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Susie Brock, Director of Marketing, Salesforce Administers, 1st Family MortgageMarketing today is more complex than ever. Gone are the days of measuring success by whether or not the phone rings or just by assuming that if sales are up it is due to the marketing you did that month. There are just too many components that affect a consumer’s decision on where and how to spend their money. Tracking, measuring and reporting in a real-time environment are the keys to building a successful business.
“We also developed an error message system to track records that get entered into Salesforce or Calyx POINT incorrectly and notify the appropriate user”
Salesforce.com turned out to be the ideal solution for 1st Family Mortgage. We needed a CRM tool that could integrate with our loan origination software Calyx POINT and also replace our existing lead generation software Leads360. The goal was to have one platform that could track a borrowers’ information from the time of initial contact and lead generation all the way through to the funding and closing of the opportunity.
Our existing systems just could not do this. There was too much data in too many places.Before Salesforce we had no way of connecting the lead information to the actual loan information in Calyx POINT. We knew how many leads we received per campaign but could not connect that information to the closed loans in Calyx POINT. So, if we closed 100 loans in a month we didn’t know what campaigns brought them in. We could not easily run reports and see their demographics or geographical information. The customer service department used one system, and the loan officer, processing, and accounting used another. Each manager had spreadsheets that were not shared or centrally stored so you had to call each supervisor to get their most recent version. There was no real way to know what campaigns were effective because of disconnects between the lead generation and loan origination programs. We had to manually look up each loan to see what campaign it came from within Leads360. 1st Family runs on average 150 different campaigns a month. This was an impossible task and by the time, we finished the reports that information was already out of date. There was no real way of tracking sales calls, appointments or quantifying those efforts. With 40 plus loan officers in three states we had to have one tool that delivered a single point of contact for all of the customer’s information.
Our solution was not just to customize Salesforce but to develop a feature complete mortgage tool that everyone in the company could utilize. The most important component was the integration between Calyx POINT and Salesforce. This had to be seamless to the user. It also had to be as close to real time as possible. Our customized integration currently sends any changes in Calyx POINT to Salesforce every five minutes. We also developed an error message system to track records that get entered into Salesforce or Calyx POINT incorrectly and notify the appropriate user. This was a huge help in user adoption.
Without these two key functions, we would not be able to use Salesforce at all. We have 100 percent user adoption because we took on the moto that “if it isn’t in Salesforce it doesn’t exist” and if you are a salesperson of any kind this means dollars and cents. From the time the initial appointment is made, until the borrower’s loan is funded by the lender we can track it and report on it. The third most critical component to us is the Salesforce dashboards. Creating usable functioning dashboards was the last thing we did but that would have to say now it is one of the most important. By using the Salesforce dashboards and Salesforce1 mobile app the manager has all the important information they need at a moment’s notice from a smart phone or tablet. If I am an owner or CEO I can view my company’s profitability and production in real time from my phone or tablet. No need to drag a laptop with you when you have dashboards set up correctly. No need to call accounting to see what funded today or what the revenue is for the week if you are out of town on a different time zone.
I am not sure we could do a loan without Salesforce now. Everyone depends on it working and reporting correct numbers. Regarding the training classes, I like to say, “Calyx POINT is the Bible and Salesforce reads and interprets it.”
Computer Telephone Integration (CTI) was the next big project once we had Salesforce in place. CTI was equally as important as Calyx POINT integration. This was a huge undertaking due to our decision within Salesforce to use Person Accounts. By using Person Accounts we converted Salesforce to a Business to Consumer model instead of its normal function which is Business to Business. No big deal unless every CTI component connects to the very object in Salesforce you put to sleep. However, after much research we choose InsideSales as the added component we needed to complete the lead cycle. With features like click-to-dial, call recordings stored in Salesforce, call monitoring, prerecorded voicemails and plentiful KPI’s we now have a complete 360-degree view of our company’s activities within a record. But what does this really mean? It means that our sales team and customer service department can work faster and smarter by seeing the account history such as emails, number of dials, and voice mails. They can now leave prerecorded messages for each unique product and quickly move on to the next call without even leaving Salesforce. We can now store each recorded phone call on a Salesforce lead, account or opportunity instead of our phone system. This solution gave management the tools needed to improve call performance, training and coaching. It also unified our selling techniques.
We all are now speaking the same language to our customers and within our own company.
