Digital transformation sales for support

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[Music] i was never looking for love until i met you i was just at you i always wish i could stay high with you i was new [Music] driving growth through a customer first digital transformation please welcome product marketing manager at salesforce ashgorage good morning good afternoon everyone my name is ash gorang and i'm excited to be your host today before we dive into this exciting conversation about the partnership between it and sales and how together they can drive business growth i'd just like to mention a few housekeeping keeping items for our webinar so you can share today's message on your social media using the hashtag it and sales unite you also may have noticed that there's a dashboard at the bottom of this page you can feel free to check out speaker profiles and additional resources in that dashboard below and last and not least we invite you to take the attendee survey at any point during the event just click on the survey icon at the bottom of the page we have a fantastic 40 minutes ahead of us where we're going to talk about how it leaders are working with sales teams to deliver the tools and technology that optimize customer experience and drive business growth i'm joined today by amy doherty and dolly wagner-wilkins we'll get to formal introductions in a moment this is going to be a free-flowing conversation we're going to talk about some of the tools and technology that it teams are using to equip sales organizations then sort of understand a little bit more about how it and sales are aligning and finally talk a bit around the topic of how sales automation technology can help the customer experience and now to introduce our panelists so we're joined by dolly wagner-wilkins the cto of worldwide express thank you for having me thank you and amy dougherty evp and ceo of first command financial services thank you for joining us today amy so glad to be here and as i said my name is ash orange i'm a product marketing manager focused on sales cloud at salesforce and also very excited to be here with you today so just to set a little bit of context before we jump into our panel conversation so over the course of the last 12 months obviously there's been a significant acceleration in the use of digital technology and in fact mckinsey the global consulting firm does a longitudinal study where they talk to a number of different global execs and they found talking to north american execs that the percentage of customer interactions that use digital tools and technology significantly increased over the first six months of last year in fact they saw a leap from about 41 of customer interactions using digital tools to 65 percent by the middle of last year and by their estimation that equates to a kind of leap frog of about seven years relative to pre trends for the use of digital tools and of course it's i.t that's in the hot seat for driving a lot of this change for for making this evolution happen and so with that i'd like to turn to our panelists to talk a little bit more about their experience so i know that both of you and your respective companies have recently made a decision to enhance your sales technology um what what led to those decisions amy maybe we'll kick off with you first sure thank you um so at first command we endeavor to assist as many military families as possible in their pursuit of financial security and we have a desire to scale our business so that we can help more and more military families and our legacy platform did not allow us to have a 360 degree view of the client it was limited to just sales and in that model um in the new model we need sales and service and marketing and knowledge management to all work together so that we can provide a better experience for those military families dolly what's sort of been that what's that kind of initial decision to to upgrade your sales automation what's that kind of look like uh for your company well for worldwide express our sales team is one of our biggest differentiators we have a large outside sales team we specialize in the smb market so having sales team members that are in with customers in that market is somewhat rare a lot of those businesses don't get to see their sales reps for their different vendors so it's a huge differentiator for us as worldwide started growing and certainly within the last year we learned that um as we added more structure to the sales process we grew with that became you know more need for reporting and information we saw this high-powered sales team spending more and more time on manually managing their sales process on putting data into the system they were struggling when they'd go visit a client client whether it's a virtual visit or an in-person visit to have the right information for their customer um so we went all in on automation so that we could make their the sales process much more efficient automate all of that administrative work have every tool that they need at their fingertips and then also have this 360 degree view so every time they interact with a customer they have all the information that they need and really unlock the power of that sales team to spend the majority of their time doing what they do best which is selling and building relationships with our customers amy i know you talk about administrivia what are some examples of some painful overheads that folks at first command have to have had to deal with previously yeah sure so um filling out forms you know how you love to do that when you go to visit a new doctor where you write the information down on one page and then you write it down on another page just so you can have the same information on two forms so we have during the financial planning process we have to collect a lot of data in order to provide really good financial planning advice there are lots of compliance requirements that require multiple signatures um acknowledgement of disclosures etc and so as dali said we want to be automating as much of the administrative work or the administrative as possible so that our advisors can spend the time coaching these families helping them in their pursuit