SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome! You are listening to the CRM Success Show, where you will hear from CRM executives who have overseen some of the most interesting and complex CRM implementations. Your hosts, David Mossri and Kiro Whitey, will be bringing you real stories, real insight. Follow along on social media for updates on new episode releases, exclusive content, and much more. Enjoy the show and thanks for listening.

SPEAKER_04 0:29

Welcome to the CRM Success Show, where we deep dive in CRM success and failure, delivering real stories with real impact. I'm Dave Masri. And I'm Kira Whitzi. And today we're talking with uh Ethan Waller, um, who's the head of Salesforce Solutions at Newshead Insurance.

SPEAKER_05 0:46

Hello. Hello Fantastic. All right. So um, Ethan, thank you for joining us today. Uh happy Friday. We appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_02 0:56

Yeah, thank you guys for inviting me. Appreciate this.

SPEAKER_05 0:59

Absolutely. Um, could you start with giving our listeners a high-level overview of your role? Um, Goose Head Insurance um and how they are currently using Salesforce uh as things stand.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

Absolutely. Um, so thank you for the introduction. Uh I'm the head of uh of the Salesforce Solutions. Um Goose Head Insurance is one of the largest um uh personal line insurance comp uh brokerage in the United States. So we don't directly um we're not an insurance company, we we sell uh for other carriers, right? So the big ones that I'm sure everyone's heard of um on the different uh various TV commercials and what have you. So um what's interesting about us is that we are one of the largest, however, we have zero paid media, uh we don't do any advertising, um, and we our revenue is growing 30% year over year. And our last quarter, we we killed it again, even with this hard insurance market. Um, and you're like, well, how do you do that? Well, we we act I'll go into how all we use Salesforce, but our um our main driver is our referral partner search tool that we created internally. So um we have a large um data set of loan officers, realtors, uh construction firms, title agency, more mortgage companies, and we develop relationships one-on-one with them. And uh essentially when someone's buying or selling a home, they need new insurance. And uh what's also really great about um Goosehead is that we integrate and work with about 200 various insurance carriers across the United States. So um we have a competitive edge that we're able to truly shop for a wide, wide, wide range of insurance policies to get you the best one uh and the best rate. Uh, and also we we have the opportunity to look at different rates, like maybe it's a little more expensive, but you get better coverage, you know, $100 more dollars, but you get $100,000 more dollars in coverage, right? Those sort of things that we have because we're able to look at so many carriers in one foul swoop. Um, yeah, that's kind of how we differentiate ourselves from from our competitors. Um, and we've built internal tools, uh, our own internal rating system and um external rating system, which you know everybody that's listening could please go to goosead.com and and check it out. It's totally free. Um just to compare your insurance rates. It's it's totally fast, it'll take you about five, 10 minutes. Um, so it's it's very cool. Um, so and I think second part of your question was so how do we use Salesforce? I would say how do we not use Salesforce? Our our entire company, uh, we have about 45, 4600 users that live and breathe in some part of Salesforce. Every single department, every single person uses Salesforce every day for their uh for their job. Um so I manage a team of uh analysts, data analysts, admins, uh project managers, um, like provisioning admins. Um I also help oversee our MuleSoft team development team. Um so that's around 40-ish, some odd people. Um and then in our particular Sourceforce org, we have all the clouds. So if there's a cloud, we most likely have it. Uh service cloud, sales cloud, uh, we have CRMA. We also have Tableau, which we have Snowflake as our back-end um uh data lake. We use DBT, FiveTran. We have Data Cloud, Heroku, which we use that's our Raiders on Node, JS, and React, Mule Soft, we have Maps, Omnichannel, FSC, Experience Cloud, Service Cloud Voice, and then on top of that, we have all of our other little systems that we we have, right? Like we have deduping tools, we have our own backup, own archive, own seeding, we use Sonar for data dictionary, API monitoring, we use Capado for our um CICD, uh, which is our change management tool, as well as uh Capado robot testing. Um yeah, and that we have many, many, many other tools, but that's just a sliver of the things that we're that we do. So once again, there isn't a department that does not use Salesforce in one way or the other.

SPEAKER_05 6:02

It's um it's pretty unique to see that. Um, you know, I I think usually most commonly it's it's sales use it or customer service use it, right? Um but but um for every single department to be touching Salesforce in some way, it's pretty unique. Um just just for context uh for our listeners, um, on good insurance, um, could you just specify what types of insurance um you guys sell?

SPEAKER_02 6:27

Yeah, but sorry about that. Yeah, we do primarily we do home and auto, um, but we do stuff like uh umbrella, jewelry, a little bit of residential, a little bit of life, but we're primarily focused in um home and auto and then bundling those various things. And another thing that we've done is because we have such good relationships with all these carriers, we're actually able to bundle two different carriers and get different discounts. Um, because maybe one carrier doesn't produce um auto, but they do home. And then another carrier is like, hey, well, we do the other half of it. If you if you go with them and we'll get it together and we'll give you a discount on top of that. So it's um it, yeah, we just have all sorts of really interesting and cool things that we've been able to do with our carrier relationships as well as the technology. That's awesome.

SPEAKER_05 7:23

Um, and uh for those that are interested in learning more about Goose Ed, uh they are a publicly traded business, correct? So plenty of uh information out there on trading history and growth and things like that. So definitely recommend uh some some further exploration there if you're intrigued. Um and and and before we move on, you know, a little bit further, um, you've been with the business for about 18 months, is that? Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

That's correct.

unknown 7:49

Perfect.

