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First Help Financial (FHF) is an innovative and fast-growing auto finance company that has served customers with limited access to financial services for over a decade. With a team of 20+ Field Sales Reps spread across the United States, FHF didn’t have a CRM to help track customer (dealer) interactions and Sales Reps had no way to see how a dealer was engaging with FHF while the reps were on the road. While in the field, Sales Reps relied on remembering their competition at each dealership and had no systematic way to track other lenders in their markets. Moreover, Sales Reps didn’t have a streamlined way to plan their daily sales routes and lacked mobile capabilities when they needed to update key customer information.
Lack of a centralized data source also had an adverse impact on Leadership. Sales Managers had cumbersome and inaccurate way to measure KPI’s around Sales activities and no way to track the types of conversations their Sales Reps were having. Financial reporting, Forecasting, Case Management, and Loan Approvals were all tracked in dispirit systems making it hard for different teams to see a full view of dealer engagement.
First Help Financial partnered with Solving IT Edge to implement Salesforce Sales Cloud and Maps to streamline their Sales process and empower reps while on the road. Sales Cloud was implemented to track dealer interactions and consolidate dealer account data. Using Salesforce Automation Dealer Relationship Stages were automatically set based on each account’s engagement with FHF. Tasks were automatically created to proactively remind Sales reps of the types of meetings they should be having with Dealerships based on their past engagement with FHF.
Maps was implemented to help sales reps plan their day and make the process of logging calls more streamlined. Google Distance API was used to automatically calculate mileage for each rep twice a month so reps get reimbursed for mileage correctly with minimal overhead effort.
Integration was set up between FHF’s back-end Loan Origination System and Salesforce to ensure data is properly synced between Sales, Underwriting and Loan Processing, thus streamlining each deal’s sales cycle and giving Sales reps real time information about open and complete loans. Integration was also set up to allow Sales reps to set up new Deal Portal Users for contacts directly in Salesforce from a mobile device.
Competitor Data is now housed in Salesforce as related to a dealership so Sales Reps can easily see other lenders in the market and determine how to frame sales conversations based on where the competitors are lacking.
Since going live in Q4 of 2020, FHF has seen both measurable and intangible results. Managers are empowered with visibility into Territories and Quotas for sales target reporting. Dashboards give leadership a real time look into company and individual performance. This transparency has allowed managers to identify underperforming staff up to 3 weeks sooner resulting in overall better team performance.
Additionally, FHF Leadership was able to see which markets they should move into next with the use of Experian AutoCount Data that was integrated with Salesforce. This has helped FHF expand into 5 states in 3 months.
Sales Reps are equipped with more information at their fingertips than ever before which has helped them be more empowered, productive, and effective the field. On average, reps are reporting time savings of up to 60 minutes / week / rep.
Salesforce now drives Sales Reps daily schedule by proactively highlighting which accounts to call on, suggesting the types of conversation they should be having with dealers, providing optimized driving routes, tracking mileage automatically, and giving them real time data on competitors and loans. This data allows reps to have more meaningful and fact-based pointed conversations with dealerships. Increased productivity has contributed to FHF to surpassing their largest revenue month to date by 30%!
“Solving IT Edge delivered our Salesforce implementation on time and on budget while flexibly adapting to our changing needs. Despite our Account Management use case, which proved to be complex and unorthodox at times, Solving IT Edge invested the necessary time to fully capture our context so we could have a CRM that not only fit our needs but was 100% adopted by our sales team within 2 weeks. We’re excited to continue having Solving IT Edge as a partner who gives us confidence to get maximum value out of our investment.”
Lucas Oliveira, Vice President of Sales at First Help Financial
