At a Glance
- A Secured Research survey found that 46% of equipment dealers who abandoned a financing submission cited portal complexity as the primary reason—not rate, not credit appetite, not relationship quality.
- Most vendor finance operations measure portal adoption by login frequency, missing the more revealing metric: submission completion rate by step, which exposes exactly where dealers abandon the process.
- The highest-performing vendor programs treat portal UX as a sales enablement investment, not an IT maintenance item, and assign dedicated product management resources to dealer-facing technology.
- Reducing submission steps from double digits to five or fewer correlates with a 28% increase in dealer activation rates within the first 120 days of onboarding.
The Portal Nobody Complained About
A vendor finance director at a mid-size independent recently pulled submission funnel data for the first time. The numbers told a story nobody in the organization had been willing to confront. Of every 100 dealers who logged into the portal to begin a financing application, only 34 completed the submission. The other 66 dropped off at various stages—most of them between the third and fifth screen, where the system required equipment serial numbers, insurance certificates, and a guarantor personal financial statement before the dealer even knew whether the deal had a chance of approval.
The portal had been in production for four years. Nobody had filed a complaint. That was precisely the problem. Dealers don’t complain about bad portals. They use someone else’s.
