Who Are Portman Asset Finance 

Based out of Northampton, Portman Asset Finance is one of the largest, hybrid asset finance broker-lenders in the United Kingdom. Since 2007 they have helped businesses secure almost one billion pounds of finance and in 2021 alone, have brokered/lent directly on more than a quarter of a billion pounds.

With over 40 major lenders the company are able to work closely with businesses to finance assets upwards of £10,000 across a large range of sectors. Some of which include beauty, transport, engineering, fitness, catering, brewing, healthcare, retail, technology, leisure, manufacturing, farming and construction.

The Need for a Experience-Driven Usage 

Portman’s top priority was deploying Zoho CRM and ensuring that high-priority leads jump out at the user. In short, this is where CRM’s conditional styling feature has benefited them. As a result of using Zoho 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. To clarify, this was nearly impossible to implement until the development of Canvas.

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.”

 Jack Welsh, CRM Developer & Business Insights Associate, Portman Asset Finance Ltd.

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

To design, build and implement this specific design with conditional styling and all working data components took around 2 days.

The Canvas Advantage: Fine tune every detail  

“The ability to present data the way you envision it in your head, like physically putting pen to paper, is effortless.”

 Jack Welsh, CRM Developer & Business Insights Associate, Portman Asset Finance Ltd.

Having information presented in a way that works best for Portman has been a valuable exercise for the team. For example, this has enabled the company to:

• Be more productive by spending less time scrolling through irrelevant data

• Develop a 360-degree view by rearranging the related lists

• Effortlessly drag and drop important data into place

• Highlight relevant fields in bright, bold colours

• Create visually appealing designs without the need to know CSS or HTML.

Way Forward 

The Canvas experience has been vital to the success of Portman Asset Finance as they rapidly expand their operations, working with businesses from the start-up stage to established enterprises. As a result of implementing Zoho CRM, Portman has created a much more inviting, productive environment to work in, just from the use of a complementary colour scheme and visually appealing layout.

“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!)”