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Mike McCormick is the CMO of California Casualty, a century-old insurance provider targeting peace officers, nurses, firefighters, and educators. McCormick shares why California Casualty chose to implement Salesforce to replace their homegrown system. At the time, the shift to the new system had its critics, but the results have proven that change is good, even for a successful 100-year-old company.
California Casualty just celebrated our 100-year anniversary.
One hundred years is quite a milestone. However, when your company has been around for so long, it also means change can be a tough sell. After all, not many companies can say “It’s worked for 100 years—what’s to improve?"
When I arrived as California Casualty’s CMO, we relied on a homegrown system that we loved, but it struggled with critical tasks and also required human control that lead to inevitable human errors. Our turnover rate was low compared to the industry average; still, it’s a metric we look to continually improve on.
We saw these as barriers to California Casualty’s pursuit for industry competitiveness and innovation. It was clear that the system needed to be upgraded or replaced with one that automated tasks, offered out-of-the-box features, and delivered flexibility to the particular needs of our niche. Despite the legacy system being limited and behind, the move introduced some challenges. That said, I had the go-ahead to evaluate a new product.
Going into the evaluation process, I knew we were competing against decades and decades of success, and whatever the new system was, it had to be 100% successful from all angles.
The process took nearly 18 months with countless hours of research, vendor presentations, and visits to other call centers. I knew that Salesforce was the go-to CRM the entire time, but our team had to evaluate other offerings to be certain.
Over time, with their popular CRM, Sales Cloud, and thousands of business apps such as PowerDialer, it became clear that Salesforce was to be our choice.
With so many critical eyes on the transition, I not only needed a powerful CRM like Salesforce, but I also needed the company to use it. You can have the best system, but if your team rejects it, then it won’t have a chance. Over time, our team was able to achieve 98% adoption. I accredit our successful adoption rate to these three critical elements:
After implementation, we saw a pattern that unsuccessful reps were, more often than not, the ones who weren’t using Salesforce. The way we set up our new system with PowerDialer, it shortened the time it took for new reps to get up to speed; new reps were producing numbers comparable to our most senior reps within 6 months.
The numbers told us (and continue to tell us) that we made the right decision. With Salesforce as the foundation to our day-to-day operations, we’ve seen dramatic improvements on our key measures.
Since implementing Sales Cloud and PowerDialer, we assumed we would see higher dials but in fact, we’ve seen a decrease in the amount of calls—that’s because we have a better understanding who to call, where and most importantly, when. At the same time, with call scripting and call timing, we’ve cut the number of calls required to get to a quote by 20%.
And talk about selling as a team... Salesforce evened out the playing field: our top reps are still our top producers, but historical averages are being surpassed almost monthly.
The year we implemented Salesforce (2012), we recorded our highest production in years across many important metrics. To prove that it wasn’t a fluke, the following year shattered that. In 2013, we also saw employee turnover decrease by 50% (because reps saw success quicker), Quote Percentage increase 36%, a 45% increase in Forecast Accuracy, and Contract Rates improve by 20%.
Going into our third year with Salesforce, we’re excited to see how we continue to streamline our processes. Without the powerful features, products, and extensions that Salesforce offers, we certainly wouldn’t have been able to see such dramatic improvements in our productivity.
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