Best tailored CRM System solutions for Mortgage Professionals

CRM tools can offer improved efficiencies, but do these efficiencies align with your organization's specific needs and objectives for delivering the best CRM for your Loan Officers, Account Executives, Marketing Directors and their teams?

Meeting these needs means “Tailored Efficiency.” The secret to achieving tailored efficiency includes:

1. Confirm the CRM platform is capable of performing the needed functions

2. If #1 is not an option, assess whether or not the platform can be re-configured or customized at a reasonable cost

3. (Most Important) Given that #1 and/or #2 are possible, do you have the available resources to apply the right tailoring to the CRM to reach the desired efficiency?

📈“When users find the system intuitive and tailored to their workflow, their satisfaction with the platform increases, which can further increase adoption.”₁

The first requirement is all-too-often a non-starter for many of the “canned” CRM’s in today’s market. I refer to these solutions as “Kiosk CRM’s.” You’ll typically subscribe to these one-size-fits-all platforms with minimal or no interaction with the vendor. They tend to offer “ease-of-use” as the top feature, but the caveat is that they don’t really perform much in the way of features - not to mention the lack of ability to customize or add the missing components.

The second need is typically not an issue for the enterprise-grade CRM’s but again, having the tools without the resources is also a non-starter or could also bring a heavy price tag if outsourcing to a consulting vendor.

That third ingredient is really the secret ingredient. Finding a resource who truly cares about providing solutions coupled with vast background and experience would certainly make for the most tailored fit!

Are you truly enabled for Tailored Efficiency?

How do you know if you’ve found the right resource? It’s the difference between a response of “Sorry, we can’t think of a solution for that need” versus “Based on our prior experience I think we could tailor the platform in such a way that we can provide a solution for you with minimal cost and time.”

📈“In recent CRM implementation survey, 40% of respondents felt that the inability to achieve full-scale adoption was due to poor strategy and deployment...companies did not have CRM implementation experts or properly train their sales managers to help their teams...”₂

I think all of that experience is something that’s hard to appreciate until it's been achieved. When I first started my CRM business, I would start a client conversation with my “clipboard” in hand asking them: “tell me about your business requirements.” Fortunately, these days no conversations start that way which saves me and the client a tremendous amount of time in determining their needs.

I can think of countless situations where clients have had very specific use cases that called for significant tailoring. A lot of thought had to go into the right path for design, and course execution, based on those previous experiences. This can really make the difference between a solid, long term solution and a failed implementation.

There have also been many cases where a client will request a specific change or additional feature but, after evaluating the request, we determine through our experience that the actual "need" is often something very different. Like the Rolling Stones song goes: "You might, find you get what you need!"

Implementing Tailored Sales Flows (content)

📈“83% of businesses that customize their CRM platform see an increase in user adoption...companies with high levels of CRM adoption experience a 15% increase in revenue.”₃

Okay, so you're now familiar with the concept of tailored efficiency in your CRM, but the question is, how can that be put into practice? I think there are a few areas where this can be leveraged.

One is tailoring your communications to customers and partners. Two important things here:

1. Surgical content - Content that's included in your email and or text messaging that's very specific or relevant to your target audience. By utilizing your marketing tech stack, you can dynamically include call scripts and/or messaging based on each target's profile or situation.

2. Timing and frequency - Assume for a second that you're the target audience of the communications. What timing would impact you the most? And, how often would you want to see that surgical content that was relevant to your situation? Determine the timing and incorporate that into your tailored journeys, but be careful about overdoing it too much/too often!

Implementing Tailored Sales Flows (call list)

Another area is the tailored call list. Again, two items of importance:

1. Dynamic filters - First, develop the dynamic filters in your CRM that take numerous factors into consideration. For example, your last call attempt or contact, the current target status and or disposition, or whatever criteria helps craft your specific message in a timely/relevant manner.

2. Power dialing - Utilize your CRM for what I call power dialing (where available), where you filter your list, click a button, and the system auto dials each person on the filtered list efficiently, making it super easy to automatically drop tailored voicemails for unanswered calls and even send on-the-fly, customized text messages which, by the way are increasingly the best way to reach and get responses from your efforts. So the end result becomes the difference between shooting from the hip and a mechanized, personalized targeted groove. And that's what I call tailored efficiency.

Big Data: Big Impact

Possibly the biggest impact and example for tailored efficiency is your data. This is possibly the most discussed headache and challenge in any CRM platform. Again, this is where experience can really help, and I'm sure that our experience just in data quality is in the thousands of hours.

Data that's housed in your CRM is one of those things where there are typically no simple answers for ensuring data quality. It has to be analyzed, scrubbed and evaluated before making any changes or putting solutions into practice to ensure accuracy and confidence before executing that one-million record email campaign. A few important steps:

1. Think long-term solution – Remember that any solution is not going to be a one-time fix. Just because you clean up your data, that’s not going last. That would be like cleaning your garage once and expecting it to stay clean forever!

2. People are lazy and they’re not robots – Let’s assume you’ve cleaned up your data. What are you going to do to prevent more bad data being entered and/or imported into your CRM? How are you going to handle mistakes, typos, etc.

3. It’s never going to be perfect – Your policies and procedures for data accuracy in your CRM are never going to ensure 100% accuracy, so focus on being accurate enough to avoid sizable efficiency issues and/or QC problems in your external communications to prospects and customers.
   

Best 'tailored' CRM Conclusion

I think everyone can agree that CRM tools can offer improved efficiencies but only when the efficiencies provided are tailored to your organization's specific needs, delivering the best tailored CRM System solutions for your pro mortgage team.

So, when reviewing your current mortgage marketing & sales automation workflows, try to assess where your system can be optimized and further configured to optimize the available resources within your organization to get the results all of that hard work deserves.

And if you're unsure - feel free to reach out to the experts in tailored efficiency!

Sources:
1: CRM.org, How to Choose a CRM System That Will Be Adopted By Your Sales Team, 2023
2: CRM.org, 17 CRM Statistics: Growth, Revenue, Adoption Rates & More Facts, 2023
3: Nucleus Research, CRM Technology Value Matrix, 2022