Technology and customer service today are moving in tandem with each other. From retail to banking and beyond, the success of any business is being measured by its ability to adapt to changing technologies and become closer to their customers in the process. And, believe it or not, customers of specialty lending are now expecting to have this same experience with their lenders.

Why is this, you may ask? The answer is pretty simple: the technology to exponentially expedite every aspect of the lending process now exists. If you’re operating by means of manual processes, recording information in endless spreadsheets, or running your sales process through a sluggish, home-grown, or legacy CRM environment, chances are your competitors are going to leave you in the dust.

The prominence of the customer experience has rendered the specialty lending industry ripe for disruption. And perhaps the most critical catalyst that can catapult your firm to the forefront of the industry is the investment in a CPQ solution. Here are just a few of the benefits you’ll realize when you decide to implement a CPQ solution such as Salesforce.

Faster pre-approvals, pre-qualifications, quotes, and offers

The process of getting from pre-approval to a quote for a loan can be a long and arduous process for both the lender and the applicant. Ask yourself: how are you going through the process of creating these components of your selling process? More importantly, do you think you are operating in the most efficient manner possible when creating your approvals and quotes?

This is where Salesforce CPQ can seriously save you time and money. With Salesforce Guided Selling, you can streamline the sales process by ensuring accurate pre-qualifications and approvals for the maximum loan amount possible. This means you no longer have to worry about assembling an approval package—it’s as simple as clicking a button and receiving professional, branded, and complete pre-quals and approvals in seconds.

Salesforce CPQ also offers unmatched control over pricing and conditions. For pricing, you no longer have to worry about a sales rep offering runaway discounts or preferred pricing, accidentally or otherwise. And control over conditional approvals equals increased pull-through revenue and higher efficiency ratios, which can mean better bottom line for the company.

Speed up employee training

A common concern in the specialty lending space is the challenge of bringing on a new employee. There is often a huge catalogue of products, pricing, and variations for a new hire to learn, and any time spent not selling is money lost for your organization.

With CPQ’s ability to guide sales reps to the products and pricing that align with a specific client, even new sales team members can start quoting accurately right away. This greatly increases your ability to ramp up your employees faster and enable them to spend more time on selling right out of the gate.

One platform means ease of maintenance and clear sales path

Companies invest a lot of time and money in automating their CRM solution to ensure a quick sales process. However, when a sales rep reaches the last mile of sending a contract to a customer, they are often bogged down by manual processes. Outside of being slow and elongating the sales cycle, the process is error-prone, relies heavily on tribal knowledge, and lacks sufficient control over discounting and approvals.

However, the Salesforce platform is easy to deploy and is maintained by an admin opposed to being architected via a fragile system of custom code. Salesforce platform solutions have all the functions of the most extensive CPQ, contracts, and revenue management solutions, but with easy drag and drop configuration.

Built on the Lightning User Experience, Salesforce CPQ is available across every device and is built with integrations across multiple other Salesforce components. Additionally, by bringing your whole lending practice onto the Salesforce platform, you are creating an overall easier selling cycle for your employees. Operating on one customer success platform allows you to leverage standard objects, the Salesforce Common Data Model, and a unified view of your overall sales path.

Don’t let yourself get lost in the throes of manual processes in your lending practice. Invest in a Salesforce CPQ solution and realize its many benefits, including quicker approval-to-quote times, efficient employee ramp-up, and the ease of a unified platform for all of your operations. Simplifying success can really be that easy.