of financial security and spending time building those relationships which are so critical to our success and in terms of the what i sort of said up front uh pointing to a real sort of significant increase in interactions using digital tools has that been your ex has that been the experience for for both of you the past kind of 12 months dolly what what what have you seen at uh worldwide express yeah that's certainly been our experience you know we have this outside sales team and um prior to this they would do a lot of the customer visits and spend a lot of time traveling out to see customers and what we've learned is that that outside sales and being close to the market understanding our customers business is still very important but where they might have needed to close a sale five meetings in person with a customer they can do three of those over the phone or virtually through the different virtual tools that are enabled for them now and meet the customer once or twice and it still has that same benefit from a customer experience perspective but it's a lot more efficient for the sales team so we've certainly seen that and we do have a pretty dynamic team so they embraced the technology learned how to use it well and i think going forward we'll continue with that mix of virtual visits and in-person visits um and get the benefits of the efficiency as well as the benefit of that in-person touch so seeing a kind of a permanent change really and your whole kind of go to market motion absolutely would you say coming out of this past 12 months amy there are things that you can see as permanent shifts and and how your advisors sort of interact with military families veterans absolutely so i think the pandemic created some opportunities for technologists because all of the sudden we had a real appetite for change and an accepting of a lot of changes that i think many of us have have wanted to see come to life for some time so our business model is face to face we call it knee to knee coaching and consulting for our military families and we couldn't do that safely during the pandemic and while we may have wanted to introduce some tools like electronic signature or video consultation that was a we couldn't quite see how it would blend in with our traditional business model and so the copic pandemic really accelerated that change and the acceptance of that change and i think going forward we've seen that some clients actually prefer to have some of their appointments virtually so you know they can get their kids to bed and they could get on a call with their spouse in the living room and talk with their advisor about you know a recent change in their situation or a financial challenge that they're having and so we think that these technologies will augment the relationships and the relationship building that we do with our military families and certainly adoption of things like um automated workflows and the use of digital signature have helped us close business more effectively and efficiently and if you miss a signature on a paper form in the past the the client has had to come back into the office to sign that piece of paper and now it's as simple as sending a link through email so that they can close that piece of business so it's it's really um streamlined a lot of what we do and our clients uh are telling us that this is more effective and efficient for them as well so it's a better experience for them to well so that that is definitely an example of the leapfrog that we were sort of referencing before so i think it's all well and good to kind of talk about you know these new technologies and sort of the the benefits etc but i think kind of operationally getting folks aligned within the organization before you take this step that that can often be they can kind of be easier said than done i think is is is one way of putting it kind of what are some of the challenges in terms of bringing together it and sales so that you are all focused on uh the kind of customer experience and and and sort of optimizing that as much as possible um dolly maybe kind of talk about your experience first at worldwide global express we enjoy a very low to no friction relationship with our business teams which is really one of the keys i think to driving alignment so we have a few we as a technology team we really value those relationships we try to protect them and a couple of things that we do that we try to be very consistent about in term with our business teams is one um be really thoughtful in what we propose and why we propose it and the approach that we take and we find that when we approach our business partners and it's well thought out um they feel more valued and um want to hear what we have to say another is uh transparency everything that we do we're transparent about there is no such thing as internal tech it's internal worldwide express and any business team can come to any of our meetings they can see any of our documents there's no um we're completely transparent when we do we mess something up we admit it when we are doing well we tell them whatever it is we're very very transparent um third is that everything we do we try to make sure it has a direct business value um so we don't try to go to our business teams and sell tech for tech's sake it's all um directly related to our goals or achieving our strategy and last but certainly not least is that we everything we do we do in partnership with our business teams so they're engaged from the time we first start thinking about an idea to engaging with potential partners rfp processes or and or development the prioritization we show them what we're doing along the way we get their feedback and input so really everything that we do we view as a joint effort and it's ours not theirs not techs or the business teams but it's worldwide and it's all done uh together every step of the way so those are kind of the ingredients that we kind of put into the relationship to drive alignment and and stay aligned and ultimately it drives success because everything that we do they feel ownership of they've had tons of input into it's incentivizes them to adopt the new technology because they have ownership in it