Adopting deal management technology is no longer optional for real estate firms—it’s a necessity. Moving beyond spreadsheets and fragmented workflows opens the door to faster decisions, fewer errors, and scalable growth. But how you approach onboarding determines how quickly you realize those benefits—and how well your teams sustain them over time. The quality of your data, the clarity of your workflows, and the consistency of team engagement all shape your platform’s long-term success. A thoughtful, structured onboarding process lays the groundwork for immediate wins and positions your firm to adapt and thrive as you grow.
Assess Your Readiness
Before you adopt new technology, it is critical to understand your current deal management maturity and what is driving you to adopt a new system. Common triggers include overly manual processes, data silos, or outdated information that slows decision-making. Pinpointing these issues helps you choose a solution and workflows that address your true pain points and align with your firm’s goals.
10 Questions to Pinpoint Your Needs
1. Data Accessibility: How long does it take to gather complete and accurate data to evaluate each deal?
2. Document Extraction: How much time do teams spend pulling information from emails, broker documents, or offering memorandums for internal, external, and investment committee reporting?
3. Reporting: Do you require consolidated reporting across multiple regions, currencies, or strategies?
4. International Deals: Do you require the ability to look at deals in any currency or unit of measure?
5. Automation: Which processes, such as approvals and underwriting tasks, need to be automated?
6. Comparables: Aside from sales comps, do you rely on leases, unit types, or past underwriting models to assess opportunities?
7 . Capital Structuring: Do you raise capital from multiple partners or funds and need to track commitments, ownership, and allocations?
8. Relationship Management: How important is tracking stakeholder interactions, such as calls and meetings, in a centralized system?
9. Access Controls: What level of user or role-based security do you need? Should certain data be restricted to specific teams?
10. Unique Deal Structures: Do you manage joint ventures, acquisitions, refinancings, or other structures that need specialized fields and reporting?
Answering these questions clarifies your requirements and helps you plan for a successful rollout. When it comes to deal management, most companies fall into one of three stages of maturity:
Manually-driven:
At this stage, companies rely on spreadsheets and email for data sharing and collection, leading to fragmented information storage. This lack of centralization makes it difficult to locate critical data and requires manual data entry between systems, consuming valuable time. Additionally, collaboration is inefficient and challenging to maintain.
Using stand-alone tools:
Many companies rely on a mix of off-the-shelf solutions. This fragmented approach leads to data duplication, requiring records to be maintained across multiple systems. As a result, data silos, redundancy, and inefficiencies grow—while the absence of a single source of truth creates confusion and inconsistency.
Comprehensive tech adoption:
Firms that have fully transitioned to an integrated platform centralize data, streamline workflows, and scale more efficiently when entering new markets. Teams can instantly access deal history, automate key workflows, and generate reports with a single click—driving faster decisions and greater operational efficiency.
Knowing where you sit on this spectrum will clarify which capabilities are most urgent to address with new technology. Documenting current processes and bottlenecks is the best way to drive meaningful change.
Prepare for Change
Once you have selected a platform, thoughtful planning saves time and reduces friction in getting started. You do not need an elaborate plan, just the right steps to align people and processes before implementation.
Identify Gaps: From your readiness assessment, pinpoint the workflows and data sources that need improvement.
• Choose a Champion: Select someone with the authority and visibility to manage timelines, secure resources, and communicate project goals.
• Secure Buy-In: Leadership endorsement ensures broader support. Clearly communicate the purpose behind the transition to motivate and prepare teams.
• Set Measurable Goals: Define KPIs, such as time-to-close and data accuracy, to gauge success and guide ongoing improvements.
Start Your Onboarding Journey
Effective onboarding should deliver value quickly and build momentum. By focusing on four essential areas, you can set your technology adoption up for success.
Structured, Efficient Rollout
Collaborate with your provider’s onboarding team to define tasks and timelines. For larger firms, use a phased approach with pilot teams. For smaller firms, consider a unified launch.
Data Migration and Cleanup
Migrate high-priority data, such as active deals and key comparables, first. Use this change as an opportunity to audit and clean your critical data to ensure accuracy. Cleaning and standardizing information can help you avoid importing inaccuracies.
Configure for Impact
By aligning workflows, user roles, and integrations with current and future needs early in the process, you make immediate and long-term success more attainable. Set up critical dashboards and reports during the onboarding process so teams have immediate access to relevant data.
Training for Adoption
Your deal management system is only effective if your people use it consistently. Focus on core features like pipeline management, data entry, and basic workflows to encourage immediate adoption. You will also want to identify super users who can become in-house experts to help teammates troubleshoot and start using new features.
Measure Onboarding Success
Once the platform goes live, it is essential to evaluate results and make refinements as part of a continuous improvement process. You will want to keep track of:
• Time-to-Value (TTV): How quickly do teams use the platform for real work?
• Adoption Rates: Are the right users logging in and using the system consistently?
• Feature Utilization: Are teams using advanced features or only basic ones?
• Operational Efficiency: Are manual processes decreasing, and are deals moving faster?
• Error Reduction: Has data accuracy improved, and are there fewer version-control or reporting issues?
• Collaboration and Decision-Making: Are teams better aligned and equipped to evaluate deals?
• Deal Velocity: Are deals closing faster or with fewer bottlenecks?
Review these metrics regularly to identify areas for improvement—whether in data structure, training, or reporting.
Drive Adoption for Long-Term Success
Onboarding is just the beginning. Maximizing your investment in deal management technology requires consistent usage, ongoing improvement, and proactive change management. Here’s how to ensure long-term success:
First, empower super users to act as product champions. Encourage them to explore fresh use cases, share best practices, and support their teams. These individuals play a crucial role in driving adoption and overcoming initial resistance.
Second, leverage your provider. Partnering closely with your customer success manager gives you access to tailored training, troubleshooting, and strategic insights that accelerate adoption. They can also help you explore new features or integrations as your firm evolves.
Third, build in accountability to reinforce usage. Integrate the platform into daily workflows, such as pipeline reviews, and use reporting and analytics to drive data-based decision-making. Additionally, address potential resistance early by securing leadership support and communicating the long-term benefits to your team.
By taking a structured approach, you create a culture where technology adoption is natural, ongoing, and continuously optimized—ensuring your investment delivers lasting value.
Use Onboarding to Future-Proof Your Deal Management
Robust onboarding does more than help in the short term—it sets you up for growth. By structuring data and processes correctly now, you can scale the same workflows to new regions or deal structures later.
Be sure to plan for expansion from the outset. Choose a platform with enterprise-grade features, such as support for multiple currencies or partial sales, so you are prepared for increased complexity. Then be sure to train teams so they understand how to accommodate new deal types or capital structures within the same system.
You will also want to adapt continually. As markets and company priorities change, you can add new modules without major disruptions. A flexible deal management system will allow you to pivot quickly when entering new markets or taking on new investment strategies. Being able to extend the familiar tools in a single platform to a wide range of operational needs enables you to adapt and grow more quickly by fast-tracking implementation and adoption.
Onboard Effectively, Transform Successfully
To take your business to the next level, real estate firms need to be smart about the move to a deal management platform. Deploying this technology is an opportunity to streamline processes and strengthen collaboration. Thorough readiness assessments, clear goals, and structured onboarding can transform how you handle deals, reduce errors, and drive faster closings.
At Altrio, we have supported many onboarding engagements and developed best practices for firms of all sizes. Origin is purpose-built for real estate investors, brokers and lenders, and our proven onboarding approach helps you start smarter, adopt faster, and ultimately achieve better results.
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