As a mortgage institution, you want high-quality leads with plenty of additional detail to help your sales team nurture them into customers. But even once you find a way to get those leads (hint: we can help), you need a system to keep them organized. The last thing you want is to invest money in generating the lead only to have it vanish into the ether.

That’s why so many successful companies — mortgage lenders and otherwise — turn to a customer relationship management (CRM) system. With a CRM tool, you unlock more potential from every individual’s contact information you get. 

What CRMs do: a basic overview 

If you’re already familiar with the functionality of a CRM, feel free to skip to the next section. But if you want a little refresher course in everything this type of tool can do, you’re in the right place. 

At its core, a CRM is a way to organize information about individuals. It gives you a way to store their contact information and track interactions with them, like sales and marketing touches. In the mortgage world, it can provide the foundation from which your loan officers can build. It helps them stay organized so they can deliver the best possible homebuying experience for your leads. 

That might all sound fairly vague, so let’s look at a few specific ways your team can use a CRM:

• Relationship building: Using your CRM to track interactions with your contacts doesn’t just give you visibility. It presents the opportunity to tailor communications and service offerings to them. Within the CRM, your loan officers can see a thorough overview of everything your company knows about that individual. This lets them personalize service so that lead feels like more than a number or a cog in your machine. 
• Automating tasks: A CRM isn’t just a digital Rolodex. It can automatically send emails, schedule appointments, generate reports, and more. This frees up time for your team so that they can focus on more important work, like the aforementioned relationship building. 
• Lead nurturing: With automated emails and drip campaigns, you get a way to nurture leads by providing them with valuable information (like current rates). This builds trust with your brand and helps to warm leads even between touches from your sales team. 
• Increasing closings: A CRM makes it easy to track your entire pipeline so you can see which leads need what attention. This lets you course-correct when needed, check in when it’s been a while, and take other strategic action to support an uptick in closings. 

Long story short, a mortgage CRM is an essential tool for any loan officer who wants to nurture their leads, build relationships with their clients, and close more loans.

Choosing the right CRM for your team

At this point, you might be convinced that a CRM is a good idea for your lending institution. Whether you already have one in place or you want to pick a new solution to integrate, following these steps can help you maximize what the system delivers: 

1. Get clear on your needs. Start by making a list of things an ideal customer relationship management tool would do for your company. Then, ask your team for their suggestions. Compile that into a must-haves list. If you already have a CRM, cross-reference that with the solution you have up and running.  
2. Take your research online. If your CRM delivers on what you need, great. But if it’s falling short, explore other options. And if you’ve never deployed a CRM before, you’re in great shape to shop your choices. Take a look at the features various CRM providers list on their website. If you want a list of popular mortgage CRMs to help you get started, you’ll find it in the section below.
3. Check for compatibility with other tools. Speaking of the list below, we’ve highlighted these CRM options because they integrate with a variety of other mortgage solutions, including our BankingBridge suite of tools. Before you dive into a new CRM or make the switch, confirm that the system you’re considering plays nicely with other solutions in your existing tech stack. 
4. Take it for a test drive. A good CRM provider will offer you a demo. Get into the weeds and make sure the tool performs the way you expected. It can be helpful to have a few other key members of your team try it out and provide their feedback, too. 

Supported CRM integrations

Once you get a CRM up and running, it’s time to start unlocking everything it can do for your mortgage company. 

Ideally, that’ll be easy. Here at BankingBridge, for example, we leverage Zapier to power the integration and drive data flow between leading mortgage CRMs and BankingBridge tools. In fact, if your team is tech savvy, you could likely deploy Zapier to connect your CRM to your other tech solutions, giving those tools your CRM data to better interact with leads and customers.

Best case scenario, though, you don’t have to do any legwork to integrate your CRM with other tools. For example, we already have BankingBridge integrations set up with all of these CRM solutions: 

• Bonzo 
• Big Purple Dot
• BNTouch 
• Follow Up Boss 
• HubSpot 
• Insellerate
• Jungo
• LeadMailbox 
• Lodasoft 
• Ricochet360 
• Salesforce 
• Shape 
• Surefire
• Total Expert
• Velocify

Once integrated, you can use BankingBridge to turn your website into a lead generation tool. With customer rate dashboards that feed into lead workflows, for example, you can capture contact information in exchange for providing that individual with a personalized rate. Once that person completes the lead workflow, we automatically feed their info into your CRM so your sales team can go to work. 

This doesn’t work in just one direction, either. In the same way we can capture leads and tee them up in your CRM, we can also use data from your CRM to support your lead nurturing. For example, we can leverage your CRM contacts to create drip email campaigns. These campaigns provide people with useful information on a regular basis, keeping them warm and building trust with your lending institution. 

This is just a quick overview of how we can integrate with your CRM to drive more closings for your team. To learn more, schedule a demo with us today. 

‍