SPEAKER_05 7:49

And how long have you been in the Salesforce ecosystem for so far?

SPEAKER_02 7:52

Oh man, so I think I started around maybe 2008. I think that's when I first and I, you know, the joke is I I was working in Classic for it was called Classic. You know, that's a Salesforce joke. I don't know if it's funny, but it's it is a joke. Uh but yeah, that far back.

SPEAKER_05 8:11

Oh gee, maybe showing your age a little bit, so we'll move on.

SPEAKER_02 8:17

Yeah, that's my gray hair. That's what's showing my age.

SPEAKER_04 8:21

So a couple of questions on your user base. You said everyone in the company is in it. Um, but like from sales, like you have your brokers in there, they're doing sales, and you do your underwriting in there as well.

SPEAKER_02 8:33

So um yes, because we we don't actually uh we're not an insurance carrier, we don't have brokers, right? So we don't, I mean, excuse me, we don't have any uh underwriters. Uh we do have an internal basic, we have an internal QA team that looks at every single policy we bind uh that comes through one of our carriers to make sure that all the I's are dotted and T's are crossed, we have all the documents that you know the address is here, the address is there, you know, all that fun stuff. Because what's also really interesting is that uh county by county there are different rules with insurance, right? Um, and also just understanding all of those things and understanding are you in a flood uh zone? Are you uh are you at risk to be in fire having um fire? Um, like in California. Uh so you know those things are all things that like our agents have to understand. Uh so we do have multiple phases of that sort of policy life cycle before it's bound with the carrier. So it's similar to I mean it's not really an underwriting, but as as much as we have to really analyze each of the policies before we bind with the carrier, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:56

So you have all those rules in Salesforce, like you actually configure it. So take take us through that process. I guess you would call it the application process.

SPEAKER_02 10:06

Yeah, sure. So uh essentially, you know, how it works is when you go to goosehead.com, you'll you'll actually see our online rating tool, which is free for anybody to use uh to get your quotes. Um and then we have all sorts of technology that we're working on in the background, which is all running on the Heroku platform and our our full stack, right? So uh uh the first round as you're entering in your information, the first round actually loops through our MuleSoft uh um architecture. And that architecture uh based on business rules of like who, where do you live, all those rules that I kind of mentioned before, right? The qualifications of of the different insurance. And then based on that, it's it says, ah, do we do you qualify here? Yes, no, here, you know. So you know, there's all these checks, and then it it blasts out to all the carriers, hey, let's get some quotes, and then we get all those quotes back, then all this information starts flowing into Salesforce as this beginning opportunity as you're walking through, you know, binding this policy. Uh, and then somewhere down the path, let's say that you update your that your quote that you want to add another driver, let's say you're doing auto, you want to add another driver, or you want to delete a driver, or something like that. Um, we run it through Munosoft again to then update with that existing kind of quote ID back to the carriers, and it it it we get the results back. Um, but then the third is when we're ready to bind, which is meaning that we have uh built and worked with um our carriers and large partners of ours, uh, that we built end-to-end API integration. Most uh insurance brokers that you are gonna see out on the internet, um, it's basically a lead gen that they do those, they call it rate call one. That rate call one to get the initial quotes is pretty um standard across all insurance carriers, pretty much. So if you are uh work with them, you can get those rates. So, but we've worked with them to now do that last step where we no longer have to actually sign into the carrier to complete or bind it. We are able to bind that insurance policy with our own um application, uh, which is once again built all in Heroku. Um we're using Node and React. So that's also a kind of a thing that kind of puts us above the rest is that we've invested a lot of uh time and resources in getting that end-to-end process where you are able to bind that insurance very quickly. Um so yeah, uh, and that and that's sort of like the beginning of the pipeline, right? Of of in now, now it's in the Salesforce journey. So now there's just all this, all these things that are happening out inside Salesforce. So the minute that that contact account, that home, that car, all this information starts flowing into Salesforce, and then we have millions of processes that are kicking off, checking all sorts of stuff, right? Pulling different data sources, maybe uh finding when's the last time your roof was redone, or what when's the last time you had an accident, or things like this, right? So all of this stuff where we start collecting all this data. Um, and then um it also during this time our marketing cloud starts kicking off different journeys, right? Now you put in you put in journeys. Let's say that you don't bind and you're like, uh, not for me right now. I'm happy with what I have. Well, now we're gonna put you in a uh marketing cloud journey to see, like, hey, we'll let you know that XYZ has happened in your area, it might be good to check us out again or something like that. Um, or as an existing client, hey, we noticed that there was a big storm in your area the other day. You might want to check to see if your roof's okay, maybe you got hell damage or something like that, right? So we're we're we're doing proactive stuff like that as well. Um uh and then after that, now the what and also this is really great. This is also an interesting feature about Goosehead. Um, so Goosehead is comprised, we have corporate agents, which means that you have agents that work for the like national office, and then you have franchise agents. So uh once again, that's all organic. People come to Goosehead and say, hey, I'd like to own a franchise. I think we're we're in the top 10 of the number one franchises in the United States. And what's really great about our franchise model is that once an agent binds that policy, it kicks over to our service team. So we have uh a thousand some odd service agents uh around the United States that when you call a number, you're gonna talk to what one of our service agents, and they actually help service your policy. So if you get in an accident or you need a question about your claim, or you need an ID card, or you need you just want general information, you have a central one number that you have to call, and you're gonna get a hold of one of those thousand people to um assist you. So this lets our agents, our uh sales agents focus on sales and our support agents support on service. So being part of the franchise, you get that um service agent as part of your package. So um that's also like a really great benefit for for somebody that's interested in uh looking to become a goose head franchise. And I know we're actively still looking for people that are interested in becoming uh franchise owners. So go to goosehead.com and check it out. Great, there we go.

