M E M O

To:                   All EBC Staff

From:               Sam Jones

Date:                February 4, 1998

Subject:            Using ELISa and Her Little SIS

As we’ve embarked on our trek to “Bag the BHAG” and achieve our vision of Becoming nationally recognized as the leader in providing specialized capital to Small Businesses, we identified several things we need to do very well.  Those are:

To develop systems and processes that are aligned with and reinforce our Core Values

To effectively manage the tradeoff between risk and return

To make quality decisions fast and

To become an outstanding sales and marketing organization

SIS and ELISa were designed to help us with our decision making and to help us become an outstanding sales and marketing organization.  Because I strongly believe that doing these things well is critical to our success and because I believe SIS and ELISa will help us achieve these objectives, I am making it a requirement that everyone in our organization use SIS and ELISa.

The rest of this memo provides some insight on why I am making this a requirement and how we will help you develop proficiency with SIS and ELISa.  I know that SIS and ELISa are not perfect, but they work and will help us achieve some of our key objectives.  Just as I am requiring you to use SIS and ELISa I am requiring that Abe and Steve listen effectively to the issues you raise so that we can constantly improve the usability of the system.

Here are my views on what we need to do to make quality decisions fast and to become an outstanding sales and marketing organization.

Making quality decisions fast means

• That we make a commitment to the market on how long it will take us to respond to requests, and approve loans

• That we have the ability to measure whether or not we are meeting those time commitments

• That we are able to transfer information from one part of the organization to another with minimal effort

• That we constantly look for new ways to improve our processes

Becoming an outstanding sales and marketing organization means that

• You evaluate the referral source universe in each of your markets, prioritize those sources  and develop a plan for reaching them through a combination of face to face calling effort, and targeted direct mail/fax/e-mail

• You maintain a quality record of the contacts you make so that you are able to track the success of that plan and constantly fine tune/adjust your efforts

• You know how many deals each referral source is referring, how many you are proposing, and how many you are closing.

• Based on that information you constantly fine tune and adjust your plan

• We are able to share information on referral source needs across all parts of our company

• We are able to provide you qualified referral source and end user leads

• We are able to track our success in following up and closing sales from those leads

• We are able to target specific sales or marketing efforts to specific groups based on historical data

• We provide you the advertising, PR and creative support you need to effectively execute the plan you develop

SIS and ELISa help us achieve many of these objectives because:

1.      The contact management feature of SIS gives you the ability to maintain detailed information on your referral sources and provides tools that help you better manage your time, your sales territory and your sales activity

2.      The integration of SIS (contact management) with ELISa (deal management) allows you to track deals as they move through the process, communicate leads and deal brief info in house and track the performance of you referral sources.  No other off the shelf contact management software allows you to obtain and communicate deal specific information to another member of the production team and provides information on the performance of your referral sources.

As with any database, the information in the database is only as good as what you put into it.  SIS and ELISa have been designed to make capturing the data happen as a result of activities you would perform anyway.  For instance, when you make a call on someone you put that appointment in your calendar.  With SIS if you record an appointment in your calendar and mark it for the log that call is automatically recorded.  If you send out a group of letters and mark it for the log it records that the letter was sent and maintains a copy of that letter in the file.  With ELISa, when you send a proposal letter the system automatically captures that information and updates the information for that referral source.

To help you become proficient with the system, we have structured a series of training modules to be held by conference call each Friday afternoon.  Bob Brown and David Smith will break the system down into smaller bites that will be easier to assimilate and at the end of four to six weeks, we’ll all be SIS/ELISa experts.  They want to know what areas you want them to spend time on, so please send your suggestions to Steve at your earliest convenience.

The topic this Friday is “How to Use the Calendar and Contact Management Features to Manage Referral Source Information.”

Prior to the weekly conference call, get into the system and play with it a bit.  If you have trouble getting in, call David or Bob and let them walk you through the process.  These weekly calls will be much more meaningful if you have tried the system out on your own first.

Now all that is left is for us to set a date for nationwide implementation—a date when we all commit to using the new system exclusively.  The date I have set is March 1.

I look forward to having each of you learn more about SIS/ELISa and how it can help you be more productive!

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This page was last modified on Thursday, January 16, 2003.

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