DEALSTRUCK
“We never sold anything before we had Salesforce, and I'm pretty certain we wouldn't have been able to grow as quickly without it.”
Dealstruck grows by helping small businesses find healthy financing.
“Our whole Salesforce contract is less than what we would pay one engineer for one year. And if we had built it ourselves, we would still be building it.”
The angel who said, “Build it in the cloud”
A trusted industry veteran then gave the founders some advice. As Senturia told the story, an early angel investor in Dealstruck told him and McLoughlin, “You know, you guys need to be on Salesforce. Don’t try to build all this yourself.” They took his advice and started building on Salesforce while the company was in its infancy. Even in those early days, the flexibility and scalability of Salesforce was a big selling point for company leaders. “We knew the system could grow as we grew,” Klein said. Today, Dealstruck manages everything on Salesforce — from customer acquisition to underwriting. The team uses Pardot to capture leads from website landing pages and then nurture them via targeted email campaigns. From there, Dealstruck’s sales team uses an AppExchange app from InsideSales.com to qualify leads and track opportunities. Klein said that tracking conversion rates and lost opportunities is a key metric for the company that drives constant “tweaking and tinkering” with the sales process. Once a loan has been made, the team employs Service Cloud and Cloud Lending, an AppExchange loan management system, to create and track service cases, including missing loan payments. Dealstruck also built out an online community for its brokers using Community Cloud. Brokers can log in to the community to track deals in the pipeline and communicate with Dealstruck staff. Dealstruck grew from two co-founders to 33 employees in just over a year, and hired employee number 50 in year two. Salesforce has grown with them, saving the startup time and money while also taking major headaches like data security off of the co-founders’ plates. “Our whole Salesforce contract is less than what we would pay one engineer for one year,” Senturia said. “And if we had built it ourselves, we would still be building it.” And that angel investor who told Senturia and McLoughlin they needed to be on Salesforce? Now he’s Dealstruck’s chairman of the board.
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