SPEAKER_05 15:54

Um and uh you took the words out of my mouth. I was gonna ask about the franchise model, right? Because I think it's something that adds a unique, again, another unique component to the business um and and and the ability to act as a business within a business. Um and and it's it's really interesting to see, you know, almost one in four employees is service focused, right? Um uh as someone who is and was a customer of Goose, a lot of this is is interesting to me to see, okay, yeah, I did get the marketing campaign, and then I did come back after the renewal. Um so uh definitely piecing that together. Uh so good insight there as well. Um so so we know um you know Goose are continuously um you know investing in Salesforce and its family of products and and uh embedding them into the the org um using pretty much every product there is. Um that's that's been a journey over time, right? How how long has has when did when did Guten first start to use Salesforce? I know it's prior to your time, but roughly how long has this been to get to the I think it's about 13, 14 years.

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Um we've actually on the same org that they spun up that originally. So I yeah, I mean I think in everybody everybody knows what it's like having an old org uh coming in and and uh seeing where all the skeletons are buried, or not even buried, they're there's right in front of you, uh, of of like what what's happening, right? So um as the goosehead insurance has grown so much in the past few years, like it we're just expanding, we're getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and our org is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Um, so that was one thing that when I first started, um, you know, we were really hyper-focused on uh optimization, optimization and consolidation uh of different products, uh processes, things like that. And that's not done. We're we're not anywhere close to being done, but we're always having to look at legacy processes, legacy, even tech within side of Salesforce. And um, as things are starting to deprecate, as things are going end of life, you know, now we're having to say, okay, well, we're gonna have to pause on these on this cool new feature that we want to do because we have to get this up to date, otherwise it's not gonna stop working. But like Salesforce isn't gonna support it. And if it's part of your you know, your your your core production, you you can't that you can't live like that, right? Uh or you can't yeah, you just can't work like that. So um I don't know if that were you were going.

SPEAKER_05 18:39

I was just no, I I I think I mean it's it's a useful, it's a useful point. I I think um, you know, it'll be good to hear about um you know continuous improvement and that's project within itself, right? Um, you know, how do you continually look to streamline processes and and uh you know convert those old uh process builder and workflows into flow and and and so on, right? You know, that that that that is something that's well documented, right? Um could could you could you give us uh an a bit of insight to perhaps uh a priority project that you're currently working on within sales quads?

SPEAKER_02 19:15

Um it actually it's it's funny that you even mentioned that because right now we're we are working on uh converting process builders to flows. No, I really wasn't.

SPEAKER_01 19:29

It's not, it's not, but we we literally kicked the kickoff call was today. No way.

SPEAKER_02 19:33

I totally honest God, but uh so what's interesting is that you know once again, once you're inside the Salesforce ecosystem, you start learning about the the infamous governor uh governor limits, right? And understanding the not the confines, but the bumper guards that Salesforce puts on you so that you don't run rampant, right? They force you to optimize. You don't have a choice. You you have to live within their boundaries, otherwise it's not gonna work, right? So uh when you know when workflow moved to process builder, everyone was like, oh, process builder, we really hate the UI, but it's better than uh workflow, right? And so Goosehead did exactly what they did were supposed to do at that time, right? They converted workflows into uh process builders. So, you know, now that there's like a hundred process uh yeah, process builders that are I don't know how many nodes deep, you know, with all of this uh with this craziness that's happening with inside of there, and the logic is kind of like, yeah, it's iffy just because that's the way it was designed. And so now guess what? Well, we're we're a really huge, very busy org. And if you can believe, process builders are very inefficient in running um uh any sort of automation, uh declarative automation in Salesforce. So we're actually hitting a lot of uh errors because of legacy Salesforce tech, which seems uh crazy, but it that's what's happening, right? So um we're we're seeing uh long running uh processes that die because after that 10 seconds or 20 seconds or whatever that those different um time periods, it just Salesforce kills it, right? And you get an error, and you're like, oh man. And so uh we're it's a long time coming, but we kicked it off today, and hopefully we'll get it done by this quarter. But once again, we also worked with a Salesforce engineer, and and they basically just said, Look, you have to get these upgraded, otherwise, your org is just gonna like go to a like a crawl. So here we are, we're not we're doing it.

SPEAKER_04 22:00

Wow. So so yeah, tell us a bit more about that. Like how do you know right? So anybody who's taken the admin ex admin exam, right? One of the things they tell you to study is the order that things fire off, right? So first you can have your pre-updates, then your post-updates, and your flows, and your triggers, right? Um the process builders. Right. So and if you got like a really, really big org and now you're, you know, like so big that you really gotta like you know rewrite all of these uh process builders as flows. How do you manage that knowledge of just what has to happen when? Um not to mention using FSC, right? So FSE had all of its also automation built in there. Um right, so you gotta know what that does, then you gotta know what your stuff is doing, and you gotta know all the orders, um, and then you're rewriting the code. Like how how do you how do you manage just like forget even the rebuilding, just the knowledge of like what has has to be done? Um are you using like some kind of automated testing tool? Are you documenting this? Do you have like a giant Gantt chart? Um, not a Gantt chart, a pull chart.

