Portman Asset Finance has better CRM adoption with Canvas for Zoho CRM

About the Company

Based out of Northampton, Portman Asset Finance is one of the largest hybrid asset finance broker-lenders in the United Kingdom and has helped businesses secure almost one billion pounds of finance since it was founded in 2007. They brokered or lent directly on more than a quarter of a billion pounds of finance in 2021 alone.

Portman Asset Finance have relationships with over 40 major lenders, allowing them to work with businesses to finance assets from £10,000 to £2,000,000 across a large range of sectors including beauty, transport, engineering, fitness, equipment, catering, brewing, healthcare, retail, technology, leisure, photograph, manufacturing, farming, fitness, construction, and equipment.

Introduction

Jack Welsh, CRM Developer & Business Insights Associate at Portman Asset Finance, started his journey with the company from June 2021. He had previous experience using Zoho CRM for over 2 years and wanted to deploy Zoho in the company. Having an eye for design, Welsh signed up for the early access Canvas program during implementation and used a Canvas View in the Leads module.

The need for a experience-driven usage

Conditional styling is something that the CRM community in general has been looking forward to for a long time. For Portman Asset Finance specifically, making high-priority leads jump out to the user was a challenge. And the go-to answer for this was to change the colour of something, whether it’s the lead name or the priority field. But until Canvas, this was nearly impossible to implement effectively.

Reinventing dynamic data display

"The drag-and-drop interface in Canvas feels comfortable and instantly familiar as it follows the style of website and form builders we’re all used to"

Portman Asset Finance needed a solution that was a unique fit to their industry, methods, and styles. They had many use cases for implementing Canvas, like highlighting leads, prioritising deals, and modernising the system workspace they spent most of their working day in.

With Canvas, they are now able to highlight the priority of leads in the system by using conditional rules to change the colour based on the priority and draw more attention to high priority leads, as shown in the screenshot below.

As an experienced Zoho CRM developer, it took Welsh around two days to design, build, and implement this specific design with conditional styling and all working data components.

The Canvas Advantage: Fine tune every detail

Having information presented in a way that works for them has been a time-consuming exercise for the Portman team. With the Zoho Canvas library of templates, Portman Asset Finance is now able to:

• Spend less time scrolling through data
• Skip data that isn't relevant to them
• Rearrange the related lists for a better 360-degree view
• Effortlessly drag and drop data into place
• Highlight certain fields in bright bold colors

In terms of styling, the built-in Canvas features like the box shadow, radius, and padding sliders have helped them create visually appealing designs without needing to know any CSS or HTML.

Way Forward

"I would definitely recommend Zoho Canvas to any CRM user (not just a Zoho CRM user, as this could be a reason to switch to Zoho!)"

Portman Asset Finance is rapidly expanding its operations, working with businesses from the startup stage to established enterprises and offering access to a range of asset financing products.

The Canvas experience has definitely been vital to the success of Portman Asset Finance as they no longer need to work with a boring database. The CRM has also become a more inviting environment to work in, with a complementary colour scheme and more visually appealing layout.