Case Study: How BLC Lending Put Its Loans and Investor Capital in One CRM
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Client: BLC Lending, a commercial real estate lender · Platform: HubSpot Sales Hub and Marketing Hub Professional · Partner: CRM Assist
At a glance
CRM Assist moved BLC Lending off a standalone email tool and scattered spreadsheets onto a single HubSpot portal in about nine weeks. It now runs both the loan business and investor relations.
| Contacts consolidated | 3,900+ from an email marketing tool, phones and personal lists |
| Companies | 1,690 borrowers, brokers, lenders and partners |
| Loan deals tracked | 251, with nine years of history |
| Funded loans on record | 152 |
| Active loan pipeline | 33 deals |
| Investor relationships | 107 in a dedicated pipeline |
| Email activity | Up ninefold from setup to the first full month live |
The challenge
BLC Lending makes commercial real estate loans, mostly bridge loans, across more than 30 states. It also raises capital from outside investors. That means running two businesses at once, and before HubSpot neither had a system of record:
- Contacts were scattered across an email marketing tool, phones and each loan officer's own lists. Most records were bare email addresses with no company attached.
- Key tracking lived in spreadsheets, including lead hand-offs between loan officers, which affect how they're paid.
- Deal sources were a blind spot. No one could say which brokers, channels or campaigns produced the loans that closed.
- Investor outreach had no home. The stages had been sketched out but lived in no system.
- Marketing ran on relationships, mostly email announcements with no link to deal activity.
The goal was one system the whole team would use, showing every borrower, broker and investor relationship and where each deal stands.
The approach
CRM Assist mapped BLC's own process before configuring anything, then rolled HubSpot out in crawl, walk, run phases so the team got value early without a big-bang cutover.
- Kickoff. Set sponsors, a sales and marketing lead and an admin, with tasks tracked in HubSpot Projects.
- Business process reviews. An on-site working session and a follow-up defined both pipelines, their stages and probabilities, the deal fields, privacy rules and contact ownership.
- Configuration review. The team walked through the build and signed off on the sales setup before data went in.
- Data migration. Contact lists were cleaned by owner, with unsubscribes kept as opted out. Missing company details were filled with HubSpot's AI enrichment.
- Marketing workshop. Branding, email templates and the move off the old email tool.
- Hands-on sales training. Exercise-based, covering email and calendar sync, creating contacts and deals, and AI record summaries.
- Admin handoff. Gave BLC's admin what's needed to add fields and adjust the setup in-house.
Two integrations, the loan underwriting platform and the accounting system, were deliberately left out of the first phase. They can be connected once the team is fluent in each system on its own.
The solution
Each side of BLC's business has its own pipeline in one CRM, set up in the lending terms the team already uses.
- Loan fields that match underwriting: loan type, transaction type, property type and location, LTV, rate structure, fees, loan number and priority, plus a structured lost reason.
- A clean hand-off point: conditional loan commitment issuance marks when a deal moves to the underwriting platform, so each system does its own job.
- Deal history in the CRM: nine years of funded and declined loans are recorded, so win rates can be reported by asset class, state and loan type.
- An investor pipeline: investor relationships sit beside the loans they help fund, with classifications for retail and institutional capital.
- Privacy by design: each rep sees their own contacts and deals; leadership sees everything. Lead hand-offs are tracked in the CRM, so payouts stay accurate.
- Connected email and calendar: each rep's email and calendar sync to HubSpot, and deal alerts go to the team's chat channel.
- Consolidated contacts: lists were deduplicated by email, assigned owners and enriched with AI.
Screening loan requests with Leads
BLC turned on HubSpot Leads to handle incoming loan requests before they become deals. Each request is logged as a lead, tied to the broker who sent it, and checked against BLC's lending criteria. Requests that don't fit are disqualified quickly, so loan officers spend time only on loans BLC can fund.
Of the first 48 loan requests logged as leads, 36 (three in four) were screened out before they became deals:
| Why requests were disqualified | Leads |
|---|---|
| Construction or conversion projects | 9 |
| Deal size outside BLC's range | 5 |
| Property type BLC doesn't finance | 5 |
| Collateral, credit or cash-flow issues | 5 |
| Loan-to-value too high | 4 |
| Other or unresponsive | 8 |
One brokerage alone sent three requests outside BLC's criteria, exactly the kind of mismatch a short education email can fix.
"Who's sending us deals that we just can't get done, and how can we coach them better with automated emails on the types of deals we are getting done?" — David Manser, BLC Lending
The results
- Adoption: email activity logged in the CRM grew ninefold from setup to the first full month live, and more than 175 meetings are logged against contacts and deals.
- A live pipeline: 63 new loan opportunities were entered in the first weeks after go-live, with 33 active deals across four stages today.
- Visibility across the book: leadership can slice 251 loans by property type (13 types), state (37 states) and loan type, and see which outcomes each combination produces.
- Cleaner data: entering open deals exposed contact-database gaps the team had never noticed.
"Two-thirds of the brokers I was dealing with, that I just assumed were in our contact database, weren't. This whole process is going to really clean up our databases and help us build more robust, effective ones." — David Manser, BLC Lending
"What we really want is better data on where deals are coming from and who we're having success with, so we can market more to those same types of people." — David Manser, BLC Lending
What's next
- Deal summaries without spreadsheets: investment committee summaries generated straight from deal records.
- Smarter marketing: branded announcements, automated broker education driven by disqualified-lead reporting, and targeted investor outreach.
- Connected systems: integrations with the underwriting and accounting platforms to end double entry.
- AI deal scoring: HubSpot's predictive scoring, trained on BLC's own loan history.
About CRM Assist
CRM Assist is an AI-driven CRM consultancy based in Orange County, California, specializing in HubSpot, Salesforce and Clarify.ai implementations that cut out manual data entry through automation. Founder John Hulina leads the Orange County HubSpot User Group.
Ready to put your whole business in one CRM? Book a consultation or email john.hulina@crmassist.net.
