The Power of Standard Salesforce Functionality: Deploying Account for Success

Effective customer relationship management (“CRM”) is central to lessors’ ability to make informed decisions about aircraft placement and achieve continued commercial success, both in terms of cultivating long-term airline customer relationships and optimizing fleet decisions.

LeaseWorks is built on the leading Salesforce.com CRM platform that offers a comprehensive suite of standard Salesforce functions, providing critical tools and features to streamline sales, marketing and customer relations activities. Among them is the all-important Account functionality–an essential tool for optimizing marketing strategies. In this article, we will delve into the key reasons to use standard Salesforce objects, particularly focusing on Account.

Improved Data Consistency and Integrity
Using Account enables all users to adhere to a uniform data structure, ensuring consistency that is critical for maintaining data integrity and making accurate data-driven decisions. By using Account, lessors can manage and access key customer information faster, thus enabling sales representatives to work more efficiently.

Seamless Integration
Account is designed to work seamlessly with all other features and modules, allowing for effortless data-sharing between various Salesforce tools, such as Activities, Tasks, Customer Portal and integration frameworks. Additionally, Salesforce has been investing in many out of the box solutions around Mobile, Artificial Intelligence and analytics that Account would be able to support with little customization.

Time and Cost Savings
Customizing Salesforce can be time-consuming and expensive, particularly when it comes to developing, testing and maintaining custom objects. By utilizing Account, lessors can avoid these costs and focus on more strategic initiatives.

Streamlined Reporting and Analytics
Account facilitates comprehensive reporting and analytics, enabling lessors to track key performance indicators (“KPIs”) and make data-driven decisions. Account can also be used to monitor customer trends, sales performance and other critical business metrics.

Easier Upgrades and Maintenance
Salesforce is constantly evolving and new features are regularly added to improve the platform. Account, along with other Standard Salesforce functionalities, is automatically updated and maintained, ensuring lessors have access to the latest enhancements.

Account is a vital component of an efficient and effective CRM strategy, resulting in improved data consistency, seamless integration with other Salesforce features, time and cost savings, streamlined reporting and analytics, as well as easier upgrades and maintenance. By embracing standard Salesforce functions, businesses can unlock the full potential of the Salesforce platform and drive success in their commercial endeavors.

Market Intelligence: The Analytical Lifeline for Aircraft Leasing

Market Intelligence is an important aspect of the aircraft leasing industry as it provides valuable insights into market conditions, competitor behavior and consumer trends and preferences. By collecting and analyzing data from various sources, lessors can make more informed decisions about their market strategies, ultimately leading to improved profitability and competitiveness.

Lessors’ commercial teams use Market Intelligence to benchmark the lease rate proposals they receive from airlines, aiding decisions on whether to accept or reject lease offers, negotiate rates, or determine the most cost-effective approach to providing leasing services.

At LeaseWorks, we understand the importance of Market Intelligence – our platform offers a one-stop-shop for lessors to collect and analyze relevant market data. Our Market Intelligence module constantly collects multiple data points as the application is being used and provides analytics around this, with robust reporting capabilities.

The data recorded may include information from portfolio acquisitions that have crossed your desk, both won and lost deals, third-party sources, such as world fleet and even chatter from your reps. The quality of the data can also be classified into different categories, such as High, Medium and Low, to distinguish between verified data and hearsay intelligence recorded at industry events.

Market Intelligence is an essential tool for lessors to ensure they make informed decisions and stay ahead of the competition. LeaseWorks is committed to providing lessors with the necessary tools to succeed in the highly competitive and rapidly changing aviation leasing industry.

Connecting Customer Interaction to Your Centralized Data

What is an interaction log? 

We’re all used to taking meeting notes, typically capturing them in a Word document, attaching or pasting them in an email to share with others and saving the file in a folder related to a given customer.

But meetings aren’t the only way we interact with customers. In fact, meetings may be one of the least frequent ways we interact, especially in the current environment. It’s more common to have a telephone call rather than an in-person or online meeting and the highest likelihood of all is that we’re chatting by email, with the conversation building up on a long thread or even under multiple subject lines. Or with multiple deals discussed in a single email.

The LeaseWorks concept of an interaction log includes all these formats and also one more idea from which the profound power is born.

The true power of interaction logs comes in creating relationships to your centralized fleet, customer and contract information.

Why is it important? 

