Midwest Banking Giant Accelerates Sales Productivity During COVID

Relationship managers embrace Groove’s productivity and messaging capabilities to efficiently manage SBA PPP workflows for thousands of clients

The Highlights

A publicly traded financial institution with banking branches in 15 states has grown steadily over the years, but it continued to struggle with getting their relationship managers to use Salesforce.  As a result, sales leaders didn’t have a reliable way to assess their pipeline or create accurate sales forecasts. That attitude quickly changed when Congress passed the Paycheck Protection Program to help small businesses deal with the economic impacts of COVID-19. Overnight, this financial institution needed to find a way to accurately and efficiently administer the plans for hundreds of small businesses, and it found Groove solved a critical usability gap between Salesforce and G-Suite. Once their relationship managers discovered the productivity enhancing features of Groove, it also started to use it for activity tracking, online scheduling, and creating automated flows to easily manage their growing book of business. As a result, this institution has dramatically increased adoption rate across all customer facing teams since embarking on their digital transformation journey.

Big Wins

• Increased Salesforce adoption
• Significant gains in tracked activities for relationship managers
• Productivity gains save relationship managers hours per week

The Full Story

This publicly traded financial institution with $10 billion in assets under management offers a range of business and personal banking services and wealth management services to customers via a network of more than 50 branch and loan production offices across 15 states. While the financial institution had implemented Salesforce to manage customer relationships, it struggled to get sales reps and relationship managers to adopt it. As a result, this institution didn’t have accurate data for understanding their pipeline or setting forecasts. The approval of the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) to help small businesses affected by COVID 19 created a forcing function for technology adoption, and this institution turned to Groove to help accelerate their digital transformation.  

Salesforce Adoption Challenges

This institution serves its commercial, retail, and wealth management customers with a highly experienced team of sales reps and relationship managers. Ever since rolling out Salesforce, it had struggled to get reps to use the CRM to log their activities or access relevant information on a regular basis.

It was a dogfight every day to get Sales to input sales into Salesforce. – VP of Application Development

“The executives want to see the pipeline numbers, but the numbers aren’t correct if the data is not in Salesforce,” continued the VP of Application Development.

COVID 19 Creates an Immediate Need for Digital Transformation

This institution tried numerous ways to motivate reps to adopt Salesforce and other digital tools, but had limited success with every attempt. That all changed with COVID 19 and the passage of the Payment Protection Program. 

As a principal provider of small business loans, this institution quickly found itself inundated with thousands of loan applications for PPP funds. Nearly overnight, it needed to create a process for its reps to understand, track, and administer the loans – and that required relying on technology. 

“Before COVID, a lot of sales reps avoided using Salesforce, but once Congress approved the SBA Paycheck Protection Program, there were so many details to track for our business clients that they had to start using it,” said the VP of Application Development. 

Managing PPP Workflows Efficiently with Groove

This institution’s decision to track its PPP loan applications in Salesforce provided a huge incentive for reps to use Groove. By bringing Salesforce information into the inbox, Groove enabled the institution’s commercial, retail, and wealth management reps to efficiently manage their accounts without interrupting their workflows.

Before long, we started seeing strong adoption of Groove, as reps quickly saw how much easier it was to access Salesforce data right from their email.– VP of Application Development

Groove’s automated messaging Flows also played a key role in helping reps keep customers informed throughout the PPP process. Instead of manually sending loan information to each customer, relationship managers could use templates to send information to customers at scale. This capability became critical as demand for information surged after the PPP was approved.

“All of a sudden our team has 75 clients that want to know what’s going on with the PPP process,” said the VP of Sales. “Being able to leverage Groove Flows to send out that information has been incredibly beneficial.”

Automating Day-to-Day Tasks Gives Reps More Time to Build Relationships

Groove is eliminating tedious and time-consuming tasks so reps across its commercial, retail, and wealth management divisions can spend more time building relationships. In addition to bringing Salesforce data into existing workflows and automating messages, this institution is also using Groove’s online scheduler to significantly reduce the time spent setting up meetings with clients. 

“Groove is great for scheduling meetings with clients and prospects,” said a Retail Branch Manager. “It syncs immediately with everyone’s Google calendar, which eliminates the back and forth email negotiation or phone calls with everyone’s busy schedules.”

Groove helps this institution maintain regular relationships with its customers, which is key to both customer satisfaction and retention. From making users more productive so they can spend more time with customers to automating messages so they don’t miss key moments in the customer journey, Groove is enabling it to create deeper relationships with its customers.

Our relationship managers and salespeople will tell you that they are a lot more productive with Groove, and they’ve got a better plan for staying in touch with contacts and centers of influence.– VP of Sales

“Each business banking salesperson might have 10 centers of influence, and Groove enables them to keep them up-to-date with our latest news,” continued the VP of Sales.

Activity Tracking Enables Management to Trust Pipeline and Forecasts

This institution’s account teams no longer have to spend time logging calls or emails to Salesforce. Groove allows this provider to automatically log every customer interaction as they happen. 

“Since rolling out Groove, I’ve been hearing reps say, ‘I hardly ever manually log calls and emails in Salesforce anymore, because it’s so easy to do it in Groove, right from my Gmail,’” said the VP of Application Development.

Advanced automatic activity tracking doesn’t just save each user time, it also provides management with visibility into the performance of sales reps and relationship managers. Having more complete activity data gives management the information it needs to get a more accurate view of their pipeline and make more reliable sales forecasts.

With Groove, management gets more accurate data and our sales team gets a platform that makes their life easier – everybody wins.– VP of Application Development

Benefits of Groove’s Salesforce Native Platform

Groove’s Salesforce-native platform provides additional benefits to this institution in terms of ease of administration and industry-leading security. Groove maintains Salesforce as the system of record, which enables it to be managed in one-tenth the time of other providers. It also eliminates security concerns from maintaining data in a secondary database.

“Groove is more than a sales engagement platform, it’s an informational bridge between the Salesforce and Google ecosystems,” said the CIO.  “With Groove, our sales teams can access real-time account history and update Salesforce without leaving their inboxes, which saves them time and increases their effectiveness.”

The Results

• Increased Salesforce adoption
• Significant gains in tracked activities for relationship managers
• Productivity gains save relationship managers hours per week