A 30-day CRM implementation plan for a lending brokerage

Pick one person who owns the rollout. In a small shop that is usually the owner or the processor who already keeps the spreadsheet honest. They decide the stages, approve the import and answer questions for the first month.

Then write down three numbers from the old way, so you can tell at day 30 whether the new system helped:

• Speed to first call on new leads, in hours. See speed to lead for loan brokers.
• Submissions per funded deal: how many lenders a deal goes to before it funds.
• Commissions outstanding: how much lenders owe you that you have not reconciled.

1. Users and roles. Invite everyone with the right role. Reps should see only their own leads and deals; managers and processors see the floor. Decide this now, because it is awkward to take access away later.
2. Pipeline stages and lead statuses. Use the words your team already says out loud (App out, Docs in, Submitted, Approved, Funded). Fewer stages beat more.
3. Lead sources, with cost. List every vendor and channel and what each costs, so the source report can show cost per funded deal from the first week.
4. Decline reasons. A short, fixed list (revenue too low, too many positions, NSFs, industry, credit). Free-text declines cannot be reported on.
5. Custom fields. Only the ones you actually filter or report on. Everything else goes in notes.
6. Email templates. The application request, the docs chase, and one submission template per lender type.

In our CRM each of these is a lesson in the owner and admin setup track of Learn, written from the app itself.

Import in this order: leads, then merchants and owners, then lenders, then open deals. Leave closed and dead files for last, or leave them in an archive. Check duplicates on a small file before you run the big one. The migration guide has the export and clean-up steps. If you are coming from spreadsheets, the Google Sheets layout post shows how tabs map to records.

• Lenders and their criteria. Enter your top ten lenders properly: programs, minimum revenue, time in business, credit, positions, industries and states. This is the part that pays back fastest, because matching is only as good as the criteria.
• Commission defaults and rep splits. Set the default split per rep and partner, so every funded deal creates the right expected commissions.
• The pilot. Two reps, one experienced and one new, work every new lead and deal only in the CRM for the week. Everyone else stays on the old system.
• A daily ten minutes. The rollout owner reads the pilot's pipeline every morning and fixes whatever confused them the day before: a missing status, a field nobody fills in, a template that reads wrong.

Move the whole team. New leads and deals go only into the CRM; the old system or sheet becomes read-only for anything opened before the cutover. Run the morning pipeline meeting from the CRM's board and dashboard, not from anyone's notes. When a rep asks where something is, show them in the system rather than answering from memory. That is how the habit forms.

• Move the deals that were still open in the old system, or let them finish there and mark the old system retired on a set date.
• Upload last month's lender commission statements and reconcile them, so commissions outstanding starts from a clean number.
• Compare the three numbers from day zero. If speed to first call has not improved, look at who gets new leads and how they hear about them.
• Cancel the old subscription once a full month of deals lives in the new system and an export of the old data is saved somewhere safe.