Company Profile
MILA is a wholesale lending company based in Washington. MILA’s vision is to create a seamless loan process that provides consistent underwriting, real-time loan decisions and a closed loan in less than four hours. With DecisionPoint, their revolutionary web portal, they offer instant automated underwriting and real-time loan management tools 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
In 2004, MILA was included in the ‘Top 25 Tech Savvy Mortgage Lender’ list by Mortgage Technology News. Layne Sapp, their founder and CEO topped that in 2005 when he was named the winner of Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year® Award in Service along with being named in Puget Sound Business Journal’s Top 100 Largest Private Companies in Washington.
The Challenge
MILA’s sales are driven by their team of Business Development Managers (BDM’s). Each BDM is challenged with building up a personal customer base and helping their customers use MILA’s products and services to close loans. Because the product is a web service, most BDM’s have never see or meet their customers. Common communication with customers was by phone or email.
While MILA’s marketing department was sending email marketing to its customer base, the sales managers were allowing their BDM’s to create their own marketing and sales messages. Most of this was done with Outlook® and clip art. There was no consistency in the message, content or appearance. They had no control over the lists used for email blasting and no control over the content. This presented both a branding and legal problem that they needed to get under control.
The Solution
MILA was able to distribute access for each of their BDM’s to their Digital Mail Maker account. Each user’s access included a personal contact management tool, private user name and passwords and access to all sales and marketing templates that are continuously prepared and updated for their client communications. The company hired a Field Marketing Director who was tasked with content updates and monitoring the communication created by their BDM’s.
Additionally, MILA is able to preserve the client lists and marketing history created by BDM’s that have since left the company. These lists are easily assigned to other BDM’s in the company.
The Results
MILA’s sales and marketing efforts are tightly controlled and coordinated by their sales and marketing directors through Digital Mail Maker’s administration system. The BDM’s enjoy the simplicity and ease of using the system for their marketing efforts whether they’ve been hired as inside or outside sales representatives.
At the time of adoption in May of 2003, MILA employed 70 BDM’s who marketed themselves independently. They funded an average of $50 million in real estate loans per month. Today MILA employs nearly 265 BDM’s who fund an average of $425 million per month. Imagine: 850% growth in just over two years!
