The Official MyLoanBiz Blog

Winter '08 Release - Deal Close Out

I always thought of a mortgage transaction (a Deal) as having 3 to 4 stages in its life-cycle:

• Lead
• Pre-Approval (this stage is only relevant on purchases)
• Committed
• Closed

From a database management perspective it is crucial that you are accurately recording information during a Deal's transition from a Committed to a Closed stage. There are a number of things in play during this transition:

• What is the correct Deal status to set on the Deal record? Is it Closed:Won or Closed: Lost? What was the reason if it was a loss?
• What is the correct Future Refi status? Is this something you want to track on future refi reports? So should you mark it Monitoring? Do you not want it on future refi reports? So should you put it in an Inactive status?
• What changes should be made to the Group Membership type of the Borrower and Co-Borrower? If they were marked as Prospects they should now be changed to Customers if the deal was Closed: Won. 
• What is the new Mailing Address going to be for the Borrower and Co-Borrower? You will need to correctly update their Contact records. Will you use the Present Address or the Property Address from the Deal record?
• Do you want to set a task for yourself as a reminder to send a Stay-in-Touch email in 30 days to the Borrower and Co-Borrower? This might be a good idea on owner occupied purchase deals because more than likely some of their contact information will change after the move. 

Alright, I think you get the point, there is a lot going on with a record when you switch it to a Closed stage. So we thought we would try and automate this process as much as possible while still allowing you to make specific decisions on each setting.

In the MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com Winter '08 release for customers on a managed package we have added a Close Out button to the deal record. This will take you to a single page where you will be able to make all the necessary changes to a Deal and it’s correlating Borrower and Co-Borrower Contact records from a single screen. We think this new feature will help you save a lot of time and keep your database in great shape. I know my transaction coordinator will be happy to have this feature because doing this manually took a lot of clicking and it was easy to forget to update things (yes, I still right loans).

When will Winter '08 for MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com get here? The wait is almost over; I have one batch of features left to report to you and I will post on them shortly. The release is actually completed and we are doing final testing and writing the release update notes. It will be generally available for all MyLoanBiz users that are on a managed package release next Monday, November 5th 2007.

Winter '08 Release - Mass Delete Feature

Alright, this is not the most exciting of features but it is a simple little thing that I often wished I was able to do in Salesforce. Mass Delete from a list view on both the Contact and Deal tabs will be part of our up coming Winter '08 release.

This one is simple to explain. When you are on any list view on the Contact or Deal tab you can simply click the check box next to any of the records in the view. Then you simply hit the Mass Delete button at the top of the list view and you get an alert box asking if this is really what you want to do. Hit yes and the list view reloads minus those records. This is especially handy when you have imported a number of records and you want to filter through the list and delete out duplicates.

A few of you might be saying that there already is Mass Delete for Contacts. So why did we create our own? Well, it is not available directly from a list view and it is not all that straight forward if you are new to Salesforce. I think you will find this Delete button to be a bit more intuitive and something that you use more often. The other delete function is more for administrators and advanced users.

We have one last feature that we are wrapping up that I will post about shortly and then we are onto writing the release notes and then getting this version launched. I promise we will work to get this release out ASAP.

Winter '08 Release - Mass Email Deal Feature

The standard Mass Email feature that works with Contacts in Salesforce is very powerful. I often use it to send out an email to a specific subset of people in my database. For example, I send a weekly newsletter to all my contacts with a Group Membership setting of Real Estate Agent. This is an easy way to stay in front of a large group of people. Marketing is all about being constantly top-of-mind with your target audience. As an originator you want to always be focused on establishing your brand and the Mass Email feature makes this easy.

I often wished I could send a mass email to a set of contacts based on criteria from a Deal record rather than being limited to filtering by fields on the Contact record. For example, I wanted to be able to identify all the deals that were in a Pre-Approval stage and had no activity in 14 days and send them a mass email to just touch base. I also wished I could send an email in mass to all contacts with a deal that was an ARM rather than have to do send them one by one.

I am excited to announce that we are in the final stages of testing our up-coming Mass Email Deal feature. This new functionality will add a Mass Email button to all Deal list views. Here is how it will work:

1. You will simply select an existing list view on the main Deal tab or create a new one specific to you filter criteria.
2. You will then be able to select all deals that are in the view or check them off individually.
3. Next you will click the Mass Email button and be able to then browse through your email template folders and select an email template (we tried to mimic Salesforce.com's standard Mass Email flow in order to minimize your learning curve).
4. After selecting a template you will be able to send your email to all the contacts that are linked to your selected deals as the Primary Borrower.
5. At the end a report will be generated detailing all deals that failed to have an email sent and why. The two reasons this might happen are due to a Contact record not being linked to the deal as a Primary Borrower or because the linked contact record did not have an email address.