SPEAKER_02 23:11

Yeah, I mean I mean that that is a that is the million dollar question, right? That because I I even I think as Salesforce admins, we every time an admin leaves an org, a little bit of that historical knowledge or that Oracle like goes out the window, right? And it it's always a struggle. I mean, the the beauty of the the declared nature of Salesforce is that it's so easy to do something, but then it's like, why did we do it? Or why is this here? Another thing that we've struggled with and is that we found redundancies inside of the various process builders and flows because people didn't know that this action was already happening over here and now it's happening over here, right? So we're doing like double DMLs or something, right? Like it's just it's insane. Um, well, I tell you how we're handling it, how we're gonna handle it. Um uh basically, I've assigned one of our senior um self-source admins to um work with uh so we've assigned a group of people to systematically start breaking down each of the process builders and moving them to uh flow. That's the first thing we're doing, and we're having them blindly move them, not not activating them, but just blindly rebuilding the logic in in workflow. And then we're gonna have like our senior architect admin then look at our current uh flow as it relates to that object. And what we've done now is we're we're starting to create master flows. Inside those master flows, we're determining is this a subflow of this flow or is this actually a flow? Uh, and then also we're looking at redundancies as well as is this process still even needed? Because this process builder was made five, six years ago. Is is this even valid anymore, right? So we're we're that's how we are tackling it right now. Because uh doc, you know, everyone says document, document, document, that's great. But if this document was created five, six years ago, I'm not sure how valid it would be in our current org right now. Um, and I think also the other good thing is that Salesforce is pretty readable uh in in the declarative UI. So understanding, but uh how it works is easy. The why is a little harder, but that's what we we have our evidence for.

SPEAKER_04 25:40

So how the how it works is easy because that because that's really the core of my question, right? So if you have 100 process builders, um, I don't know how many use cases or use case flows that covers, right? How many paths can it you know traverse through that? And how how do you regression test all of that, right? Yeah. So I would not be surprised if you're rebuilding that if you find a legacy bug.

SPEAKER_02 26:07

Oh, I I absolutely uh guarantee you we'll find a legacy bug. I guarantee you. Um uh so what we what we just did recently is that we um like a few months ago we purchased Capado uh robotic testing. So we're actually creating test cases uh for the robot to do regression testing on each iteration of of all this stuff going forward. This project as well as just our regular releases. So um this is a great opportunity for us to also uh create those test cases as we as we go through this process. So that's new for us, uh, but I think that's gonna help. Um yeah, and and and I know you said you said how. How will I know? Or what was that? Well, how will you know?

SPEAKER_04 27:02

How how do you how how do you even know the use cases, right? Of all of these flows, right?

SPEAKER_01 27:10

Correct, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 27:12

Every county had its own rule, and based on the insurance type, um, and I'm sure based on the individual, their age, their general demographic data, um, then I'm sure where the entry point is, is it from your website, is it from the user directly into Salesforce, all right? All is it from a franchise or an internal, all of that kind of stuff, you know, not to mention the values they enter, right? You know, old beat up car or viewer car. Um, all of that I would assume affects the flow, right? But not to mention dollar amounts. Um, so there must be just so many rules, like business rules of what has to happen.

SPEAKER_02 27:52

There is. I would say um for for that very specific uh scenario that you were talking about, all of that is really handled on our our full stack side. Once it gets into our Salesforce org, we're really about maintaining and servicing once the policy comes back into the org. So we don't make a lot of decisions about the actual insurance like binding. That's that's in our Heroku environment. That's where all that logic sits. And that I I um I feel for my counterpart that he manages all of that because it's it's massive. That code base is is huge. And we have uh uh eight scrum teams with uh 50 some odd web developers working on this this project that we have going on, getting on new carriers and more carriers and more carriers. Um and it's very impressive to see it all happen. But so once again, once it gets into Salesforce, our processes are really about um, like I said, servicing and maintaining the policy through the the life cycle of that particular policy, like the term of the policy, like um um cancellations, renewals, all and all the service stuff. Um and then just all the different regulation pieces that we have to also look at. We all of that is all in different logic with Inside Flows. Now, um a lot of these things are like stamping um like analytic data as well, right? So when was the first time they called? When was the first time the the policy was created? Are they how many times is the policy renewed? Um when when did the policy cancel and did they not renew it? So these are just all the the things that I think are sitting in these little process builders. I haven't looked through all of them, uh because there's quite a few, but um, but yeah, so I don't know quite what we're gonna uncover just because I haven't looked at all of it, but it should be exciting.

SPEAKER_05 30:10

It will be rewarding when it's finished, I think. Uh, and it'd be interesting to kind of hear your thoughts, maybe in three months, six months time, right? Uh see how many how many of those extra grades you pointed out might be there.

SPEAKER_02 30:22

Yeah, well, yeah. I mean, what's interesting is like it this this one little piece causes such a trickle-down effect of performance in our org. Like it really is staggering that these process builders are literally choking our org, which is crazy to think that this was it a couple years ago. But um, you know, as technology gets better and uh Salesforce gets better, that's what we're doing.

