Chief Revenue Officer, Shape Software
Kevin Benner is the Chief Revenue Officer at Shape Software, where he leads revenue, marketing, and customer growth. He brings over 23 years of experience in mortgage lead generation and sales technology.
Mortgage texting software is judged by what happens after the borrower replies, not by how many texts it can send. Any tool can send. The ones worth paying for put the reply on the borrower’s record and stop the automation. Then they show a loan officer who needs an answer. Everything else is a bulk […]
Social media approval software for loan officers decides one thing: whether compliance sees a post before the public does. Every product in this category answers that question one of two ways. Some stop a post until someone approves it. Others find posts after they go live and flag the problems. Pick the wrong kind, and […]
A text message cadence fails when the texts stop arriving, not when the copy is weak. Carriers filter numbers they do not trust. Borrowers block numbers that text too often. Regulators set hours and opt-out rules. A mortgage text message cadence has to clear all three before timing or wording matters. Four ways a text […]
Referral partner tracking breaks on the first step: nobody records who sent the borrower. The loan closes, the agent expects credit, and the CRM shows “phone call” as the lead source. Fix that one field and most of the rest follows. Referral partner tracking starts with what you record Give partners their own record type, […]
The calls your floor misses are the ones a competitor answers. An AI answering service for mortgage closes that gap only if it does less than the vendors promise. It takes a few details, books a time, and gets the borrower to a licensed loan officer. Anything more starts to look like loan origination. What […]
Direct mail wins or loses on the list, and the rate environment decides how good the list can be. Mortgage direct mail marketing works for acquisition and for retention, in the right market. A mortgage direct mail campaign is mostly a data decision. The design matters less than anyone selling design will tell you. How […]
Most lenders reading about the Encompass SDK transition deadline have nothing to migrate. That is not what the coverage suggests. The subject has produced a steady run of posts about an Encompass SDK sunset, an end-of-life, a cutover. Several carry a countdown clock. Some of it is written by firms that sell migration work. Here […]
Ask a shop how they nurture mortgage leads and you get a sequence. Ask when a lead leaves that sequence and the room goes quiet. That is the whole problem. Nurture gets built as a destination rather than a state with edges, so leads fall in and never come out. The list grows, engagement falls, […]
Your past client is not forgetting you. They are refinancing before you thought they would. Client retention for loan officers gets taught on a purchase cycle of five to seven years. Send a newsletter, mail a card, call at the anniversary, stay top of mind until they move house. Client retention gets treated as a […]
Most lists of the best CRM for banks and credit unions are general mortgage CRM lists. Each entry gets a sentence about members added to it. That misses what actually separates these platforms for a depository. Your mortgage division runs like any mortgage shop, so the mortgage capability has to be real. But you also […]
Recruiting conversations spend all their technology time on one question, which is what platform the producer will be on. That is rarely the expensive part. The expensive part is everything those systems render, and the reason nobody plans for it is that no system moved. A branch transition checklist that only lists platforms will miss […]
“Bidirectional” describes how the loan file gets created. It does not describe the relationship afterward. That distinction is the whole subject and almost nothing published on it says so. A loan can start in either system. Most often it starts where the application is taken, on the CRM or point-of-sale side, and gets pushed across. […]
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