In this guide, we will show you how to create and manage your sales progression chain. This guide will also include how to exchange and complete property. In order to go to the sales progression section, you must first have a property that's under offer. See our guide on the offer process here.

See our webinar on how to use Sales Progression here

When on the home screen, see the property section and click on the STC option

This will take you to the list of STC properties. From here you can click on the property to go into the Sales Progression screen.

If you scroll down the page you arrive at three tabbed sections.  These are labelled 'Milestones and contacts', 'Activity' and 'Documents'.  We will look at these sections each and in turn, starting with 'Milestones and contacts'  You will  the vendor and purchasers contacts. In this section you can add in any contacts related to this sale. For example solicitors or surveyors etc. From the plus icon next to the contacts you can click it and it will open a screen for you to add a company to this. You must do this for both the vendor and purchaser separately.

Once you have clicked the 'Add Vendor's Contact' or indeed the 'Add Purchaser's Contact' button you can search for a company as you see in the example below.  If it is a new legal contact that your Agency has never recorded before, simply click 'Add a new customer'.

If you add a new company it will display the add company form as seen below. You will need to fill all the required fields in and press save. This will then attach this new company to the sale.  Please note, the fields marked with a * are the only mandatory fields.  These are: Company name for the solicitor, type and both fields for the individual name of the representative of that company.  You may find it beneficial to record further contact information for the person as it will remain on the system for reference.  Description can help if you need to differentiate this solicitor from other local solicitors when you view the Company's page in the system.  What the person is looking for is not essential unless with the contact's consent you felt it was beneficial to record their property search/vending needs if they were to be a client of your Agency in the future.

If you decide to search for the company instead, you can do this from the search bar. You can type in the name of the company, telephone or email to find the correct company.

Once you have selected the correct company it will take you to a screen to select a person who will be dealing with your case. From here you can drop the menu down and select a person. Once you have done these you can click Save to add that person to the property chain.

Once you have pressed save it will appear on the property and it will display the contact details for this person. You can also do this to the purchaser's side. Just repeat the above guide on the purchase side of the screen.

Building a chain, Milestone and Notes

Underneath the contact section you will find 3 columns in order to progress this chain. On the far left you have the chain options (1). In this section you can build your chain by adding properties and put up and below the chain. There is no limit on the number of items in a chain.  Selecting 'Full Chain' grants you access to the facility to add chain items in either downward or upward chain movements.  Clicking the small magnifying glass icon on one of the properties highlights it for "centre stage" as it were, in the middle column (2).  Selecting a magnifying glass on each chain item tells the sales progression what property's milestones you wish to work on (3).  The milestones are listed below that heading (4).  There are seven standard milestones for a Vendor and thirteen standard milestones for a Purchaser.  Need to swap the order of the milestones around?  Click and drag on a Milestone line e.g. memo of sale sent to move it up and down the order.  Drop the milestone where you think is best for your Agency according to the order that you work to.  Need to add a one-off milestone due to an additional check or expected complication with the sale?  Select the + button (5).  Need the order and/or labelling of these milestones changed permanently for your Agency according to how you work on each sale progression?  Please feel free to reach out to us via Help Centre support ticket, support team phone call or Livechat.  We will look at how to update the status of these milestones e.g. changing them to completed further down this guide.  You also have a notes section (6) if you need to add updates for all of your colleagues to see.  We will look at that further down the guide.

Select Full Chain.  Once you have clicked this it will open up the chain for you to add in more items.  To the left in the example below we can see that only one property in place in the chain right now, which is the property this Agent is selling.  The box on the left contains the name of the vendor and buyer, along with a total of how many steps (if any) are completed yet.  Clicking the magnifying glass will take you back to the milestones and notes page as we saw above.  Clicking on the X in the far right-hand side will also do the same.  You have the option to mark the chain as having fallen through on the far right of the screen also.  To add an upward or downward chain item you simply need to click on the up or downward arrow in the box of the property your Agency is selling.

