InforcePro / InsightSquared Case Study

InforcePRO is revolutionizing the way the life insurance industry manages and mines its largest unmanaged asset – policyholder data – while setting the standard for data security and compliant policyholder service. The Austin-based software company was founded in 2012 and has grown rapidly, raising $6.5 million in funding so far.

The company began to scale the sales team last year, and they quickly realized the need for better visibility into their sales data. According to Jim Reiss, Chief Revenue Officer of InforcePRO, the company had enviable sales metrics, but didn’t have insights into the entire sales process.

Building a Better Sales Machine

As the business scaled up and volume increased, Reiss and other business leaders worried that their impressive 85% demo-to-close conversion rate would drop drastically.

“Anytime you try and drive a bunch more leads, it’s like watering down your beer,” he explained. “The more ice cubes you put in, the worse the beer tastes. And so, as we try and market to the 800,000 life insurance producers out there, there’s a pretty good risk that we’re going to dilute our demo-to-close ratio.”

Reiss wanted to create an efficient go-to-market machine to maintain those metrics. That necessitated better insights into the entire sales process — from marketing lead through to signed customer.

 

Jim Reiss of InforcePRO

“Salesforce, while it’s a great place to put data, it’s not a great place to visualize it,” Reiss noted. “And you can’t manage what you can’t see. We were tracking all the standard activities in Salesforce, but not with the granularity this business needs. We weren’t discerning between inbound and outbound leads. We weren’t tracking demo stats and meetings separate from tasks. We weren’t tracking live conversations compared to chat off the website.”

Without this information on hand, it was tough for him to really drill down and understand what was working, and what wasn’t. Reiss wasn’t able to drive improvements or invest more heavily in the best activities, because he wasn’t sure what those activities were.

Revising the Sales Funnel

To gain a better understanding of the sales process, InforcePRO chose InsightSquared as the solution they needed to refine and improve their sales process. They immediately saw value from the analytics, however, Reiss realized he needed to clean up their sales data in order to get more from the product.

For example, Reiss shared a story of how he analyzed the push rates when reps sent prospects a contract before they were ready to buy.

“We would supply pricing and a DocuSign to our customer who didn’t buy at the moment of the demo,” he explained. “I found in the data that the majority of times we would DocuSign, those deals slipped. They weren’t ready to buy.”

With data guiding his decision, Reiss chose to make changes to the sales funnel, including adding an entirely new sales stage. By changing the process around this funnel stage, Reiss saw their sales cycle shorten. Instead of leaving prospects to decide on their own, reps got a commitment to buy before sending the contract.

“Now, we’ve gone to a higher degree of granularity where we can really track everything that the BDR and the ISR is doing to drive leads to opportunities and opportunities to close,” Reiss explained. “So, where we had two or three levels of granularity, we’ve now got seven or eight.”

We’ve gone to a higher degree of granularity where we can really track everything.

“As a manager, if you’re really looking for a way to understand what’s going on in your pipeline, you’re not going to get that in Salesforce,” he said. “You need a better set of optics, and that’s what InsightSquared is designed to deliver.”

 

Empowering Sales Reps to Win

Once the data was organized and the company was seeing powerful reporting in InsightSquared, Reiss made sure analytics were adopted across the sales team.

All of our reps have InsightSquared and they use it to manage their opportunities. 

“All of our reps have InsightSquared and they use it to manage their opportunities and see a visual summary of their daily activities,” Reiss noted. “If my reps want to know how many demos they’ve done this week, how many calls they’ve made, or how they stack up versus the other guy, it’s right there.”

Now, when managers bring up the dashboard to coach reps on open opportunities, the reps are completely on board. Reps are trying to most efficiently allocate their time, by targeting the opportunities the data tells them are most likely to close.

“They use the opportunity changes screen to keep an eye on their deals, and I use it too,” Reiss said. “What I’m really interested in is what’s changed for the good and what’s changed for the worse. When you start looking at this visually, it creates a new level of expectation, both of me upon the rep, and the rep upon themselves.”

“The reps are very reliant on InsightSquared to be able to track the metrics that we say are important for them to be successful,” Reiss said. “It puts us all in a common operating language; the language of InsightSquared.”

 

Scaling Up, and Winning Big

With data-driven insights in hand, InforcePRO has not only maintained their high conversion rates, but driven improvements. Reiss said he’s thrilled with the results.

“That’s the holy grail for our business — being able to show somebody the product, have them be measurably impressed, and then getting them to sign on the line the dotted very quickly,” Reiss noted. “InsightSquared is giving us this supreme level of optics to ensure that we hold on to those things that we know to be the tenets of our close process.”