The Official MyLoanBiz Blog

Inline in Winter '08

What if you did not have to click the Edit button to make a change to a single field on a Salesforce record? What if you could just click on the field and an edit box would just appear and you could change the field value and then hit the Save button? Well, this long awaited feature is on the horizon. Expect to see it in the Salesforce.com Winter '08 release which should be out in the next 90 days. (for more information read Eric Wilson's Blog Post: Sneak Peek: Inline Editing)

Bring the Blog

I was a full time Loan Officer at Guaranteed Rate for 5 years prior to starting MyLoanBiz. I still originate there and I manage to put up respectable numbers even with the limited amount of time that I have to devote to it these days. This is only possible because I have a phenomenal team and due to the fact I really leverage MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com. 

I generally have focused on building realtor relationships and have over 150 of them. As this number grew I was no longer able to call each one of them as often as I wanted so I started writing a weekly newsletter to stay in front of them. I called it the Kenessey Report and I used MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com's mass contact email feature to send it out to all my Realtor contacts. Each week I read a number of financial websites to help me put the report together but as my schedule got more hectic doing the research and writing the report became too time intensive.

I received great feedback on the Kenessey Report so I wanted to keep sending it out. I started investigating a way to still produce it without having the spend so much time on it. As it turned out, Dan Green, a popular mortgage blogger (www.themortgagereports.com) and a MyLoanBiz customer had recently started a blogging service for mortgage and real estate professionals. The company, Bring the Blog provides its members with their own blog Web site and then updates that blog with new mortgage-related content and commentary every business day.

This worked out perfectly for me because I not only had a blog that I could make available for my referral partners and customers but I could also repurpose the content for my newsletter. Dan's writing style is intelligent and to the point. The feedback actually improved after I switched over to his service (I am not sure what that says about my writing style).

Now every Monday my transaction coordinator pulls that days post from my blog (www.kenesseyreport.com) which is hosted and published by Bring the Blog and pastes it into an email template in MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com and sends it out. The Monday post is always a summary of the previous week's news and a highlight of the week to come. I cannot say enough about the service and suggest anyone looking for this type of thing to check it out (www.bringtheblog.com).

May the Force Be with You

Every year Salesforce.com delivers a big announcement at their annual user conference and this year they did not disappoint. In front of 7000 attendees Marc Beniof their CEO announced a fundamental change in strategy. Salesforce.com which started in 1999 selling a single online application for salesforce automation was now focusing its attention on developing the world's first "Platform as a Service" which they are calling Force.com (Here is an interesting Article at Investors.com).

Platform as a service? Huh? Why should I care? Here is the reason why... as a user of MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com the possibilities of what features we will be able to deliver long-term just became exponentially larger. This new strategy is going to open up endless possibilities for how we can now expand our mortgage application.

An example of this would be the usability of our Deal record. As we all know it has a lot of fields on it so you have to scroll up and down the screen to see them. We would like to make this layout more manageable but Salesforce.com's current capabilities do not allow for major changes to their user interface. You can only add and subtract fields to and from their standard layout. With Force.com a new development tool is being added called Visualforce. This will allow us to eventually add sub-tabs to a Deal record so the data is broken out in section such as Overview, Property, Borrower(s), 1st Loan, 2nd Loan and Processing information. Here is a quick mock-up.

Keep in mind that currently Force.com is a strategy in development and the technology will not be made available for at least another 6 months. Regardless the future looks bright for Salesforce.com and we are excited to be running our application on their platform. Oh by the way, they also announced they hit the 900,000 subscriber mark. Not a bad milestone.

Reporting from Dreamforce

When I started originating 5 years ago, one of the first things I did was look for a mortgage specific online customer relationship management (CRM) application.  2 years later I had tried a lot of products and just could not find one that I liked. In hindsight this was a good thing because it started me down the path that eventually led to the start of MyLoanBiz.

Prior to getting into the mortgage business I was in technology and had used an online CRM application called Salesforce.com at two separate companies. My familiarity with Salesforce.com put it at the top of my list as I searched for a platform to start building my own mortgage CRM solution on. The timing was good because Salesforce.com had just started expanding its capabilities around customizing their application. This new functionality allowed me to start tweaking their application to work for my specific needs.

I eventually approached them about forming a relationship so that I could take what I had built on their system and offer it to others. Fortunately for me they agreed and on March 24^th 2006 MyLoanBiz became one of their first OEM partners.

I cannot say enough about how great a partner Salesforce.com has been. One of the things that I have been most impressed with is their pace of innovation. As the MyLoanBiz team has continued to add mortgage specific functionality to our application, Saleforce.com has continuously added additional core CRM functionality to their platform. It has truly been a double bonus for our users.

Why am I telling you all this? Well, I just landed in San Francisco earlier this evening to attend Salesforce.com’s annual user conference called Dreamforce. The rumors are already flying about what new features will be unveiled tomorrow morning by their CEO, Marc Benioff at the conference kickoff. So stay tuned and I will be reporting back soon.

Let the Discussion Begin

 

Welcome to the Official MyLoanBiz Blog. This blog along with the launch of our updated website are part of a new initiative at MyLoanBiz to better communicate and collaborate with our customer base.

Our corporate mission is to bring new and innovative technologies to the mortgage industry that fundamentally change the way mortgage professionals approach:

1. Establishing strong referral sources
2.  Surpassing clients expectations during the mortgage process
3.  Consistently communicating with their marketing database

We have spoken with hundreds of top originators over the past few years about how they approach these core activities. Many of the best practices that were shared with us became key components of our flagship application, MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com. This blog’s intent is to create a broader discussion about what it takes to build a successful mortgage practice and the role that technology plays in this endeavor. Our hope is that your input with lead us to build products that are more relevant to the issues that you face in our ever evolving mortgage industry.

In addition, we will use this blog to communicate product direction, to provide a look inside MyLoanBiz and to profile innovative customers and partners. We look forward to the discussion and hope you do to.

Best Wishes,

George Kenessey
Chief Executive Officer
MyLoanBiz, LLC