It’s a pretty common story: A bank makes the big investment to deploy a horizontal CRM across the enterprise. But a few months (or years) later, they aren’t seeing the adoption and utilization they expected—particularly in their mortgage department. They’re hearing whispers (or maybe shouts) that loan officers (LOs) don’t have the functionalities they want. And they’re starting to worry they won’t see the results they’re counting on. Bank leaders are left wondering how they can drive LO adoption and utilization—without packing on heavy costs and timelines of custom development.
For modern financial institutions, there’s a top-tier solution to this age-old dilemma: Integrating a purpose-built vertical solution (Total Expert) as a seamless layer on top of the horizontal CRM. In the case of a bank utilizing Salesforce, they can instantly add the vertically focused Total Expert solution to their horizontal platform deployment and put Total Expert’s 90% LO adoption rate to work for them.
Give LOs the tools they need
Good LOs are problem solvers: They find the shortest path to the outcome they (and their customers) want. If they aren’t finding the tools they need to get the job done out of the box, you can bet they’re going to find another way. Moreover, if deploying Salesforce across their organization doesn’t add enough value—making them more efficient and more effective—then the “pain of change” will keep adoption low. In short, to drive adoption, banks need to focus on the tools and capabilities that LOs care about most:
- Give them customer intelligence
LOs know they need to make hyper-personalized, hyper-relevant connections to break through the noise and build trust with borrowers. But they need help. They can’t keep up with dozens (or hundreds) of borrowers’ financial lives on their own.
As a powerful horizontal CRM, Salesforce is great at aggregating customer and prospect data. But it’s not built to identify the industry-specific insights that matter for LOs. Missing out on key customer intelligence means opportunities are slipping through the cracks.
Plugging Total Expert into Salesforce fills this gap, using purpose-built analytics to harness the full breadth of CRM data pouring into your Salesforce platform and extract the customer intelligence that LOs crave. Total Expert alerts LOs the moment a customer or borrower has their credit pulled, lists a property, qualifies for a better rate, or reaches an equity threshold. Most importantly, banks don’t need custom development to utilize this customer intelligence monitoring and alerting—Total Expert comes ready to go on day one.
- Give them co-marketing tools
Building relationships with real estate agents to create a healthy referral program is one of the most reliable success strategies for LOs. Co-marketing plays a big role in building these relationships, exposing the LO’s brand and the co-marketing partnership to new audiences.
Lending teams can use Salesforce CRM data as the backbone for these relationships. But creating the co-marketing materials is often a time-consuming, manual process.
LOs can automate a large portion of the process and simplify the creation of co-marketing materials by plugging Total Expert into Salesforce. Total Expert’s purpose-built co-marketing tools make it quick and easy to create RESPA-compliant rate flyers, single-property websites, emails, and other compliant co-marketing materials.
This enables LOs to trim a ton of time, energy, and hassle out of co-marketing—helping them attract and foster professional partnerships, without the huge burden of creating these materials from scratch.
- Give them ready-to-use content
Consumers today are wise to marketing. They don’t want to be sold to. Rather, consumers have made it clear that they want a financial institution to help them—providing the financial education they need to navigate the stressful complexity of the financial world.
Less-experienced LOs often aren’t sure where to start or what to say. They don’t have the deep experience to draw from when offering financial education and guidance. Even the best LOs, who have the experience and expertise, struggle to find the time to write this kind of educational content for their customers.
Plugging Total Expert into Salesforce solves both of these issues by giving LOs immediate access to a lending-specific content library of compliant print and social assets. LOs can leverage a broad range of short articles, tips, lists, and infographics that are constantly refreshed, so they’re always timely and relevant. This enables rookie LOs to build trust by giving borrowers the guidance of a seasoned pro. And the more seasoned, rockstar LOs can build on ready-to-use content templates that make it easy to quickly put their own touches (localized insights, personalized branding, etc.) on educational content.
Adding purpose-built tools—without custom development
Salesforce is a powerful generalist CRM platform. But it can’t possibly provide out-of-the-box functionality for every use case—particularly when it comes to the specific needs of banks and their lending teams. This is exactly why Salesforce created the Salesforce AppExchange: to give trusted vendors an easy way to integrate focused tools and functionalities.
Total Expert leveraged the Salesforce AppExchange to make our purpose-built lending toolbox available directly through Salesforce, without requiring any custom development. LOs get the out-of-the-box tools they need to be more efficient and more effective. Financial institution leaders see adoption and utilization surge, helping them make the most of their Salesforce seat licenses. And, as LOs leverage the integrated Total Expert toolbox, they bring more data into a financial institution’s Salesforce platform, creating new customer data feedback loops that complement and augment Salesforce CRM functionality across the enterprise.
Get a deeper look at how Total Expert can take your Salesforce deployment to the next level—putting Total Expert’s 90% LO adoption rate to work for you while helping LOs drive deal flow without extra development costs: https://totalexpert.com/partners/salesforce/
