Retirement Team Successfully Creates Custom and Compliant Presentations at Scale
Summary
Our client is an American holding company for various life insurance companies and investment firms. They operate primarily in the United States, offering life and supplemental health insurance, investments, and retirement services. The firm chose Synthesis Technology to help them scale retirement presentations.
In early 2016, our client’s marketing team did an audit of their retirement sales presentations. They found the decks to be inconsistent in form and brand messaging. Also, they learned salespeople thought the standard presentations created by marketing weren’t client-focused. Sales found it too time-consuming to find, share, and build presentations. Thus, salespeople would often reuse their “favorite deck” from their desktop and tailor it for their upcoming presentations.
The firm knew they needed a better solution. Sales wasn’t using the retirement presentations marketing created. So, the result was a lot of time and resources wasted. For this reason, the decks created by Sales were not always compliant, and there wasn’t a good way to track them. In an effort to remain a leading provider of retirement plans, they needed a solution to help them streamline their processes. We helped them do this in a way that would improve customer centricity, compliance, and auditability.
Client Vision
With a laser focus on ‘digital transformation’, the firm’s vision was to find a holistic technology solution. One that would enable sales agents to create highly customer-centric presentations within the guardrails of marketing and regulatory compliance. Their goal was to have it fully implemented by Jan 1, 2018.
First, the firm outlined a strategy for creating dynamic slide content to allow salespeople to customize certain slides by selecting from pre-approved content. They wanted to integrate this process with compliance, sales enablement, and CRM systems to create a seamless workflow. Once they had the vision and strategy in place, they needed the technology to make it happen.
After an extensive evaluation, the marketing, sales, and compliance groups unanimously selected Synthesis in September 2017.
With this solution in place, the retirement sales group of 200+ people can easily find content. Furthermore, they can personalize their presentations for each meeting. Salesforce tracks the final presentations. Then, they are archived in their internal Compliance system for a seamless and efficient workflow. The integration with Salesforce also provides analytics on content views.
How it Works
Sales agents effortlessly log into the presentation system using single-sign-on (SSO) to start building their presentations. Then, their slide library consists of several hundred slides — and growing. Over a dozen of these slides are dynamic, meaning a salesperson can select custom content in these slides to personalize them for a specific audience.
For example, a salesperson can upload or select custom content such as client logos, photos, and bios of the portfolio management team, timeline details for moving funds to the new plan, or pre-approved talking points to include on a slide.
The system will approve the custom deck once a salesperson creates it or route it to compliance for a final review.
Nearly all of the custom content available in the dynamic slides is pre-approved. As a result, most presentations can be created and used immediately. However, if the platform recognizes new content, it will route it back to Compliance. Over time, the system learns to recognize content that has previously been approved, thus dramatically reducing the back-and-forth review time between sales, marketing, and compliance.
Once the presentation has an approval status, the system “stamps” the presentation with an approval code and pushes it to the sales enablement platform. Simultaneously, it’s also pushed to their Compliance system for record-keeping.
Upon approval, presentations are immediately available in the sales enablement platform. Then, sales reps can share and present retirement presentations, videos, and more from any device. Salesforce records and syncs sales meetings and customer interactions. This provides meaningful insights on content usage and an audit trail.
The Compliance team can search for the final approved presentations in their Compliance system whenever necessary, simply by searching for the unique code stamped on the presentation.
Results
We implemented and rolled out the solution to the pilot group in 10 weeks. Synthesis worked hand-in-hand with the firm’s marketing group. We were able to configure the dynamic slides and sales enablement platform to their specs. This included the integration with Salesforce. After much anticipation, their pilot was a success. Then, we rolled out the system to all 200 users at their national sales conference in January 2018.
Today, the firm is seeing immediate benefits, including:
- Improved alignment between the Marketing, Sales, and Compliance teams.
- Improved process efficiency. The team increased sales process velocity by providing sales reps with a way to create compliant, customer-centric presentations very quickly.
- A “single source of truth” for sales presentation content. The entire organization can have confidence in the client-facing marketing material.
- A significant reduction in the time spent creating, reviewing, updating, and managing presentation content.
- An empowered sales team, who expects to see an increase in sales productivity and close rates in the near future.
Learn More about our compliance-focused sales and marketing platform for financial services.
Our end-to-end data management, content automation, and sales enablement platform helps financial services firms overcome regulatory obstacles. These obstacles can negatively impact how quickly teams can create and distribute sales and marketing content. By utilizing this innovative platform, marketing, sales, and compliance teams can streamline their workflows. In doing so, they improve speed-to-market, increase deal velocity, and ensure brand and regulatory compliance.
