|
Pinnacle Lending Group, located in Bellevue, Wash., is one of the top residential mortgage lenders in the Pacific Northwest. With over 100 years of combined lending experience the loan officers and the support staff are committed to providing “Pinnacle Service” to clients, friends, associates, and realtors.
But despite the experience and dedication the employees add to the group, they were running into difficulties in managing their contacts effectively. Pinnacle employees already had an established sales process to move loans from leads to relationships, but they wanted to find a better solution for managing the sales process and improving relationships with top clients.
The Challenge
David Baltzer, Principal, and his team were using Outlook as the primary contact management tool nine years ago. But they ran into serious limitations when trying to manage a growing loan volume, so they turned to ACT!. With ACT! they have spent large amounts of time and money customizing it to fit the residential loan business. As Pinnacle’s business was growing, ACT! was causing more and more problems because of the way it handles multiple opportunities for the same clients over time. Each new opportunity required the creation of a new, duplicate contact in the database.
Baltzer’s team was spending too much time on maintaining the ACT! database due to the duplicate contact issue. They would need to scroll through 10 duplicate contacts to look at the 10 loans they have provided for a major client. Baltzer and his team would also spend hours in ACT! dividing the clients into ‘Leaders’ and ‘Followers’ based on their sales volume. In addition, there were too many steps involved to use the email, calendar and task functionality of Outlook with the database of ACT! together. Baltzer continued to search for an improved way to manage his sales process and build his relationships with the top clients.
Baltzer knew that Pinnacle needed a solution that could handle the growing client base, improve the efficiency of the office, help them keep in contact with their current clients, be customizable to the business, lower training time and have a reasonable price tag. In addition, Pinnacle needed to shave hours off of the database maintenance duties and minutes off of each email and sales process interaction. Baltzer found all of this and more with Prophet.
The Solution
Pinnacle brought in Prophet for a test during the beta period and was immediately impressed with the clean way Prophet related opportunities to contacts.
“The integration with Outlook is so logical and clean that it makes a ton of sense,” said Baltzer. “Prophet gives me total control over the opportunity and how I manage it. I now have a single contact with multiple loans associated with that contact so when I need to update my database, it’s once per contact instead of multiple times.”
Since Pinnacle already had an established and functional sales process to move loans from leads to relationships, Baltzer and his team started by customizing the opportunity window to match their sales process. Basic configuration changes to Prophet took only a few hours and were extremely easy to push to the 10 other Prophet users in the workgroup. Next came the task of rationalizing the contact database to delete the duplicates that were required within ACT!. This process reduced the total contact database by almost two-thirds, which saves time in both finding contacts, managing the data and looking up contact history for specific clients.
Since moving to Prophet in September of 2003, Pinnacle has completely dropped ACT! and continues to find new features within Prophet that save them time, including the following:
- the Opportunity Manager allows Pinnacle to view, sort, manage and access every opportunity that they have in one place from inside of Outlook.
- the Company Level opportunity association allows Pinnacle employees to communicate with all of the parties involved with a particular load whether they are part of Pinnacle, a title insurance company, a bank, a lender or a borrower.
- the Add File feature allows the team to associate and find all critical documents and attachments to a particular opportunity, contact or company. They can now easily store the title, appraisal, hud-1 statements or any critical documents on their network or local computer and quickly pull it up from inside of the opportunity.
- the Group Personalized Email Wizard allows Pinnacle employees to send a personalized email to any number of contacts in the database and it looks like it went to only one of the clients at a time.
- the find email and attachment feature allows Pinnacle employees to search the entire email folder structure and pull up the one email they need from a particular contact. They can also find any attachment for that contact with a single click.
An additional benefit that Baltzer is seeing when he brings new employees onto Prophet is the quick ramp time.
“Most of the new employees we hire already have a good understanding of Outlook while not that many have an understanding of ACT!,” said Baltzer. “I don’t want to have to train them in ACT! and now I don’t have to. It is so much easier to get new people up and running with Prophet.”
By using Prophet integrated into Outlook, Baltzer and his team are more efficiently associating all tasks, appointments, emails, previous conversations, notes and documents.
“We are able to go much deeper with our relationships with our top clients than we were before,” said Baltzer. “The personalized email wizard alone is worth the price of the software. Each email acts as a personal reminder that I care, which is the basis of good relationship marketing and will drive repeat business.”
For Baltzer, using Prophet was a choice that made sense for the whole Pinnacle Lending Group. “The majority of our communication is via email, so why use a database that links with Outlook when I can use Outlook itself?” asks Baltzer. “Prophet is the obvious solution for our sales process management and we love using it.”
|