and it they're incented to drive business value because that's good for all of us so those are kind of the things that we focus on as we work with our partners and and so far it's worked for us um and we have a really great relationship i love that point about um it establishes ownership from the get-go i think that's just such a a thoughtful way of approaching it and i just think it makes everyone's life easier and and the projects more successful so i think that's a as a really good point to make rather than just some kind of solution being dropped in and you know everyone has to sort of change their process to to accommodate um and in terms of how you're getting that alignment um for first command amy how is that looked for you yeah so dolly had a great story and i think that we have a lot of similarities in that there's just terrific alignment we're mission oriented and so um everyone has a lot of passion about the mission we're here because we want to serve and so landing on the y is is it's just unambiguous we might have different points of view on how to get to the what um or the how we're going to do things but the why we're doing things is really clear to all of us um in when we were undertaking um re-platforming our sales automation tool um we stopped first and and traditionally perhaps we would have had our technology organization take the lead and instead this time we stopped um took a step a step back wrote a business forward crm strategy and sketched out um okr's objectives and key results that we expected to receive from every platforming and then we use that to drive the decision-making process we instead of publishing an rfp and going through what i would consider maybe a heavy documentation process um we wanted to align to our agile release trains we use the scaled agile framework here at first command and so we needed to do a thorough but really quick discovery and evaluation of the potential tools on the market and so we undertook the discovery programs with two potential partners it was the microsoft's catalyst program and salesforce insight program and we put together a group of about 52 stakeholders across first command in a variety of roles and at a variety of levels and over the course of about six weeks we simultaneously participated in these two discovery programs let the the two potential technology partners learn about us and what our objectives were they both came back with a compelling story about why their platform was going to be the next best platform for first command and um it was i think a real testament to how aligned we were on our vision and and the objectives and our hypotheses about what a platform could do for us that um in the end um all of the participants were aligned around a singular choice so it was a very easy decision we were all quite aligned very bought in it was a transparent process and we did have ownership from the start so all those great qualities that dolly talked about in her program or mirrored here at first command as well and you even did usability lab testing at some point at first command is that right so we do usability lab testing for everything and so we have a voice of the client a voice of the advisor and voices of the employee program where we do research and then user testing on usability part of the evaluation certainly for the new platform was usability we wanted to hear from all of the the users not just our our sales team our advisors we wanted to hear from our service folks if this was going to allow them to service our clients more effectively from our marketing folks where we're going to be able to reach more military families and from our operations folks what would it take to support this platform and continue to build it out in service to our clients and i know both of you have kind of some interactions with agile frameworks which i i think we've discussed have been useful in terms of driving interaction sort of uh alignment from kind of the execs downwards would you kind of point to that as something that's been useful um dolly what would you say to that yes absolutely um we also as just as amy does we use the scaled agile framework at worldwide as well and you know it was developed originally you know when agile was developed it was developed you know kind of a brainstorm among technicians on a mountain retreat one day and it worked really well for startups and small companies but it didn't have much of a mechanism for larger corporations when you're answering to a board and when you need to drive alignment with your business teams and so the scaled agile framework adds some layers to what you would consider a typical agile approach that allows you to do that and really calls for business to business engagement um all along the process and that's incredibly helpful and it still gives you all the benefits of agile in that you can you know something unexpected comes up you it's it's easy to change and be flexible so it offers flexibility that you get with agile but it puts a little more structure to it so that that engagement is part of the methodology so your business teams are included all the way through the process um yet your development team still get the benefit of driving through an agile process um and some of the speed and flexibility that comes with that and some of the tenants like doing the harder parts first also lends itself to greater success as a program overall so it's a really nice mix of that original agile tenants and framework with some structure on top of it which considers a little larger corporation and that driving that alignment with your business partners so i think it's been hugely helpful and it sounds like it has been for amy too she's talked about this and i think she's seen a lot of success as well i know amy that you're also passionate about it yeah yeah i i um you know agile has been in place for a couple decades in i.t and there's so much goodness there that i i love that the scaled agile framework has allowed us to expand outside of i.t and bring our business partners um along in a more comprehensive and collaborative way we are um we're after the benefits that agile will bring to our entire organization so we want shorter