David S. Brown

David S. Brown is a commercial real estate company whose design team manages tenant improvement and design projects in Asana while the commercial and retail leasing teams were just standing up Zoho CRM for their deals. The two systems did not talk. Both sides tracked the same critical milestone dates, so staff confirmed them by email or phone, entered them twice, and still ended up with mismatches. On the discovery calls the ask was consistent. The leasing team should see the design milestones that matter to them, the design team should see when a proposal is signed or an LOI goes out without chasing anyone, and neither side wanted to see the other's day-to-day task noise. Only the agreed critical milestones needed to cross over.

There was also a real question of whether to keep Asana at all or move design work into Zoho Projects so everything lived in one suite.

This began as a paid consultation. Over a series of working sessions the design team walked us through their full intake-to-execution process in Asana, and we reviewed the leasing team's CRM workflow in Zoho. The recommendation that came out of it was to keep Asana, where the design team's adoption was strong, rather than force a migration, and to build a bi-directional milestone sync between Asana and Zoho CRM on Make.com, with milestones defined once, visible to both teams, updated automatically in the other system when either side moves a date or completes a step.

The consultation led to further CRM work. A Zoho CRM audit followed, and then a build-out inside the CRM itself, covering deal review sheets generated automatically from templates and linked to each deal, with versions for different lease terms, key deal economics surfaced directly on the CRM record for management review, pipeline stages rebuilt to match the real leasing workflow with required fields and lost-reason capture, a lease expiration report that drives renewal follow-up, sheet permissions that give leasing edit rights and leadership view-only access, and a design request workflow triggered from the deal.

The consultation gave the company a decision it could act on, to keep the tool the design team already used, and close the gap with an integration instead of a migration. The milestone model, agreed across leasing and design, became the contract between the two systems. On the CRM side, deal review sheets that were previously built by hand are created and linked automatically, and the pipeline now reflects how leasing deals actually move.

Given the same problem now, we would build one system that holds deals, design projects, and the shared milestones natively, so nothing needs syncing at all. The consultation-first approach would not change, because understanding the intake-to-execution process before touching software is what made the recommendation right. What changes is the destination, a client-owned system instead of two subscriptions and a middleware layer keeping them honest.