itself; reporting fields; and location-to-manager routing with alerts for private-office enquiries, which are the highest-value conversations the assistant handles.

#What the dashboards are built to answer

A dashboard is only useful if it answers a question someone asks every week. We designed each view around the questions its audience brings to it.

For a general manager: How many enquiries did my location receive this week, and how many are still waiting for a first reply? How many tours are booked for the coming days, and how many of last week's tours turned into a membership or an office? Which enquiries have gone quiet and need a follow-up today?

For the sales lead: Which locations are converting tours well, and which are booking tours that do not close? Where are enquiries coming from, and which sources produce members instead of browsers? Which types of space are in demand at each site?

For the executive team: How does each location compare on the same measures, from enquiry to tour to signed agreement? Where should marketing spend go next month, and which site needs help with its process instead of more leads?

Answering those questions depends on the data model underneath. Location, space type, enquiry source, tour status and conversion all have to be recorded consistently, by every team, every time. That is why so much of the early work went into fields, ownership and mappings, and so little into decoration. A plain dashboard over trustworthy data is worth more than a polished one over guesses.

The same principle applied when the executive dashboard was revised. Each change started from a question leadership could not yet answer, and the work was to make sure the data existed to answer it, before a chart was added.

#How it works in practice

A prospect asks about a private office at one location late on a Sunday. The assistant answers the first questions. In the integration design, the conversation arrives in Salesforce as a validated message, is matched against existing records so the prospect is not duplicated, and is stored with the lead. Because it is a private-office enquiry, the manager for that location is alerted. On Monday morning the manager opens a lead that already contains the conversation, books a tour and records it. If the prospect signs, the opportunity carries everything gathered along the way, and the executive dashboard counts it against the right location.

#How we delivered it, end to end

Process before configuration. We started with how each location actually sold space and agreed one shared process, with room for local differences where they mattered.

Small, usable releases. The QuickStart put a working CRM in place quickly, then dashboards, tour reporting and field mappings were added as enhancements once the team was using it.

Integration scoped on its own. The chat assistant integration carries security and data quality requirements of its own, so it was specified separately, with validation, matching and routing designed before any build.

Support that follows the business. Managed support means changes to dashboards and reporting happen as leadership's questions evolve, instead of waiting for a new project.

#The decisions that mattered

Location on every record. It sounds obvious. It is also the field that makes ownership, comparison and routing possible, so it was treated as essential from the first release.

Measuring tours, not just leads. Lead volume alone flatters busy locations. Tour and conversion reporting shows where the process works.

A person owns the reply. The assistant can answer questions at any hour. The design makes sure a named manager owns the follow-up, because that is what members remember.

#What changed

#What we would tell an operator starting this

Decide what a good enquiry looks like for your business and make sure every location records it the same way. Then measure the steps that matter, especially tours, and give each general manager a view of their own site. If you add an AI assistant, spend your design time on the hand-off, because that is where a prospect decides whether they are dealing with a responsive operator or a website.