SPEAKER_05 30:49

There's there's an aspect of embracing change, right? Um, but there's also, I would imagine, an aspect of frustration. Um, that um, you know, there's innovation, but maybe perhaps innovating too quickly. Um, that you know, in two years from now, three years from now, are you gonna have to do all this again and it's gonna be called something else, right? Um the the the uh the critics out there might say this is just a classic way um, you know, creating more work, um further embedding themselves into a business that makes it so impossible to move away from in the future, right? It's it's creating you know additional work. But I think one thing that you you you really mentioned was it's allowed an opportunity to redefine the processes in the first place. Um it's been a it's it's caused the business to sit back and evaluate is this process fit for purpose for what we want to achieve now. Um, you know, I think it's like a bit of spring cleaning, right? Unless the closet is full, you're probably never going to clean it. You're always busy, you're always, you know, you're just gonna keep chucking things in there. But eventually when the door's bulgied and you can't close it, then you're forced to do something about it, right? So um see both sides of that of that problem. Um but um I wanted to ask you about Capado uh quickly. Um so you mentioned uh Capado robotic testing. Um, you know, just for our listeners who maybe aren't as aware with with Capado and its its use case and you know, maybe other businesses that are looking at a similar um project exercise um going from you know this legacy process builder stuff to flows. Why did you choose Capado? And were there any other tools that you evaluated at that time uh that you kind of maybe came second place? And and you know what kind of made them stand out?

SPEAKER_02 32:35

Yeah, so you know, I think our um so there hasn't been um a lot of products really dedicated for the Salesforce ecosystem. And as fast as Salesforce is changing, um even with the introduction which a couple years ago of like MFA, right? Like even that was an interesting thing for QA testers, right? Because now you have to figure out okay, how do I send this token or how do I do this? How do I do that? Because most tool previously just username, password, login, and go, right? Um, so Capado, so okay, I'll take a step back. So we have Capado CI C D, which is our change management um uh software. And what's great about it is that um all our analysts kind of have their own kind of our our Salesforce admins analysts have their dev orgs, which we use Capado to promote to our UAT for uh testing, all that uh UAT is like a full sandbox where we do the rest of our testing, and then we what we've did when I came on, they were doing changes just kind of willy-nilly, like we need to change, push it through, change, push it through. And it it was kind of causing a little like disruption in in our workflow because if something went haywire, it's like uh well, what happened? So, first thing I instituted was we changed releases to every Wednesday. And why I chose Wednesday is because it's not the beginning of the week, it's not the end of the week. And I have a few days if something breaks before I have to work on it for the weekend. So um uh essentially, then what we do is is then we promote it all up and then we promote it to production on on a Wednesday, and then um we have then the ability Capado has this really great tool that lets you back promote the changes from production to lower environments. So um now all your dev boxes where people are developing now have an updated profile. They have the updated object that your coworker was was um working and developing. So that's that's a really cool feature. Um uh as well as just being able to uh keep track of all the changes in a more uh visual way. Uh, we need to like change sets after a so amount of time they kind of drop off out of the platform, and it's hard to look back historically. Um, and especially because we're we sell insurance, we're kind of under the watchful eye of uh different regulatory things. So we need to be able to prove uh at any why a field was moved from this org to this org uh and you know who requested it, why. So we have lots of um gates that we go through to get something from a lower environment to a to a higher environment. So um that's working. Um and then the second part was now the CRT um actually hooks into that. So now what we can do is we can uh inside of SoulSource use cases, and then we create user stories, which then we attach our changes to, which then gets promoted through. And then before the ideal state was before any user story or change gets promoted, we'll have a um a uh coupon robot testing script which will then test and then do regression testing after it goes into production, and after that clears, then we can close the the case. So um not only does it doing the pre, but it's doing the after. Uh once again, that library still building that library uh for all the different regression testing, but uh that obviously will start changing as we start really implementing all of our different features that we're moving through. Um, and then it also has this ability to self-heal. Um with a lot of things in Salesforce. Um you know, the what if you look at the source code on a page of a and you're looking for a specific, I don't know, like a field, every time the page refreshes, Salesforce puts a new ID because it's unique to that page. Um so tip old typical um like robotic testing that will break because it's looking for very specific things, but they've built in a little bit of this technology that allows it to look on the page and find it. They have a little bit of an OCR if it can't find it, which is also kind of a cool feature. Um, we use other products, uh, we use Selenium before. Um, and it's good, it's open source, it's good. However, it broke a lot because of uh Salesforce and the dynamic nature of Salesforce, right? So you add a new field to a page layout, and now all of a sudden the page layout on the back end is not called one, two, three, four, five, it's called five, six, seven, eight because it's the new version or something like that, right? Um and then we also are using test sigma, which is a it's also a good one, but once again, this is it's just a little more tailored for Salesforce. Um, it obviously does our uh full stack as well.

SPEAKER_04 37:56

Um, but yeah, that's why okay, cool. Yeah, so so you you said you like you have all the clouds, you have all of the products. We do. So like it's a lot, right? So one of these has to be keeping you up at night. Which is the one that that's really, really making you crazy, that you worry about constantly, you know, that's like e just curse it, let's say, curse added.

SPEAKER_02 38:28

Um like one of the one of the clouds are one of our one of the things that we built inside of Salesforce.

SPEAKER_04 38:35

Whichever it is. It's always there's always something that you like, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 38:39

There, there so I mentioned it earlier. Uh we have this submit to QC, right? QC is a is a is a group, but it's also this giant application that we created.

SPEAKER_04 38:52

What does QC stand for?

SPEAKER_02 38:53

Uh quality control.

