Many of our clients ask us how Salesforce loan origination works. Implementing a CRM is one of the most critical decisions any retail mortgage brokerage can make. In the digital world of Ellie Mae Encompass, Nortridge, Calyx, Fiserv, and similar loan origination platforms, being lean & nimble is more important than ever. Understanding how to best leverage Salesforce with your loan origination system (LOS) sets the foundation for a more streamlined future, empowering your clients, partners & employees. Understanding the suite of productivity & marketing tools Salesforce offers will be key to your organization’s success. Most important of all, remember – Rome wasn’t built in a day & it certainly could not have been built without skilled architects & the right tools. Let’s talk about the benefits of Salesforce loan origination.
Prospecting, Referrals, and Marketing
So, you have built a lean & mean loan origination machine. Now it is time to add some fuel to its engine. Salesforce can be directly integrated with multiple referrals and channel partners like Bankrate, Zillow, or Realtor.com which feed directly into your marketing & loan origination funnel. Prospects can flow into your CRM directly from your site – leveraging tools such as Web to Lead or Salesforce’s robust web service APIs to build solutions that allow for a real-time flow of customers & data. Partner Communities (more on that later!) can be leveraged to create portals for 3rd parties to refer to & manage their pipelines. Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be used for automated journeys that demonstrate your companies’ value & maintain constant contact.
Leverage your CRM to help qualify prospects, including running their credit before they hit your LOS to reduce noise & understand the quality each lead source is bringing to your organization. This will help maximize marketing dollars & focus efforts on where they matter most.
Facilitating the Funnel
Getting leads in the door is only the beginning. Now that we have them, how do we keep them? More importantly, how do we make sure they choose to do business with us? Sure, Salesforce will help you visualize your pipeline but how can it help move things along? What is my time to close? How do I know where my loans are stalling? Where should I dedicate more time & effort? How can we measure the impact?
Reminders, Tasks, Texts, Emails, Calls & other automation are all part of the Salesforce toolkit to move our clients towards origination. Einstein Analytics & AI can be leveraged to provide insights into what is most effective & when. It will even calculate & recalculate the actual close rate of loan statuses to help better forecast & understand revenue streams.
Remember, be nimble. Not all of your prospects will be comfortable leveraging technology but you certainly can use technology to facilitate communication with them.
The Empowered Loan Officer
Mortgage companies often think they are implementing a new & improved system to improve customer experience. While that is certainly true, it is equally important to remember that empowering your Loan Officers & ensuring their satisfaction can be just as critical to its success. Whether it’s ensuring they have a 360-degree view of their prospects when interacting with them (Is this your 3rd application in the last month?) or the ability to pull client credit in the field from their mobile devices – Salesforce can unleash functionality that can drastically improve productivity & close rates.
Salesforce mobile can place the entire origination process at their fingertips – anytime & anywhere. Integrations with web analytics can provide insights into prospect behavior before getting on a call so conversations can be tailored to meet their concerns. A CRM that consolidates a contact’s history creates a powerful ally and allows for a personalized experience.
Systems Integrations
Sometimes small steps are giant steps. Integrating a loan origination system – whether it be CalyxPoint, Fiserv or Ellie Mae Encompass can be a daunting task. We often find clients looking to move entirely away from what they view as an archaic system, but too much too fast is often one of the most critical mistakes clients make when attempting to modernize the origination process. Crawl, Walk, Run. While full bi-directional sync seems like a great idea, the key to success is understanding how to best leverage the right system for the right job.
Most loan origination systems have tons of functionality and decades of expertise built-in. As a first step, we often recommend our clients define a moment when their loan will flow from Salesforce to their LOS. This milestone is often once a prospect has been successfully qualified. Updates can flow back into Salesforce, particularly loan milestones & underwriting requests but any additional changes to the loan document itself should occur in the LOS. Over time, we can progress towards a more synchronized & bi-directional state but getting it right and achieving buy-in is far more important than idealistic dreams.
Enter: Customer and Referral Portals
Salesforce Customer Community
So, you want a drag & drop customer portal that sits on top of real-time data that understands where each customer sits in their loan lifecycle & dynamically adapts to drive the behavior you want? Salesforce has you covered. Customer Communities is a quick & effective way to rapidly launch a portal that does just that. This can be leveraged to solicit additional documents or facilitate the state of a loan as it flows through various milestones. What features you want to release & when will depend on your roadmap but a community is a powerful tool that drives the funnel & can be leveraged to facilitate a relationship long after origination.
Salesforce Partner Community
3rd parties such as Real Estate Agents, Insurance Companies & Law firms can often be the lifeblood of a mortgage companies organic referral system. Salesforce Partner Communities offers a drag & drop portal that can share as little or as much as you would like with each such source. This is often a forgotten piece of the puzzle but creates an opportunity to differentiate an organization from the field by providing a boutique experience for partners & allowing them to track & interact with their referrals.
Make a Client for Life, Not a Sale
A fully funded loan may be the end of one journey – but it is just the start of another. The referral & refinancing process begins as soon as the origination process ends. Maintaining regular contact & demonstrating partnership should be a core value to any mortgage company. Taking out a mortgage is one of the largest financial decisions most folks will make in their lives & the memories they leave with can have a multiplicative effect when done right. Maybe the ease of which a co-borrower found their renewal sticks around the next time rates drop & they want to refinance. Or perhaps it’s a referring partner such as a law firm or real estate agent that wants to cement their own client’s experiences by leveraging yours. Always keep in mind the importance of first impressions. Leveraging Salesforce CRM & Marketing Cloud journeys will help keep relationships alive & ensure a steady pipeline for many years to come.
Drop us a line to learn more about how we’re developing digital innovation for mortgage banks!