time to market and so far a year in it's about half of what it was pre-agile we want higher quality we want better employee engagement and we want better productivity across the organization as well we ultimately like many companies we want to be sense and respond we want to be able to listen to our clients hear what they they want in the future for products and services and we want to be able to pivot we want to watch our market understand what changes are coming in the market even even from a regulatory perspective and respond by pivoting and agile gives us an opportunity to take a look at that quarterly and so we can make the adjustments that are needed in order to be a more sense and respond organization so it's it's transformation so it's change and it's uh it's a long hard road to make um you know to unwind decades of traditional organization and traditional ways of doing things and eliminating maybe the agency conflict that you would have between one business unit and another trying to achieve different objectives um but we we now have one portfolio that we're all working towards um in in service to our clients now i could talk about that for agile for hours just it's so fascinating for me to learn about us but i will have to move on because i i suspect that's not what everyone else wants to hear kind of getting to the nuts and bolts of the the sales automation tools um kind of what are the the key functions uh like you know in terms of people's day-to-day likes what are some of the benefits that uh you know your frontline teams are getting from having a good sales automation in place all right well gosh there's lots of benefits so i think you know when we start a project we try to look at our overall business goals and strategy and you know bring technology along that supports that and so for us some of the key things in one is just automating a lot for a lot of manual previously manual tasks and really freeing up our people's time to do higher value higher quality work in the case of sales that's being out more with customers whether again that's virtual or in person building relationships it's also for our service teams um they they previously did a lot of manual work and it's putting in a lot of automation and that frees them up um to do much higher value work and and moves us from more of a reactive situation with our customers where we're reacting to problems to proactive where we can proactively see a problem coming and solving it before they know it we can reach out to them proactively and nurture relationships much more often than we would have time for before it's also really contributing to employee retention and satisfaction because they are not doing as much rote manual work they get to do higher value work that's more satisfying so that's been a huge benefit and then another benefit is just having information at your fingertips so when you automate your sales automation and you include your service and marketing and you know the entire organization suddenly you have this view of information about your customers and about your business uh that you didn't have before and so when you are working with a customer you know everything that's gone on in that customer's world so you know a customer has a bad shipping experience we can reach out to that customer we can proactively fix it or at least offer to help them through whatever the remediation might be so having that information it also allows us to look at our business and gain business insights so uh there's numerous examples of that for instance we have sometimes customers quote on us but they don't book well we now have access to that information of who quoted and didn't book and we can look at that and say well why didn't they and make the necessary changes to the business so that we get that booking the next time so there's there's you know lots and lots of benefits ultimately what you want at the end of the day is a great customer experience so you want that in sales you want them to be able to go to our customers have the information they need and have every interaction with our customers be positive when a customer does have an issue you want to be able to solve it for them quickly if they have a question you want them to either be able to self-serve quickly and efficiently have the digital tools accessible to the customer or you want to be able to service them and you want to make their you want to anticipate issues and make their day-to-day business as smooth as possible so we want to be easy to do business with and we want to delight our customers and so these are the types of tools that allow us to put time there versus time reacting and i mean you're operating in an incredibly competitive uh space as well so try to improve that customer experience and and then deliver deliver the best experience is kind of even more crucial plus um i i think your logistics in particular has experienced a real shift just in terms of that business and the volume that's seeing and how you know things are being shipped and to where in the past 12 months that is also a whole other level on top of of what other business businesses have experienced the other point i really like about what you just said is about the employee retention i think that sometimes gets sort of forgotten but um yeah people want to use like good tools that make their lives easier so they can as you said sort of do the higher value work um so a lot of really a lot of kind of goodness there um amy i know that you've kind of in terms of your kind of agents experience one use case you can talk about is the ability to kind of cross sell and upsell looking at different types of clients and and so you can your advisors can kind of understand uh you know what they can do better with their own clients based on on other agents experience um tell me about that use case as well as any other that you think sales automation has really kind of helped first command yeah that's a great question so um some of these are aspirational because we're still in the deployment phase of our barney platform but we believe that we'll be able to do a few things with automation and with artificial intelligence through salesforce we we