My Journey to Empowering Our Team

My current title might be Sales Systems Manager, but my journey to this role started as a Mortgage Sales and Marketing Coordinator. I've always had a passion for Total Expert, and it comes from a deeply personal place. Having grown up with a father who was an entrepreneur and salesman, I developed a natural understanding of the sales mindset and what it takes to be successful.

This unique background, combined with my technical and creative skills, allows me to see the potential in Total Expert. I became a champion of the platform, convinced it could be the comprehensive CRM we needed to empower our team.  

Now, I have the opportunity to take that conviction and apply it directly to our sales strategy, maximizing the entire system's potential to benefit everyone in our credit union. Albeit challenging, it is rewarding to see our plans come to fruition.

Intentional Coaching, Not Intimidation

Instead of a bulky manual, I start all my trainings with a conversation, trying to learn what ideas the new hire is bringing with them. I strive to make our sales team feel empowered and not intimidated by the technology. Our company training provides a high-level overview. But my job is to get granular with the sales team. We want to connect on the specific ways technology can support their sales goals.  

For example, if a loan officer wants to land a new real estate partner, we'll build a strategy together. We begin with capturing the contact details, headshot, and company logo to create a complete profile for the comarketing invitation. Then we’ll create a single-property website, print marketing pieces, and social posts. After alI that, I’ll have them send an email showcasing everything to the partner. This shows the potential partner what's possible—and provides an incentive to accept the co-marketing invitation. Best of all, the partners don’t have to do any work themselves. It’s all about making it easy to get buy-in.

Enlightening our team to what's possible with Total Expert highlights what I love most: helping our team succeed. One of the best results from this approach came when an agent, on the team of an existing partner, saw the social media posts we had created for their colleague. The agent was so impressed that they immediately reached out to our loan officer. And that single conversation ended up creating two new partnerships. This is exactly what I'm hoping to achieve—helping people see the platform not as a chore, but as a tool they can use to build their business.

My secret sauce is making the technology feel less intimidating. I'll poke fun at myself and express that: "You're not going to mess anything up. It's OK, it can be fixed. Just play with it. Have some fun."

I'm even trying to help some of our more seasoned employees who are resistant to new tech. It starts with showing them that if you just put in a little bit more effort here in the beginning, it’s going to pay off big down the road. It's about building their confidence, one step at a time. I'll work with their managers to help guide their efforts toward a process that yields results, rather than just spinning their wheels.

From Band-Aids to Building a Better Future

Before Total Expert, we were in reactive mode. We were constantly putting a Band-Aid on problems as they arose to keep up with our growth. Now we’re thinking ahead and planning how to prevent issues before they occur. Total Expert allows us to be more forward-thinking and proactive. Next on the horizon is trend-setting marketing with the help of Total Expert.  

This shift has enabled us to do things we couldn’t before, like passive communication through automated Journeys. This allows us to have ongoing touchpoints with our members without our loan officers having to do anything manually.  

We’re also leveraging the Customer Intelligence feature to help our team get in front of members when they get notified that someone has pulled credit or that a new listing is available. It’s a way to be there for our members without being creepy or Big Brother-ish.  

Used correctly, we’re attending to the needs of our membership and making sure we're not missing opportunities.

Beyond a Tool: Autonomy and Growth

Total Expert just gives our team so much autonomy. Now we can go in and access information quickly and easily to see where their previous borrowers are in the process. It's a tool we can utilize at any time, even off-hours, without needing support from someone else on our team. The platform has also allowed us to realize we needed to grow our internal team to better support our loan officers and maximize the usage of this product. It's why I was moved into my new role—so I could rally the entire team, from designers to testers, to coordinate our efforts and maximize what we have in the system.

The Total Expert platform is allowing us to really maximize our potential as a credit union for our community and also for our employees. We can now focus on what we do best: building meaningful relationships, both with our members and with one another.