Case Study: LendKey Gets an EightCloud Salesforce Makeover

LendKey is an online lending platform that allows consumers to obtain or refinance federal and private student loans as well as home improvement loans from hundreds of credit unions and banks located throughout the United States. Founded in 2009, LendKey’s partner lenders have collectively issued over $3.2 billion in education and home improvement loans.

Lendkey.com

Business Challenges

Like many fast-growing companies, LendKey had outgrown the tools they used to organize and manage various aspects of their sales process. Although they set up Salesforce to manage their client relationships, LendKey wanted to customize the platform to facilitate their sales process. 

Furthermore, a great deal of client information, including time-sensitive renewal documentation, was maintained outside of Salesforce. Employees routinely searched through multiple spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives whenever they needed to locate critical details or confirm whether or not clients or lenders had submitted required documentation on a timely basis. 

When LendKey’s Salesforce administrator left the organization, EightCloud was brought on board to update their Salesforce environment with the twin goals of streamlining their cumbersome sales process and improving visibility into key metrics such as lending volume.

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EightCloud has been a great partner. They’ve focused on understanding our business and adapting Salesforce to meet our operational and documentation needs while ensuring an efficient, user friendly experience. From a sales management perspective, we now have more transparency into monitoring and understanding the sales pipeline through opportunity stages. We’re so pleased with the operational and knowledge sharing gains achieved that we’re already in discussions with EightCloud to enhance another of our business units.”

 – Meredith Baer, VP Product Operations, LendKey

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What We Did

• Conducted a thorough assessment and evaluation of LendKey’s existing Salesforce environment.
• Interviewed key stakeholders to uncover pain points, establish priorities for new development projects and identify training needs.
• Customized Salesforce to align with LendKey’s unique opportunity lifecycle, sales process and product line.
• Conducted numerous working sessions with LendKey to test new Salesforce functionalities and ensure that API integrations with DocuSign functioned as expected.
• Provided ongoing training on using Salesforce to ensure knowledge transfer.
• Leveraged Salesforce’s Lightning© functionality to make it easy for the LendKey client services team to take ownership over Salesforce and make future modifications as needed.

Key projects completed by EightCloud: 

• Created Salesforce dashboards to help sales managers track progress against key metrics, such as product revenue, loan origination volume and lending commitments.
• Completed the integration of DocuSign with Salesforce. The resulting paperless process improved employee productivity and increased on-time contract renewals. 
• Enhanced the system security to limit access rights of authorized users to specific LendKey clients.

Results

EightCloud’s consultative approach allowed us to quickly grasp LendKey’s unique business model and sales strategy. We then leveraged our comprehensive understanding of Salesforce to create custom solutions that dramatically improved employee productivity and added visibility into multiple areas of their sales process.

Streamlined the annual renewal process, boosting on-time renewals from 88% to 94%. EightCloud completed the integration of DocuSign into Salesforce and set up automatic reminders to boost the timely completion of renewal contracts. This created a paperless process for generating, tracking and saving documentation generated during the annual renewal process for the lending program. This integration with DocuSign added much needed data validation and replaced a spreadsheet-based tracking process that was manually updated. LendKey employees no longer have to send multiple emails to clients to obtain signatures or follow up on missing information. Instead of searching through multiple spreadsheets, emails and shared drives to get the information they need, the client services team can easily track each stage of the renewal process.

Helped redefine and streamline the sales process, aligning Salesforce to meet their needs. LendKey can now take advantage of automated features such as email reminders, to ensure that critical client management tasks do not fall through the cracks. They can also more easily track their progress towards specific revenue goals and make adjustments as necessary. Thanks to on-demand reporting, LendKey is also now able to assess where a specific opportunity stands in relation to the overall opportunity lifecycle. 

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