expect to be able to serve up the advisor's best day so based on their book of business who which clients might need to be coming in for an annual um financial planning review their referral list etc we want to increase the advisor satisfaction and the advisory retention by creating their best day so that they they can come in and be as productive as possible um we we also think that we will be able to use the data to drive insights to create new products and services based on the behavior of the clients against these products we believe that we'll be able to make recommendations to the advisor for upsell or cross-sell of different products and services based on client personas so if one client had a need that was satisfied by a product and that client looks and behaves a lot like the client sitting across the table from us in any given appointment we want to be able to serve up that information to the advisor so that they can make that suggestion you know determine suitability with with the client and then close that sale if it's appropriate great um you mentioned data there i think obviously top of everyone's mind and every business and every every function um what do you see is the role of of of data amy like what what would be some examples of that best practice that you're trying to implement when it comes to data yeah that's a great question too um you know you hear everyone saying data is the new oil but it's it's really what keeps your business going it's a couple best practices that i would share is um first be really clear on your purpose for collecting it so is it so that you can improve decision making about sales or to understand client behavior patterns so that you can increase engagement or are you looking to find insights for new products and services i i think you have to be really clear on why you want to use the data because it's really easy to collect but then it gets hard from there and so you want to be collecting it for a specific purpose and or purposes and understand why it is you want to collect that data i would say secondly ruthlessly protect the foundational elements of your data program like data security and data privacy and data quality um data's the lifeblood of your organization and and it's a cornerstone of a trusted relationship with the client so if you know in our case if if if the client is it sees that the data isn't correct they can't trust us with their data i don't think that they're going to trust us with their money either so just protecting those those kind of foundational tenants of data is really critical um i think thirdly i'd say democratizing the data is is important our goal with data is to evolve from creating reports to finding insights and to find those insights it sounds easy but it's really quite difficult you need a lot of different types of thinking a lot of different types of people involved so that you can derive those those insights from the data um lastly i would say think carefully about your data collection protocols so ideally you want to create interactions and experiences for your clients so that you can derive data from those those experiences instead of doing the data entry that we talked about before like you don't want to go to your dentist and fill out the paper over and over you don't want to do that with your financial advisor either so focus instead on on how you can collect data through experiences so that you can understand your clients behavior and get a more fulsome profile of of them and you can then use that data to create personalized recommendations for for each client great i want to make sure care a little from dolly about this because i know at world wide global express you're bringing together data from multiple different sort of providers you're kind of acting as that clearinghouse that broker um there's a kind of an added layer of complexity that comes from from that what is some of the the ways that you sort of manage that so um you know everyone everyone stays happy and everything is protected and but useful you know well i think amy hit on a lot of the high points of good data management um one i might add that we really focus on is not um really avoiding duplication of data so there's a tendency to kind of put data here there and everywhere and really trying not to uh duplicate and have to sync data all over the organization to make sure that it um stays it holds its integrity as she mentioned you know one thing that we do and i maybe want to expand on amy said democrat democratization of data and really what we focus on we do collect data from a lot of different sources um and we normalize that we put a data warehouse to some extent with new data tools you know you don't have to do as much work as you used to do in order to make use of that data but what we try to do is get the data into the hands of our citizen users so that we have groups all over the company who are looking at the data and amy touched on this really making the data accessible to your user base and so they don't have to go to technology to get a report they don't have to go to technology to analyze data so we have a fairly centralized data warehouse but we have multiple tools that we use to access that data warehouse depending on the needs of the user what they want to use it for and the tools that they're familiar with so really use getting the full power of the data by putting it in the user's hands and not making it something mysterious that technology has to do in order to unlock insights and we were constantly surprised and delighted at what our citizen users come up with the ways they're able to use the data the insights that they're able to glean um i think amy said you know many heads are better than one and that's certainly the case um so we have people all over the organization who are driving insights from that and therefore driving the business from it and so i wouldn't encourage anyone to try to get that data into people's hands in a format that they can um use it and in a format that they can understand it so some of our users get at the data through salesforce and use eins you know the salesforce einstein pro product others get at it through a different sales