Quick Start – CRM Basics

Thank you for choosing BNTouch for your CRM solution. Our platform is filled with tools and features to help your mortgage business run smoothly, efficiently, and profitably. Starting here, you can learn what BNTouch has in store for your business, how to access and use the various elements of the CRM, and how to get the most out of them in your day-to-day operations.

First, let’s go over the basics of our CRM. At its core, our CRM can be used to manage your borrower information and stay in touch with them. It can also be used to manage your realtors and other partners that are participants in your loans. Our database management allows you to start a client as a lead, move them to a prospect, and follow as they submit an application, enter processing, and eventually reach funded status. Beyond this, it can also be used to follow up with clients and keep track of any that have canceled.

BNTouch can also keep track of your conversations and communications, like your voicemail and email, and keeps time stamps on these communications to organize your work. Our CRM allows you to communicate directly through the system through email, SMS text messages, mobile app messages, and customized portal websites. These communications can be handled before, during, and after transactions.

Our marketing system allows you to stay in touch with everyone by building your own campaigns or using pre-built ones from our content exchange. Our CRM uses automation for these campaigns to save you time and make your life easier.

The two main places where your client information will be stored are the Mortgages and Partnerships tabs. Your borrower database in the Mortgages tab is specifically for current clients, prospective clients, and past borrowers. Your partner database in the Partnerships tab, on the other hand, is for your realtors and anyone else who participates in a mortgage transaction with you. You can also keep track of vendors, friends, and family members here to handle your communication with them.

If you have the BNTouch mobile app downloaded, you can even stay in touch with your clients and partners, manage your marketing campaigns, and keep track of your business information while on the road, letting you build relationships face-to-face. You can then enter the people you meet into your CRM, and using automated rules called ‘triggers,’ marketing campaigns can be started for these records and ‘drip’ on these clients. You can even take care of holiday greetings and monthly newsletters to keep yourself ‘top of mind’ with your clients on an ongoing basis.

Speaking of marketing campaigns, you’ll find that you have many options available in BNTouch, including holiday and birthday campaigns, time-change reminders, newsletters, in-processing campaigns, partner-focused campaigns, and those used to keep in touch with current and past partners. These campaigns can be easily pulled for use in your business from our Content Exchange, a large library of pre-made campaigns. You can also make campaigns from scratch if you prefer!

In addition to marketing campaigns focused on your clients, you can also set tasks and reminders for yourself and your staff to help organize your own time. The same automated triggers can be used to keep yourself on-track with changes in your pipeline, including reminders to make calls at set intervals, communicating new information with your partners, and more.

The CRM is organized into several tabs at the top of the page. Our Dashboard has several functions that help you stay on task in your CRM, including a calendar that shows your tasks and agenda, making them easy to navigate and update. You’ll have separate databases for your Mortgage clients and Partners, and you can even keep tracks of your Recruiting in a database as well. In addition, you can always search through all the information in your CRM using the box above, including clients, partners, campaigns, and more. If you need help at any time, look for the Video Icon in the upper-right corner of the screen to access training materials for whatever page you are currently using.

You can always access detailed information about your business and the records in your databases from the various reports in our Reports tab. You can also use the Options Tab to set Alerts and Notifications for yourself to automatically receive reminders and a daily digest of your tasks. Similar daily reports can be sent for your requested documents and in-processing records, and a report on your marketing status can be sent out each week.

Records can be added to your databases in BNTouch in many ways. You can add clients or partners manually by clicking the “+” sign markers by the Mortgages or Partnerships tabs, which can help when you need to add a single record at a time. To save time, you can also use spreadsheets with record information, including lists of leads, past records, or current partners, and import several records at once in the Options tab. You’ll need to do this separately for your borrowers and your partners, but this can still save you from having to enter each record one-by-one.

You can also create Web Forms to gather information for records directly into your database when clients or partners fill out the forms. These forms can be put on a website, loaded on a signature page, or made available elsewhere to gather marketing contact information.

If you use a Loan Origination Software, BNTouch can often sync with these systems to bring information into your CRM automatically. This can be used to continually update your CRM as new information comes in from your LOS system. You can also save your records as Fannie Mae 3.2 files and import them into your LOS software and vice versa. To sync information from your LOS, you’ll need to submit a ticket to our support staff for help.

In each client’s record, information is separated into sub-tabs for organization. The Contact Info area can be used to keep borrower and co-borrower information, including phone numbers, email addresses, and such. Mortgage Information has expandable and collapsible sections that organize mortgage, loan, purchase, program, and other types of information.

Also, you can create tasks from within a client record. This will make a reminder for you that is linked to the client’s record, making it easy to remember the client and access their information later. These tasks can also be generated from automated campaigns, so you can remind yourself, for example, to communicate with a client after a certain number of days. Tasks are helpful in several ways. Even if you forget to complete a task, the task will appear in a “Missed Tasks” list in your Dashboard tab. This will help you on-task and prevent anything from slipping through the cracks.

The “In Processing” sub-tab allows you to track each client’s progress through the mortgage process. You can enter actual and projected dates for each step, add comments for later reference, and check reports for all records In Processing for your business.

In each mortgage record, you can link your partners as “participants”. This will keep them updated when the record progresses through the pipeline and when information is added or updated for the record. You can request that client send you documents and keep them attached to their records in your system, and the CRM can send routine reminders until the client uploads said documents through our secure portal. Additional sub-tabs in each Mortgage or Partnership record can be used to maintain a lead farm, analyze refinance options for your clients, or switch between multiple loans for the same record.

Further, a Tracker is available to the right of each record; this keeps track of what communication and updates have taken place for this record and by whom. Some types of entries will automatically appear here, but you can also create your own tracker events by clicking “Add Event”. This way, you can make notes on client records for yourself and your staff. To the right of each screen, you can see “The Latest” changes and updates that have taken place in your CRM through each day. The “Recent” tab can be used to see the last records you accessed. This way, you can easily re-open records and communications you have been working on that day without getting lost.

Adding clients to campaigns is easy as well. Of course, you can quickly add clients manually to campaigns by finding them in the Mortgages or Partnerships tabs, checking their records, clicking “Start/Stop Campaign,” and choosing the appropriate campaign. You can also use the Campaigns sub-tab in a record to start, pause, or remove any campaign for that record. The easiest way, however, is to set your campaigns up with automated triggers. These will tell your system, depending on what kind of record it is, which part of the marketing sequence pipeline it is in, and other criteria, can be used to automatically add the record to the campaign. For example, this can be used to automatically add new homebuyers to a particular campaign.

Setting up these rules can take a bit of time, but they will save you much more time overall. Every day, you can take just a few minutes in your day to improve your automation in your CRM—in no time, you’ll find yourself becoming a top-producer. Our CRM is really meant to help you stay in touch with your clients and to keep on track with your business.

This article is only a general overview of your CRM and is meant to serve as a starting point for learning more. If you would like to continue this “tour” of your CRM and learn the fundaments of marketing, start with the “Marketing Basics” article or training video.

If you would instead like to start a full training for your CRM in which you learn what each feature does in each tab, you should begin our Initial Training series with the first part, “Account Setup”. This article and video will help you configure options for your account, and the rest of the Initial Training series will progress through each section of your CRM in order, giving you a more complete understanding of its capabilities and the opportunities available for your business.