Shifting specialist asset finance growth into top gear with Salesforce

Specialist asset finance is all about balancing risk, margin, and utilisation – but this client was doing that with fragmented systems, siloed data, and each business area running its own playbook. Sales teams couldn't see a single pipeline, servicing had limited visibility of what had been sold, and leadership were piecing together performance from multiple reports.

The organisation had grown quickly through new propositions in vehicle finance and fleet management, yet the underlying technology hadn't kept pace. Four business areas each had slightly different processes and tools, which made it hard to move deals between teams, launch new offerings, or get a clear view of customer relationships across the portfolio.

Brought in as senior project manager within the consulting partner, I led the discovery and design of a new Salesforce platform to centralise data, standardise workflows, and give everyone—from frontline sales to the board—a shared, trusted view of customers, assets, and opportunity. Phase one focused on modernising specialist vehicle sales; later phases would extend into servicing, finance, and digital self-service.

We started by mapping how each business area really worked: how deals originated, how credit and underwriting became involved, how vehicles moved through the fleet, and where hand-offs were causing friction or data loss. That work exposed dozens of variations of essentially the same process, each living in a different system or spreadsheet.

Working with senior stakeholders, I helped define a target operating model and multi-phase roadmap that brought those strands together on Salesforce Core Platform. Phase one delivered a single sales platform across four business areas and around 100 users, with standardised opportunity stages, aligned account and contact structures, and consistent reporting—turning previously fragmented pipelines into one coherent view of growth.

From there, we shaped the growth programme: a multi-cloud Salesforce transformation using Automotive Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Experience Cloud, CPQ and Omni-Channel, supported by MuleSoft. The goal was simple but ambitious: unify sales, servicing, fleet operations and digital touchpoints so that, wherever a deal started, the data followed the vehicle and customer through its entire lifecycle.

By treating Salesforce not just as a CRM but as a strategic growth platform, the client gained a clear, sequenced roadmap that could be funded and delivered in phases—reducing risk while still moving decisively toward an end-state architecture.