force tool called tableau they have a deeper business intelligence um vent but put the right tool in the hands of the each user and then let them go to town with the data yeah i love that notion that you don't want it all to be locked up by some sort of business intelligence team or special project team and it's sort of more yeah available to everyone and and and people can start to work with it but with tools that kind of make sense to them in terms of their sort of day-to-day um because yeah not everyone needs a super high-powered bi tool to to get sort of glean insights that are useful um as we sort of kind of approach the sort of end of our conversation sort of are there any other kind of points that you would like to make in terms of sort of what your experience has been or perhaps what you're looking forward to over sort of 2021 in terms of your respective roles amy yeah that's such a great question um i i think some so many of us are looking to 2021 with hope um hopefully where we can put the pandemic behind us and figure out what our new business as usual is all about um so i'm looking forward to a lot of things and we're looking forward to our our first release of salesforce we're going to be concentrating that on our sales team i'm really eager to get the tool in the hands of our advisors and and see how our business can take off we developed as i said some objectives and key metrics um for the crm program so we're looking for increases in our advisor productivity in our advisor retention and our advisor recruitment we're also looking forward to seeing some changes in the conversion of referrals and the conversion of prospects to become clients of first command um we're looking for increases in the in plan implementation so once we create a plan for a client we want it to be so personalized and aren't on and on target and relevant to them that they um they initiate those plans and they put them into action and they they get on the road to financial security looking for changes in our client experience scores um in our client satisfaction scores certainly sales revenue we're looking for changes there in our ability to service clients we'd love to see some reduction in in some of the more simple call center support questions we get because our clients are able to self-service on those and and the calls that we do get are richer experiences where we can learn more about our clients and provide really good service um we're looking for more effective compliance processes perhaps through the platform so lots on the horizon for us that we're really excited about those are some super exciting metrics to try and work on and and develop further and it sounds like you have done that in a sort of hand and glove type relationship with uh with your sales organization um what are you looking forward to as 2021 well we're here like as you get further into it yeah we've got a big year ahead um we're really excited so we did an early implementation of salesforce um but we have been in the process of building a brand new platform that will ultimately power our business and salesforce was our largest buy component in kind of a build buy strategy and that platform will roll out this year and it has a very deep integration with salesforce and incorporates everything from pardot so we'll have lead scoring and much better be able to feed our sales team with great leads to start with the whole process through the whole sales process automation and that's deeply integrated with operational systems so that view of the not just the customer but the entire business um all in one platform is really exciting so we're looking forward to rolling that out in 2021 and you know we have this really um dynamic team at world wide express and i'm excited to get it in their hands and just see what they do with it um how all the different ways they find to sell it all the different ways that they um find to use it and then to taking it up to the next level and adding better features more automation um deeper insights and all the things that will power our business going forward so it's an exciting year i can't wait uh to get out there and get this new platform in their hands and you know drive deeper integration and deeper benefits with salesforce as well and something i just kind of heard you say are you are you kind of hoping that you've got this sort of legacy systems are you sort of hoping there'll be a little bit less work around those or sort of it will become more accessible for your team to kind of access what's in those sort of yeah they're kind of older systems um actually we're sunsetting our older systems and this new platform will replace them okay okay so that's a significant shift yeah it's a significant rollout so we um as we started on this adventure we chose to buy everything that was readily available in the market and build the things that were really unique to our business and so salesforce was our perhaps largest buy component but we didn't want to wait until the new platform was built to start gaining some of the benefits from salesforce we did an early release of our the service cloud and have that in place now and then when we release the new platform we'll go live with sales cloud service cloud pardot community porter partner portal the full you know fairly fulsome suite of salesforce products that will roll out with the new platform so it's a substantial um effort but we're super excited yeah it'll be fascinating to talk to both of you in a year's time to kind of hear what worked what you would do differently um but also you know ideally um benefits both for your frontline teams and and for the customers that they're supporting so thank you to amy and dolly for joining this interesting important conversation about how the right collaboration between it and sales can improve customer experience and drive business growth i also want to thank our audience today for tuning in the recording of today's live event will be available on youtube so remember to share on social media using the hashtag i.t and sales unite and please take the survey which will pop up at the bottom of your screen in just a moment again thank you for joining goodbye [Music] you