Matt Dalpini joined the ApostleTech team in March 2019. He previously worked as an Account Director for a digital marketing company. After five years in that role, Matt was recruited to work for Mobivity, an SMS marketing company that specializes in franchises and quick service restaurants.  Matt was hired by Mobivity to develop its customer service experience and start a project management office (PMO), where he was tasked with managing a very technical and custom POS and receipt printer software integration. It was in that position had firsthand experience with a Salesforce CRM that was not being managed or used properly. Matt took on the task of managing the software platform to support some of the company’s PMO initiatives and link information to other areas of the business. His experience eventually led him to the full-time position of Salesforce administrator, while he continued to run the PMO. As his workload grew for both the PMO and Salesforce, he was forced to decide between the two.  Matt believed the best choice for his career long term was to concentrate his efforts on Salesforce, which eventually led him to ApostleTech as a Salesforce consultant. We recently spoke with Matt to learn more about his experience as a Salesforce Consultant and Client Manager at ApostleTech.   

Tell us about a typical day for you as a Client Manager and what you enjoy most about your job?

While most days don’t follow a prototypical schedule, I generally spend 1/3 of my time on project management, 1/3 solution designing and a 1/3 of the time building a client’s CRM. I primarily work with our financial services clients, where I am challenged with a range of complex requirements and goals that makes each day a new opportunity to learn, design and build something you may have not before. Accepting my position at ApostleTech was one of best decision I ever made! What I enjoy most about the work we do is the problem-solving. While Salesforce has some product limitations, 99 percent of the desired solutions can be built in some form or fashion. It can be frustrating, but I welcome a good challenge over a well-defined process and new or unique requests from our customers. When you add in new Salesforce product launches and three major releases each year, the opportunity to solve new issues increases year after year. I find it exciting to be a part of the continuing education process.   

What are some of the biggest challenges your clients face and how do you help them overcome those challenges?

I think one of the core challenges for any organization is adoption. Because the system is reliant on interaction, adoption is a key catalyst to help justify cost and to help provide a wholistic view of the business, when developed into an actionable and unique data set. Ultimately this information helps influence all kinds of decisions such as hiring or staffing, performance evaluations, inventory management and marketing effectiveness. These are just some the many important business KPIs, a Salesforce solution can help track. At ApostleTech we focus on developing a roll-out plan from Day 1 of a project to help ensure that we drive adoption. Everything in between launch and roll-out centers on the end-user experience, which, for me, involves defining core business processes and designing a solution that is intuitive and ease to use. Additionally, for most end users reporting is a vitally important aspect of their day-to-day. To deliver an effective solution, we focus on developing data conversions structured to support a more robust and centralized reporting database than our customers had before.  

Can you share an example of how ApostleTech’s CRM solutions help companies enhance their operations?

We are on Phase 2 of working with a mortgage client that had very decentralized data hosted in multiple databases. This included multiple CRMs adopted when the company acquired a new loan officer group in their network. ApostleTech was brought in to develop a universal Salesforce CRM, to overcome the challenge of managing fragmented data and allow corporate level reporting. In Phase 1 of the project, we focused primarily on centralizing that data into Salesforce and surfacing important customer service tools such as chat and case management. At the completion of this phase, we were able to offer a 360-degree view of a client’s interactions with our customer on the loan origination side of the house. This includes visibility into chats, loan applications, web form requests and emails/events through the EAC integration. Using a custom-built API, we were able to also surface reporting metrics in Salesforce that were previously only available to C-Level users through a BI tool giving their loan officer network real-time reporting on their individual pipeline. For our customer, this helps strengthen their brand as a premier loan originator and provides a centralized database for client interaction and wholistic reporting.  

What advice would you give someone considering a CRM implementation for their company or organization?

We do a lot of work migrating companies from industry specific CRMs to Salesforce because the code structure on industry specific CRM isn’t built to be flexible or the user experience is too choppy. Salesforce provides a blank template that we can customize to fit any industry. When you work with a strong implementation partner that has industry knowledge, the possibilities are endless, and the result is second to none. I think it’s important for companies to have a vision and allow room to grow into the solution, so it will work well 5 or 10 years down the road.  

When you’re not working, what do you like doing in your free time?

We just had a daughter, our first, in July of 2020 so most of my time away from work right now is concentrated on her! Otherwise, my wife and I enjoy cooking and hosting dinners with friends. I also enjoy playing sports or working out. I regularly play basketball, volleyball and pickleball.  

If you could invite anyone to dinner, who would be and why?

I would invite my Grandpa DiNatale. He lived until I was in my mid-twenties, but we never got a chance to really connect about life and all the experiences he had. My parents moved us to another state when I was 8 years old, and I only saw my Grandpa a few times a year during family trips. As a young boy, my grandfather lost both of his parents and he was an orphan with his brother Geno. They were mostly on their own until he was16 and decided to join the Navy. He served time in both World War II and the Korean War, primarily as an Italian interpreter. During his 22-year career he was stationed all over the world including the Philippians, Pearl Harbor and the English Channel. He eventually settled down in 1966, with my Grandma, Mom and Aunt in St. Louis, MO where he was a Senior Chief Sonarman. Growing up, to me he was just my silly Grandpa and the details of his life were irrelevant. Like many veterans from that era, he was never discussed his time in the Navy and didn’t want to share details with his young inquiring grandson. Now that I have a kid of my own, I appreciate the discretion he showed, but as a grown man I would love nothing more than to sit and have a long conversation about his travels and life.