Housing Trust (HT) first deployed Salesforce in 2014.  The core use cases for Salesforce are lending, impact and development.  In the fall of 2020 Craftsman was engaged to implement critical enhancements to the Salesforce instance.  In particular, Craftsman built or enhanced the following functionality:

• Leveraged Salesforce paths to track loan origination stage and status, thereby improving pipeline management
• Created custom object and fields to connect multifamily unit loans to funding sources, thereby providing accountability to donors as well as determining amount of capital available for new loans
• Optimized reports and dashboards for internal and external purposes.

Upon completion of the project, HT engaged Craftsman’s Managed Services team to maintain the system as well as implement incremental improvements.

Over time, HT noticed that there were key functionalities that were under-utilized due to a need for additional user training.  Staff members did not fully understand how to use the existing loan Modifications and Sources modules.  New features were also being deployed that required user understanding, and new hires meant that additional training was needed to enable HT staff to effectively leverage the Salesforce instance.

The original project focused on leveraging native Salesforce functionality such as paths, object and field configuration, and dashboards/reports. The emphasis was on providing a bit more structure and order for management and reporting purposes.

Through its Managed Services Team, Craftsman worked closely with Housing Trust to create a series of desk procedures. These training documents highlighted the purpose of a specific functionality, defined relevant objects and fields, and provided details regarding related business processes. They also highlighted dashboards and reports relevant to that functionality. The team then walked through the desk procedure in a training session with select HT staff. These sessions provided an opportunity to demonstrate the purpose of a critical Salesforce feature, as well as associated processes.

Craftsman and Housing Trust started first with the Salesforce Executive Dashboard, then focused on building desk procedures related to Modifications for Multifamily Unit Loans. Afterwards HT was unrolling a new document generation solution for the First Time Homebuyer team using Conga, so Craftsman was called upon to provide training in this regard. Given HT’s recent growth, Craftsman worked with HT to provide a Salesforce orientation for new staff. The first session was provided via Zoom, after which HT and Craftsman recorded a video together which any staff member can view at any time. Finally HT and Craftsman turned their attention to tracking loan Sources, to understand how much capital is available to fund new loans.

HT continues to surface new priorities for the Craftsman Managed Services team. HT expects it will work with Craftsman to build future desk procedures and training materials.