Positive Group is a leading group of Australian finance companies with a core focus on using technology to enhance the speed they offer financial services. Built on the success of asset finance specialist Positive Lending Solutions, the business now includes Positive Home Loans and Nodifi, a provider of asset finance solutions for finance professionals and licensed dealerships.

All of these companies are using Salesforce which Managing Director Tom Caesar brought into the group to help build trust with customers and provide excellent service. “It can be quite intimidating for new customers to navigate the world of loans and insurance products,” Caesar says. “To position ourselves as a trusted source of information, we’ve worked hard to reach out to customers and used Salesforce to take them on a journey with our company.”

Positive Group’s success with Salesforce has helped the company to grow at a phenomenal pace and it is now diversifying to meet more customer needs and provide new opportunities for partners.

The Group began using Salesforce in 2008 to reduce the complexity of customer communication and improve service through greater personalisation of emails. Not long after, it extended its use of the platform to increase automation and gain deeper insights into sales data.

For the first time, management were able draw a clear correlation between the number of sales per team member and the number of outgoing phone calls. As a result, they decided to set the sales team higher targets for outgoing calls while using Salesforce to relieve them of admin. The new approach worked and Positive Group increased its revenue by an average of 2x in each of its first four years of using Salesforce.

At the heart of Positive Group’s more effective approach to sales, is its use of Salesforce and apps from the AppExchange to work smarter and streamline administration. New Voice Media has been especially valuable as it allows sales to automatically schedule calls to new leads and record these calls so they can go back and review them. This helps team members understand what makes a call successful and adopt best‑practice scripts and strategies to reach their targets.

Positive Group has more recently set up a processing centre in the Philippines and uses Omni-Channel Routing in Service Cloud to allocate the team tasks like contract generation. It is also using apps like SMS Magic and DocuSign to streamline everything from communication to contract management. These efficiencies allow the sales team to spend even less time on administration and more time serving customers.

Sales reps are now able to contact around 80% of new leads over the phone as compared to only 50% previously. In addition, on the B2B side of the business, lead to settlement rates on partner submitted applications is an impressive 60%.

 Andre D'Costa, Marketing Manager at Positive Group said that the use of Salesforce and integration with tools like Equifax and illion also helped to qualify applicants and ensure strict compliance. “With all of the current regulations, people are worried about the difficulty of getting a loan and from our side it requires more checks and validations, but Salesforce makes this seamless. The process is all automated and applications won’t move to the next stage until we have the right information and everything is compliant,” said D’Costa.

Positive Group is now using Marketing Cloud to keep in contact with customers throughout the customer lifecycle. With Journey Builder, the company can automate and personalise communications to seamlessly manage the entire customer journey, from onboarding to post settlement and periodic check-ins.

“One of our main challenges in the past was that we didn’t have an easy way to keep in touch with leads and customers, but Marketing Cloud has completely turned that around. We can now put them on automated email journeys and remarket to them, and also target like audiences on social media using Advertising Studio,” said D’Costa.

The ability to exclude current customers from certain ad campaigns and target them with automated emails instead ultimately helps Positive Group to reduce the cost of marketing while building better customer relationships.

“We can now reach out to customers every six to 12 months and see if there’s anything else we can help them with. And by automating all of this, Salesforce helps us build loyalty and secure more sales from the same customer without having to spend more on advertising,” said Tim Wells, Head of Customer Experience at Positive Group.

In the past 18 months, the Positive Group has doubled the size of its business. This is partially through the launch of Nodifi which is growing quickly with 500 partners already.

To grow even further, Positive Group is planning to ramp up its use of Marketing Cloud and is exploring how it can use Einstein Analytics to make better use of its data and connect customers to the right lenders. It is also set to launch a new consumer lending brand in 2020 which will offer customers a fully online application process and 24/7 support.

“We still have so much room to grow and will be tapping into more Salesforce capabilities to take advantage of new opportunities,” said D’Costa.