Salesforce CRM Consulting and Support for Innovative Capital Corporation

Ascendix: Revel, can you please define the pain points that led you to leverage Salesforce in your company’s workflow?

Revel: As Innovative Capital helps people looking for capital by introducing them to people that have the capital, we were seeking a solution to optimize our work to serve the borrower and the lender better.

To develop an optimized solution, we looked at the pain points we were experiencing as an organization and as a commercial lending broker. Here’s what we’ve got:

We operate with huge amounts of data that are constantly growing, and we need to house all this information. Thus, we need a CRM to do that.

We need to engage with clients constantly, and to do that we also need a robust CRM.

So, we started shopping around for different CRM solutions and decided to take a look at Salesforce. It was obviously not the most cost-effective option but definitely, one of the best, if not the best, CRM ecosystem in the world that offered some great solutions for our marketing and loan operations management needs.

On top of that, we liked the idea of hosting everything in one system where everything would be interconnected, and that is why we ultimately chose Salesforce.

Ascendix: Why did you choose Ascendix as a Salesforce consulting partner?

Revel: The reason that we ended up parting ways with our original developer was the changes in their business model that resulted in the constantly expanding distance between their technical promise and genuine achievement. So, we decided it was a good time to look at other opportunities.

Lucky for us, Ascendix had reached out to one of our partners through email, promoting themselves as Salesforce developers and specialists in commercial real estate commercial lending.

I was looking for a new Salesforce developer at that time, so I saved the email and contacted the Ascendix team.

As I started to inform Ascendix sales representatives about what we wanted to accomplish and found out more about the experience of the Ascendix team, it seemed that this was kind of a layup relationship decision.

Another aspect I really liked is that Ascendix has local support in Dallas and throughout Europe. I’m used to working with international teams and understand the value of leveraging quality resources at a reasonable cost.

So ultimately, we joined forces: Sales reps introduced me to the initial team, and we started getting to work.

During the test phase of getting everybody brought up to speed, the Ascendix team asked great questions. I could tell that they were very proficient, and we started having a lot of fun working with each other and knocking down different challenges that we were identifying to build a faster and more efficient tech stack.

Ascendix: Can you please share one or two things that you’re most proud of having accomplished in this journey with Ascendix? What results have you gained?

Revel: We planned to accomplish four things:

• Make people know we exist through creating great marketing that goes out to our current database with clients
• Start leveraging social media and e-mail marketing
• Automate administrative tasks
• Secure data exchange

I can proudly say that we accomplished all of them. Below I’ll reveal in detail what we’ve managed to achieve with the Ascendix team.

Marketing automation

Another aspect was to start leveraging social media and e-mail marketing to reach out to new prospects and bring them into our business. To achieve that, we built the application within Pardot, automated the lead generating process that comes in, introduced those leads, and auto assigned them to different loan officers within our organization.

In cooperation with the Ascendix team, we automated the process of teeing up a phone call for the loan officer where they can then “click to dial” within the system and reach out to that person with the opportunity to engage with them and have a good, wholesome conversation with the new person.

Right after that, we automated the process of following up with that person, providing them with resources about who we are, what we do, and why we do it.

Increase client awareness

We have our own database of clients, and we needed to make sure we were marketing to them, so that they knew about the services that we provided and see the loans that we were funding. The goal was to remind our clients that if they had a commercial lending challenge, they could reach out to Innovative Сapital. We’re your advisor.

Automation of administrative tasks

Our third goal was to automate the administrative tasks that no human likes to do. The Ascendix team customized the CRM so that our brokers could spend more time being humans and connecting and engaging with other humans. As a result, we have great conversations, we’re able to uncover challenges that we could solve, and ultimately drive more business revenue.

It’s easier said than done, but when it’s working and when you overcome all the challenges associated with that, you can get some impressive gains.

Secure data exchange

In order to improve the ability to transfer information between our clients and us securely, we created a digital loan application.

To do that, we used a Salesforce product called Community Cloud (now known as Experience Cloud). The program allows us to ask for information from our borrowing clients securely, any financial documents that need to be protected, so we can securely bring those into our system, and then:

• weekly extract that information
• underwrite the loan in house
• introduce that loan through a loan summary.

So, by doing that in-house and introducing that to multiple lenders who have an appetite for a given type of deal, we can quickly get a “yes” or a “no” from our lending partners.

If they can do the deal and get a quote so that we can offer multiple quotes back to our clients and give them options, that’s a really efficient process for them.

Compared with the bank loan approval process, which lasts 4-6 weeks with no guarantee of positive feedback, we offer shortened approval time (up to 1 week). Because of the relationships we have with our lending partners, our clients can choose the best-suited loan for them in a short period of time.

Ascendix: How would you describe the cooperation with the Ascendix team?

Revel: The Ascendix team has not only built solutions for Innovative Capital. We are constantly in communication concerning two aspects: Salesforce support and the Pardot marketing platform.

As we utilize Salesforce Conga templates, we need support to merge all information into these documents correctly.

The Ascendix team is open to communication and always quick in response anytime despite the difference in time zones. Due to this, we’ve got a nice rhythm.

We’ve made so much progress, so I can’t wait to see the fruits of our labor.