You will then be presented with the following screen:

You will need to enter both the person details of the vendor/business selling that property, along with the property address itself to get this property saved to the chain as the next item.  Click on 'Enter the person details'.  As we can see in the example below, it will ask you for some key details about the vendor of the external property.  As it is likely that data will be limited about that vendor and property, you only need fill in the minimum required fields which are:

1. Surname
   
2. Address
   
3. 'Looking to' tick box
   

It is very important that we bear in mind that we are not adding the person as if they are a client of our Agency, unless we knew them, had their consent to do so and felt it beneficial to add that detail for future dealing with that person.  It is therefore easiest to tick the 'Sell' box as you will not be prompted to add a buyer's search criteria.

1. Grade and source also both have to be ticked
   

Tip - why not use the 'Settings and preferences' function in Dezrez to create a custom grade and a custom source, both labelled 'Sales Progression'?  That way whenever this vendor's data appears in your person lists, you will know that they have been added as data to fill up the necessary sales progression.  Please refer to our Knowledge Base Articles for more information on Settings and preferences.  Access restrictions to that function may apply due to your individual Agency settings.  

Important - you do not need to enter any further data about the property to proceed (e.g. type, numbers of rooms etc) unless you really want to complete that information.

Please note: when the address line on the box of the chain item is in white text, it indicates that it is a property being sold by your Agency.  If the text of the address is in orange colour, it indicates an external property that has been added.

Please note the difference of the top simple chain item in the example above.  When using simple chain items you do not get milestones added for the item as we are telling the system that this is a simple move e.g. care home, moving in with family etc so you are not needing milestones for this item.

You will have a section for the vendor milestones and the purchases milestones, you can add and manage these individually from here.

You can click into one of the milestones to set the expected date on when this will be complete. This is beneficial as it will set a goal of when the milestones should be expected to complete. You can also change the title and owning negotiator from this section. At the bottom of the image below you can also create a task to chase up at a later time. This will open the slide out of the task system for you to add a new task.

At the top of this example you are also able to change the status of this specific milestone to Blocked – no needed for this chain, Pending – it’s still not done and Completed – the task has be completed.

Once you have click completed it will turn the task green, so the task will appear completed in the list of milestones.

You can also add a new ad hoc milestones from the bottom of the milestone list. There will be a plus icon and if you hover over it, it will display the add milestone button.

If you click this it will display a blank milestone for you to fill in from scratch.

Next to the milestone section you will find the Notes tab. In this section there will be all the notes stored again the chain. This will be a combination of notes from the milestones and notes added in by the user.

At the top of the notes section there will a box for you to add in the note for this chain. Once you have pressed ‘Add Note’ it will add the note to the chain.

At the top of the property you will see a series of sub tabs, the tab that has activities label will be where all the notes and milestone records are stored. You can also export the data should you wish to from the ‘Print Activities’ button.

The 3^rd tab across the top is called Documents, this is where all the documents are stored for this property. You can see the documents from the beginning of the sale.

Once you are getting towards the Exchange part of the sale you can navigate back to the Milestones page. Once there you can make sure you are happy with the relevant milestones are completed and the next step is to click Exchange. To do this you must navigate to the top of the page where you will find a button called ‘Exchange’. You can from here fall the offer through by clicking the fall through button.

When you have clicked Exchange it will open up a window for you to add in the exchange date and to possibly change the expected completion date. You can also add a note a note in at this point. Once you’re happy with the details entered you can press ok to save.

It will then take you back to the sales progression page where you can continue with adding and completing milestones that are relevant to the exchange process.

Once you are happy with this you can click the complete button

A window will then pop up in order for you to complete the property sale. You can then set the date of completion and add a note. You will also have an option to change the address of the new owner of the property by ticking that box.

Once you have pressed OK, it will then take you back into completed property here you can add notes and look at the history of that property.