SPEAKER_04 38:56

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_02 38:56

Yeah. Uh uh, so essentially when an agent is ready to bind, it has to go through QC. And the first thing it does is it uh it's a group, but preemptively we have this lightning web component that they have to kind of do these checks, kind of like a checklist of various things. But it's got to know everything about that policy, everything. Uh and and everything has to be filled out, everything at all the I's you know, T's crossed and all that fun stuff before it gets submitted. Well, because of the complexity of it, anytime that that people ask that to be updated or worked on, it's an Apex, uh referencing uh and the Lightning Web component is the is the front part. I I sweat a little bullet uh every time the development because that single point will, if that goes down, production stops. Like no policies can be bound done.

SPEAKER_05 40:03

And how much business do you think that would cost if that happened just to put it into like real monetary value? Or how many you know, hundreds or thousands of policies could that potentially destroy?

SPEAKER_04 40:15

I would assume it gets right, I would assume it gets backlogged for a little while before you lose it. Um true.

SPEAKER_02 40:22

I would uh the the total dollar amount I I I I wouldn't even venture to guess. It'd be a lot.

SPEAKER_04 40:28

Why are you trying to make them lose more hair, man?

SPEAKER_02 40:32

But but but what I would say is a insurance market is so volatile right now that if you wait even a few hours, that policy could expire and the rate could double. So um, you know, it's it's so critical speed to action on these things that we we have to get it through uh to get it bound with the carrier as soon as possible before the rate changes. Now it may go up, may go down, I don't know. But the just the way the insurance market has been, and I'm sure everybody knows it, the insurance market has been horrible. Uh, but even with that, we still grew another 30% uh last year just because we're able to look at so many different carriers to find you know great rates.

SPEAKER_05 41:24

Long long may that continue um as well.

SPEAKER_02 41:28

Yes. Well, let's hope the insurance rates go down because I would I want to save some money. Are you kidding? Geez.

SPEAKER_04 41:36

So, I mean, obviously you guys are experiencing financial uh you know massive growth there. Um I assume you're crediting Salesforce system to that in a big way. So are there any like specifics um implementations, you know, projects that you think really, really like just give you such a big bang for your buck in terms of of ROI to the business?

SPEAKER_02 42:01

So uh yes, and and this is uh Salesforce adjacent. But uh so we're doing we're doing a couple things right now, right? So uh also at the very the very end of last year, about October, I started a project, and I think we um I may mention it before when I talked about uh Tableau and we stood up a data warehouse and uh on Snowflake. I know Snowflake and Salesforce are like thickest thieves, right? Like Data Cloud loves Snowflake, and I think part of it even runs on Snowflake. I I was at the Tableau conference this this year, and I kind of cornered an engineer, and he's like, Yeah, I kind of worked, I worked at on at Snowflake with data uh data cloud, and it's sort of the same technology, or blah blah blah. And I was like, Oh, cool. Um so um we and I like I also said we also have uh CRMA, which I think used to be called Wave, I think, or Einstein was it at one point as well?

SPEAKER_04 43:11

Yes, Einstein, yeah, and then it was called like Analytics Cloud, Einstein Analytics, yeah, yeah. Um then Tableau CRM and then now CRM analytics.

SPEAKER_02 43:22

So it's a good product, right? And and uh so we've been using it since like day one, right? So we have just tons of stop building CRMA, but there are some limitations around that product, right? Uh doing some really um deep like number crunching and stuff like that, it kind of struggles a little bit with larger data sets, um as well as like the sync time between CRMA and uh Salesforce Core CRM. Um so long story short, we we spun up uh a tableau, Snowflake. We're replicating our Salesforce org. Into Snowflake every two hours. Um, we're moving it over. We're using an application called DBT to create um models, different um you know, data models, and then what we're doing, then we're exposing those to Tableau. So beginning of the year we had zero data analysts. Now we have three with a data analyst manager. Thank you, Kiro. Um, and this team has become one of the most sought-after teams because of the amount of information they're able to now give to the business that wasn't really possible before. So imagine having an org 14 years old, never archived or deleted anything. Uh all that data, and you try to run a report on a table that has like, I don't know, 35 million records or something like that. You know, it's just it's just not gonna work. Uh so um mind you, we we have our since we're archiving and things like that, so it's happening. Um but now we have now we're unlocking so much more analytics with Tableau uh being able to utilize cell source data, but in a more robust manner using Snowflake. Um so that already we have seen so much insights. Um we've been playing with the polls and things like that, but uh honestly, we uh we are working with different data scientists and things like that to really mine data, and and that's where we're really seeing the value as of right now. So it's I I know Tableau is not a new product, but it's new to us. And um another unique thing about uh Goose Head is we're all SaaS products. We don't have any on-prem technology. Everything we have is is uh SaaS. So we use uh Tableau Cloud, um which it's just been uh it's been really great for our organization.

SPEAKER_04 46:10

Yeah, CRM Analytics works really well with with uh Snowflake also. It has the native Snowflake connector, it can pull the data out. Um it's a it's a pattern I use a lot where replicate Salesforce to Snowflake. So all the transformations in Snowflake, link it back to the data set, build my dashboards in uh in uh CRM analytics, um, and don't use the recipes at all. And that kind of solves a lot of that transformation headaches you're talking about.

SPEAKER_02 46:35

Um that's a that's a good idea. Oh I didn't think about that.