A key design element is that we are not using the email address that is stored on a Deal record because it has an increased probability of being out-of-date. Instead we are using the email address from the Contact record of the linked Primary Borrower because this should be more current (especially if you are regularly using the Stay-in-Touch feature on the main Contacts tab).

We have a few additional features we are wrapping up and are targeting to have this new release available to all customers running a managed package version MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com in the first week of November. This will coincide with the release of Salesforce.com's own Winter '08 update.

Winter '08 Release - Mass Update Contacts Feature

MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com allows you to track some unique information related to your contacts that you may not have been collecting prior to using the application. Specifically the Group Membership, Account and Referral Source fields (see end of post for field descriptions).

 

Users who imported their old contacts had to open each record manually and update this information. Well, not any more. I am excited to introduce an upcoming feature that we are calling Mass Update Contacts.  This will be a button called "Mass Update" that you can add to your contact list views by going to Setup>App Setup>Contacts>Search Layouts and then hitting the Edit link next to Contact List View. It will show up at the top of all list views from that point forward.

You may consider creating a 3 custom list views that are called:

• Mass Update - No Group Membership
• Mass Update - No Accounts
• Mass Update - No Referral sources

Just select the appropriate field, select the operator "equal" and leave the field to the right of the operator blank. For example, if you pick the Account field this creates a filter that will pull up all contacts where the Account field is blank.

Once you run your Mass Update - No Accounts view you will be able to select specific contacts by clicking on the available check box next to each one. You can then select the Mass Update button and then select an account and hit the update button at the bottom of the screen to execute the process. This will then run a program that will open and update each record and link it to your selected account.

If you really want to get your hands on this, email us and we can give you access to the Beta version. Otherwise this will be part of our up-coming Winter '08 release which is available to all user on a packaged version of MyLoanBiz for Salesforce.com.

Definitions:

Group Membership field - Allows you to tag contacts as one or more types. Example: A contact could be tagged as a Customer and a Realtor.

Account field - Allows you to link a contact to an account record. An account is basically a company that the contact works for.

Referral Source field - Allows you to link a contact to a referral source record. A referral source is any person or thing that is forwarding business leads onto you.

Winter '08 Release - Convert Deal Feature

Lately we have been very busy working on our Winter '08 release which we have internally code named Sumatra. Yes, we are big coffee drinkers and lots of coffee has gone into this one. Our plan is to make the release generally available in the next 30 to 60 days. Next week we will start our beta cycle which entails lots of user testing and writing of documentation. I thought over the next few blog posts I would start giving you a preview of some of the key features that we will be rolling out.

The feature that I personally believe will have the greatest impact is our Deal Convert feature (think Deal-to-Contact). Currently the system is designed so that the user starts by creating a Contact and then uses the New Deal (B) or New Deal (B/CB) button to generate a new Deal.  With this new feature you will be able to do the reverse. Start by creating a Deal (essentially a 1003) and then you will hit the Convert button on the Deal to generate a Contact for the Borrower and Co-Borrower as well as an Account for each. You will also be able to assign them a Group Membership as part of the conversion process.

If you have ever used the standard Salesforce.com Sales Force Automation (SFA) application, this is similar to how you convert a Lead to a Contact, Account and Opportunity. The Convert Deal function is better suited for retail lending because it is geared toward a business-to-consumer sales process rather than the standard Salesforce.com business-to-business process.

Here is an example of what the Wizard will look like. All you will have to do is create your Deal, save it and then click the Convert button. Simply make a few selections and then your Contact(s) and Account(s) will be auto-generated. It is that easy.

Mass Stay-in-Touch

One of the advantages of working on the Salesforce.com platform is the plethora of features that are available to you. One feature in particular that I overlooked for a long time was Mass Stay-in-Touch. The Mass Stay-in-Touch wizard allows you to request updated contact information from multiple contacts at one time (think Plaxo, if you have used that program before).

On the bottom right of the main contact page there are a number of links.
To start just click the Mass Stay-in-Touch link. The first thing you are asked to do is create or select a View. This defines what people you want to send a request to. Next you are asked to choose either the standard Salesforce.com Stay-in-Touch request message or craft your own.  I recently sent a request to 300 people in my database and I used the following message...

"{!Contact.FirstName}

I hope this email finds you well. It is important to me that I have accurate information on file for you so that I can keep you up-to-date on any market changes that might impact the decisions you make about your mortgage.

Could you please take a look at the information that I have for you below and let me know if it's out of date?"

The final step is to send out the messages. Your customer receives an email along with a contact card displaying their information. They can review it and if it is accurate hit a "No Changes" button. However, if something is out-of-date they can hit the "Update Now" button. This takes them to a web page where they can make changes to their information. When they hit submit you get an email asking you to review and accept the changes. Changes are updated automatically in your Salesforce.com database if you accept them.

Over half of the 300 people I sent my request to replied back. Literally minutes after sending the request my email box was flooded with response emails. I was amazed at how positively my clients responded to the reuest. I highly recommend that you give it a try.