The Background
Pioneer Mortgage Services has been in the mortgage industry for over a decade. Mortgages are the heart of the business, helping first-time buyers and others onto the ladder, and a customer base of 10,000 is a fair measure of the work that’s gone into building it. More recently, Pioneer has added protection to its offering, with life cover and similar policies a newer part of what they do.
Four years ago, as the business grew, Pioneer outgrew a fairly basic system and moved to FLG. But for a long time, FLG was doing only a fraction of what it could. It held their data. It kept their records. It was, in practice, a very tidy place to keep information about leads and customers, and not much more.
That worked when the business was smaller. It stopped working as Pioneer grew.
The problem: a system that stored, but didn’t act
Jake Champion, Managing Director at Pioneer, is the first to admit that the early days were about putting out fires. Inbound leads came in and got dealt with, but the process leaned on people remembering. Weekend leads got lost. Tasks slipped. No one was consistently reaching back out to existing customers to keep Pioneer front of mind.
As the team and the customer base both grew, the gap widened. More leads, products, people, and a system still being used, fundamentally, to store data rather than drive what happened next.
Stepping into the Managing Director role was the moment to change that. Jake wanted to move out of the day-to-day firefighting and into looking after the team and the business, building the kind of processes that would free up both his time and his team’s, and let them start being proactive instead of permanently reactive.
Then came a useful discovery that Pioneer had 21 hours of implementation support to draw on. With a new product line to support and weekend leads to rescue, it was the right moment to put them to work.
The Solution: automation built around the lead, not the rep
Working with Ava Dwyer on the FLG team, Pioneer rebuilt the way leads move through the business, starting on the mortgage side.
Ava set up workflows that respond to and chase new enquiries automatically, and keep chasing the ones that don’t convert the first time, so a “not yet” doesn’t quietly become a “never.” A separate set of workflows stays in touch with customers who have already converted, and, crucially, alerts the team when a customer’s rate is coming to an end, prompting them to reach out about renewal and warm the lead back up before it goes cold.
Then there’s the part that joins the two halves of the business together. When a mortgage application reaches a certain stage, FLG automatically refers the lead across to the protection side as a new, separate lead. The protection team can start selling life cover and related products while the mortgage team carries on with the mortgage, two journeys running in parallel, neither held up by the other.
And because every lead is linked, the mortgage team can see exactly how the protection side is progressing, and vice versa. Nobody has to chase an update or join the dots by hand.
The weekend problem was designed out along the way. Whether five leads come in over a weekend or forty, each one is picked up, assigned, and actioned correctly. Nothing waits for Monday morning and someone’s memory.
Then Jake did something telling. When Pioneer’s new protection line needed the same treatment, he didn’t wait for help; he built it himself, using Ava’s setup as a template. That’s the difference between software you depend on someone else to run, and software your team actually owns.
Then Jake did something telling. When Pioneer’s new protection line needed the same treatment, he didn’t wait for help, he built it himself, using Ava’s setup as a template. That’s the difference between software you depend on someone else to run, and software your team actually owns.
The Result: time back, and conversions up
It’s early, and the new setup has only been live for a short while. But the direction is already clear. The team was sceptical at first; they’re not anymore. They agree the changes are saving them a significant amount of time, and Pioneer has already seen lead conversions increase across both mortgages and protection. Precise numbers will come as the workflows bed in, but the first signs are exactly the ones Jake was after.
What’s next
The shift has changed what Pioneer can plan for. With the workflows running quietly in the background, the team is free to do the proactive work that used to be impossible, reaching back out to their existing 10,000 customers rather than only reacting to new enquiries.
The plan now is to segment that customer base and start outbound campaigns introducing the newer products, with reminders, document uploads, and repeat tasks handled automatically rather than manually remembered.
Same system, four years on. What changed is how Pioneer uses it; it’s doing the work now, not just storing the record of it.
FLG is the Lead Conversion System for small UK sales teams. If your system is storing leads rather than following them up, a 20-minute walkthrough will show you exactly where the gaps are and how to close them.