SPEAKER_04 46:38

Yeah, Salesforce uh CRMA analytics also have this the native sync out to Snowflake, which you can just use for the replication. So it works really nice. Um believe it or not, this morning I built a dashboard on a data set using the CRMA live connector to sell Snowflake. So it doesn't replicate the data. Um the data set in Snowflake has eight hundred and fifty million records, so nearly a billion records, massive, massive data set. Um so you know, I don't know, it's not heavily used, which is good. Um my concern is like if I bid something like that into a Salesforce page, I'm gonna get slammed with Snowflake CPU charges, right? Because it's yeah. So uh it's not a heavily used dashboard, right? So you really gotta think about um you know, do you really want to connect it you know live to Snowflake with massive data sets and then just let everyone palant it, right? Obviously, you gotta worry about this stuff. But yeah, yeah, this is a whole conversation.

SPEAKER_05 47:40

Um of data, um obviously uh we can see uh for those that are watching this episode, we can see Maz's uh data hoodie. Um and and in in the last 24 hours, it's been a huge announcement in the Salesforce space with the acquisition uh Salesforce has made of OM, um company, which was for formerly um backup, right? Um I think it used to be known as um another company a bit longer. Um not not not not a uh a scripted answer by any means. Um we haven't talked about this. Obviously, it's it's half the press, but very quickly, is that a move that excites you guys? Is that a move that you know you think oh it's gonna increase cost or or how are we feeling about that kind of acquisition in general?

SPEAKER_02 48:26

Well, it's funny. Uh I don't know if I told you, but I serve on their uh product advisory board. And we they didn't tell us that they've been really tight-lipped. So when I heard about it, you guys heard about it. Uh they actually were on site two days ago, actually. Uh, and they didn't talk about it then either. Uh any company that does really well and does something uh really well, like really and and the market is really saturated in that product. Salesforce typically buys it, but you guys already know that. Um I am nervous about um what this looks like as far as pricing is concerned. Um yes, I am a little concerned because how heavily we are invested in own uh as a company, and their products are really great. Um, and then they're just releasing this new product called Discover, I believe. Um, and then essentially, uh, you know, they have all let's say you've been backing up like Gusa's been backing up with them for like 10 years. Well, they have 10 years worth of your data in snapshots for whatever your retention is or whatever you have with their contract, they have that data, and now they're letting you access that data in uh via SQL. So you can hook up any SQL. Uh it's uh um gosh, was it red bricks? I can't remember what they're using, but um, but yeah, so can you imagine how interesting that could be to now crunch your data over a 10-year span of all the changes that have happened throughout all those backups? It's it's very, very, very interesting. It's very smart technology, um, and it's fast. Uh, we did we did see a little demo of it. So um and it's sitting there. It's it's waiting. It's waiting for you to buy it. Buy your data back.

SPEAKER_04 50:34

It it's a great, it's a great product, uh owned. Um my clients have been using it, or my clients' clients have been using it for years. Um I'm gonna I'm gonna be honest, uh, it's something I have a gripe with Salesforce for a long time, is the lack of a proper backup resource solution. Like it should be quick. Take snapshot, roll back, particularly over deployment weekends, like like um, you know, the the partners in Salesforce ecosystem, everyone in Salesforce ecosystem, it's like we got a big work, we're doing a deployment, it's the whole weekend, and it's like what's a rollback process? Um, and it's often like yeah, there's no rolling. It's like we're gonna roll forward, and that's that. We just gotta make it work. And it you know, in in it it's just one of my gripes. I feel like Salesforce should have solved for that. Um, and I I don't know why. I honestly don't know why. Let's charge us, but like we'll pay for that, you know. I need to pay for a snapshot so that I can roll back um you know the whole org, metadata, data, you know, it's you know, soup to nuts. It's like a it's a badly, badly needed feature. And even even with own backup, right? Own backup is working within the constraints of the APIs, right? So if you wiped out data and then you restore the ideas are changing. If you have integrations that can cause problems for that, um your sandboxes are now out of sync, right? It's not it's not perfect. Yeah, um, you know, and there's no reason why it shouldn't. It it's it's uh it's a complaint as a data person, it's a complaint I've had I've had for a long time. I feel like it makes the stress of deployments, um, particularly big deployments, um, on production orgs really, really, really, really stressful because it's like there's no going back. Um, so it's one of the reasons why own has done so well, for sure. Yeah, because of lack, right? Um, you come you get you go to people who are like not from the Salesforce world and like, what do you mean? Just back up the database, back up the code, and then right?

SPEAKER_02 52:42

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I mean, uh trust me, we we had an issue where we had to do a restore, and it took like 24 hours to do a couple of records, and that's really just due to complexity and own having to work with the constraints of what Salesforce um enables them to do, right?

SPEAKER_04 53:04

Like you were saying, the APIs and just how quickly they can rules, yeah, push and pull. Something simple, right? The opportunity is allowed to move from stage A to stage B, but it can't go from stage B to stage A. Now, so now what? It fails, right? Because you can't roll back, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:20

Right. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely some gaps, obviously, but but yeah, you're right. There has to be a better solution than just clicking on your object and hitting download and then waiting for a CSV file to pop down.

SPEAKER_04 53:34

Uh there's nothing you can do with that CS, like what do you do with that CSV file? You you can archive it and then hope that you never need it.

SPEAKER_02 53:42

That's right. Yeah, you just just know that you have it. Right.

SPEAKER_05 53:46

We'll let we'll let you data nodes geek out a little bit offline uh about about it. Uh it sounds like that was uh uh opening the can of worms a little bit. So um moving on, uh Ethan, a couple of quick questions as we as we wrap up. Um what advice would you give another leader uh in your you know similar shoes to yourself who is coming into an enterprise organization um with you know potentially hundreds, thousands of users, um, and they've been using Salesforce for 10 plus years? Um, what would be your key piece of advice um to that to that individual?

