Large Sales Force Produces More Effective and Highly Customized Retirement Plan Proposals using Automation
Summary:
An internal sales team, selling retirement plan management services to plan sponsors, produces elaborate custom pricing proposals for each potential client.
The Opportunity:
Customized proposals lie at the heart of efforts to market retirement plan solutions to plan sponsors. For one large mid-market-focused plan management company the goal became to significantly streamline custom proposal generation and to still be able to quickly handle data, product, pricing, and branding changes without significant redevelopment effort. Additionally, their implementation of Saleforce CRM should be integrated into this process enabling close-rate analysis and other operational reporting. Proposals need to be produced in real-time and support both electronic and print delivery.
The Solution:
Synthesis provides an ideal systems integration point for this solution, connecting multiple systems together and providing users with a straight-forward process.
- The resulting workflow integrates data from multiple systems with dynamic composition and on-demand print ordering.
- Leveraging the existing Salesforce.com implementation, users begin with a new or existing Opportunity. From there, they link to a new Proposal request – a custom UI provided.
- Leveraging the existing pricing approval process, users upload an Excel file containing approved client-specific pricing parameters and calculations.
- Users make a few additional selections and can then immediately preview the proposal.
- As soon as the proposal is finalized, the user links to the print ordering system, provided by MerrillConnect, and relevant data is automatically uploaded back to Salesforce.com.
The proposal itself consists of a custom cover page, custom pricing pages, an explanation of services and fees (which is customized based on selected fund options), fund fees and performance based on fund options and dynamic disclosures. When delivered in hard-copy, the proposal is included in a custom-selected folder of educational material with applicable supplemental brochures determined by product selections.
In addition to handling multiple product lines with different business rules, this system has been able to flex with pricing sheet changes and new product launches. Fund data is provided by a feed from Morningstar which is loaded and staged by a quarterly process that is almost completely transparent to the sales team.
Results:
A pilot version of this system to support a new product line was launched in under two months. The fully integrated system supporting all product lines was up and running shortly after that. The sales desk is now able to easily respond to pricing requests and has been able to focus on product and messaging improvements to further improve their sales.
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