Centralized data organized by key relationships allow the information to be easily found no matter who’s looking for it, why or when they’re trying to find it and in what context—a specific deal, a particular airline, or an asset type.

Consider the following scenario

Doug and Martin are marketing reps at the same lessor—Aircraft4Less Leasing. Each receives an email from an airline contact.

New deals are instantly included in weekly meeting reports

Bill is the remarketing manager for Aircraft4Less Leasing. He uses the LeaseWorks deal report to run the weekly marketing meeting. Since Doug and Martin have entered their requests into LeaseWorks, Bill’s admin, Chelsea, doesn’t need to waste time reminding marketing reps to update any spreadsheets or send emails. The three new deals will automatically show up on this week’s report.

The report is sorted by Lease expiration dates then, Type-Variant and then MSN. Bill will instantly notice that two of his team are looking to place MSN9456 when it comes off lease next year. That’s great! Multiple prospects. If he wants more action, he can encourage his team to turf up even more deals for this asset.

Doug and Martin will see this too. They’ll both be able to make better decisions about how to manage their respective deals. Find another option in case MSN9456 goes to the other deal? Make sure their prospect know there’s some competition for this aircraft… perhaps getting them to commit a little sooner? Both?

New deals are instantly included in weekly meeting reports

Remarketing deal data can help the trading team and vice versa

The power is exponential

You can see all the valuable insight that came out of just two interaction logs. When it’s multiplied over all of a lessor’s deal team members, you can imagine the possibilities.

Visualizing Your Exposure On Rent Deferrals

As we’re all aware, the severe slow down in air travel has led to cash flow constraints for airlines around the world. This has had a downstream effect on lessors who are dealing with rent deferral requests from almost all of their customers.

As per Aercap’s Q1 2020 earnings call, the company has received rent deferrals from a majority of their customers. On the call, Gus Kelly, CEO of Aercap said “We are providing them with assistance in unprecedented time in the form of rent deferrals. We’ve entered into approximately $300 million of rental deferrals and expect to enter into another approximately $300 million of deferrals. The amount deferred is generally the equivalent of two to three months of rent and repayment generally begins four to six months after.”

We heard about these requests among our lessor customers in January from their Chinese lessees. By late March, these requests were coming in at a much faster pace from airlines all over the world and started to overwhelm our customers. Based on what we heard, we started to work on a feature that would help automate rent deferral approvals and made this available in March to all our lessor customers at no additional charge.

THE PROBLEM:

Here’s what we were hearing from lessors about issues associated with rent deferral requests:

• Missing information: Marketing teams weren’t always capturing all the details of the rent deferral request. Key pieces of information such as payback period and metrics that discord the health of the airline were key for management to entertain requests.
• Tunnel vision: Management needed context about the strength of the customer relationship and the overall health of the operator. Metrics such as maintenance reserve balances or security deposits on the assets were key to approve the requests.
• No defined process and approval delays: Deferral approvals were requested through multiple emails and with varying degrees of detail. Approvals were bogging down and sometimes in the wrong inbox.
• Excel chaos: Requests from different airlines on multiple assets were collated in spreadsheets that quickly became outdated and they were distributed by email, leading to revision confusion and search delays. 

THE SOLUTION:

Record information to capture details of the request

Help marketing teams digitally record details of deferral requests including dollar value, period, proposed payback period and reason.

Benchmark requests for better context

Each deferral request page includes the security deposit, MR balances and past and future rent from that asset. And deferral requests are totaled at the operator level for complete context, like creditworthiness and payment history. Finally, all requests are rolled up system-wide for a clear view of the total impact–by country, region, asset type and other metrics.

Electronic approvals to streamline the decision process

Submit time-stamped requests to management with links to all related conversation and analysis. Managers can review requests details and related benchmarks, ask for clarifications from team members via Chatter. On approval of the request in whole or in part, team members are kept in synch via email alerts.

Centralize your data, analysis and decisions

Complete details about and requests are available in LeaseWorks at any time and automated daily or weekly summary reports keep all stakeholders in the loop at all times. Understand trends in these requests by operator, region, asset types, credit scores, or any other metric you can imagine.

We’ve had great feedback on our new feature from several customers. But we know there’s a long road ahead of all of us. We’d love to hear what you think about the best way to handle rent deferrals. Got a great idea? Leave us a comment! In the meantime, read on for details of key functionality.