SPEAKER_02 54:26

Jeez. Um well, you know, I I guess hopefully what I did was the right thing. Uh, you know, make sure you align yourself with um good people around you. That that's always that's a good thing. Um, number two, don't make any rash decisions at first when a problem jumps because you don't know the full picture yet. Um, you know, people tend to jump at fires, but and we have to put out the fire, but you definitely need to know more context before you figure out what what you're putting out because that may inevitably cause more problems. Um give yourself a little grace. Um, there it is in Salesforce, really, there's a bell curve in in really anything, right? So that learning is it's really tough, tough, tough, tough, tough. And then once you get kind of over the hump, it gets a little easier. So um also, you know, what I do is I literally go into setup and I just start clicking through the configurations in our UAT environment and just trying to figure out the lay of the land, at least knowing the default configurations of what's happening. So that way when someone asks me questions, maybe I don't know the answers, but I know where to look. Or um, or maybe I do know just a little bit uh of what's going on. Um yeah, and I would say but once again, just take a deep breath because this org is big and it's gonna take you a little bit before you understand it.

SPEAKER_05 56:00

Awesome. And um what was um what was the biggest differentiator? Uh again, for our listeners for context, you know, obviously you spent a lot of your career in the nonprofit space. Um what was the biggest differentiator going from non-profit to commercial and then into a not just commercial, but also uh, as you mentioned, a industry where there is a lot of scrutiny, uh, there's a lot of eyes on policies and regulations and things like that. What what was like kind of the biggest ah I didn't realize uh that was the case, right?

SPEAKER_02 56:37

Yeah, I mean, I it I've spent like you said, the majority of my career in in various nonprofit roles, um, but uh dabbling here and there in in for-profit. But this since I've hopped out, this has been um, I would say the eye-opener is really understanding um, especially in this org, the direct impact on what you do in Salesforce. Because um, like this particular company, like I said, they live and breathe. So you change one thing, and that ripple effect is so uh I don't know, it's earth-shattering sometimes that what can happen on one little thing. Um, and also having to understand that now being a publicly traded company, there's other people that you're answering to, right? Um, not that you're not you don't take your job seriously in a nonprofit, but it's a little bit more relaxed. Um, you have a little bit more time to breathe. Uh it's not quite as fast paced. Um, not that you don't have the the mission or the passion and all that fun stuff to to get that done, but this is a little bit different. Um uh having to make sure that that bottom line always looks good.

SPEAKER_04 57:54

Very cool. And so um looking towards the future, like what what are you really excited about, you know, either in Salesforce or in the insurance industry, or have you had it with the insurance industry and maybe eventually get out of? Um I mean it it's insurance insurance is definitely is uh is definitely an interesting space.

SPEAKER_01 58:13

Yeah, it's okay.

SPEAKER_04 58:15

Yeah, yeah. So yeah, so we're so what do you what are you excited about? You know, what do you see changing? Like what do you see on the horizons for you know CRM in general or Salesforce and you know?

SPEAKER_02 58:25

So I mean yeah, you know, I I know that this is Agent Force is gonna be a thing for you guys. Exactly. Agent Force. I was gonna say, uh, you know, this is the buzzword, is the AI, right? AI is the new thing. You know, the the more I've been digging in it, the more I um I I'm really understanding. We've done a lot of uh POCs with large language models using CRM data, uh trying to use SoulSource uh uh AI, not this first iteration, not not been like we're not heavy adopters of it uh at this point. Um, I think we're a little bit more we're more advanced with the stuff that we've already built. Uh so I I am interested to see where this is gonna go. Yes, this agent portal should be interesting. Um I've been actually researching a little bit about all of this um AI stuff and just understanding like what their vision is and what they're trying to do in between the generative, uh the large language to predictive to all these things and how it fits in their ecosystem on paper on the their Salesforce slides, it looks really, really cool and really really good, but I need to see it before I'll I'll be a heavy investor. Uh someone told me one time um you shouldn't adopt any Salesforce product until two Dream Forces. So uh so it came out a couple like two, I think two ago or one ago. And so we'll see what happens this time around. But but yeah, so I I am very interested, and I I'm a huge user of the chat GPT. Um, but I also really understand the limitations and the limitations of the actual AI LLM generation that we have now, right? Like it's good, but it's not replacing any jobs as of now. So I'm I'm interested to see where this goes in the future inside of Salesforce and then out in just the general ecosystem of the world.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:36

Time will tell. That's right. Time will tell. Um, all right, fantastic. Well, um Ethan, uh, you know, just want to say a massive thank you uh for your time today and insurance and insuring insurance is on top of mind. And sharing uh the uniqueness of uh you know the business at GUTEB Insurance, um, how you navigate in the insurance industry, uh, and and and shedding a bit more information on uh how you're currently using uh Salesforce and plans for the future. So thank you again uh for your time.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:09

Yeah, thank you guys.

SPEAKER_05 1:01:11

Thank you. Uh for our listeners, uh please do not forget to subscribe to the CRM Success Show for more episodes featuring amazing leaders like Ethan, uh, who are really true work really and truly shaping the shape of uh Salesforce and the future of CRM. Um you can also follow us on LinkedIn, uh, watch us on YouTube, uh, and keep an eye out for the latest uh updates and exclusive content around uh our podcast uh releases and when they air. Uh for now, thank you again and uh take care.