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.
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. […]
The data is the easy part. Almost every mortgage CRM migration that goes badly goes badly for the same reason. Somebody built a careful plan for moving contacts and loan history. Nobody made a list of what else pointed at the old system. The contacts arrive fine. Three weeks later a lead source is still […]
Your dialer is working. The call connects, the handset rings, and nobody picks up. Most shops respond by buying more numbers. That is the wrong move, and it is the one the category keeps recommending. Caller reputation for mortgage lenders is scored on how your traffic behaves. It is not scored on how many numbers […]
Every implementation plan you will be handed is a list of phases. None of them is a list of decisions. That gap is the reason so many of these projects land late and land wrong. A mortgage CRM implementation is not really a build. It is eight or nine choices about how your operation works. […]
The referral ask almost always comes too late, and usually arrives bundled with a review request that competes with it. Those are two different asks and they belong at two different moments. Get the order wrong and you get neither. That is why most loan officers fail to turn closings into referrals. Why Loan Officers […]
Most anniversary campaigns are a card nobody answers, sent because the CRM had a date on file. That is not a criticism of the idea. It is a criticism of what the idea has turned into. Every guide lists the anniversary touch, tells you to automate it, and moves on. None says what the message […]
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