Beecher Carlson

Exceptional Client Service Managed with Relationship Building Tool

Since 1981, Beecher Carlson has delivered insurance brokerage and risk management solutions to customers in specific industry verticals. This industry specialization has led to phenomenal growth in the company over the past three years. In fact, Beecher Carlson has enjoyed 113% compounded annual growth during recent years and watched revenues soar.

Through the growth, Beecher Carlson’s unwavering commitment to delivering exceptional client service has been a key ingredient in their excellent reputation for serving the top names in business. Specialized risk management programs – including complex property, complex casualty, executive liability, marine, claims and loss control consulting, analytics and risk modeling, captive management and consulting – center on each client’s needs.

New Solutions to Old Issues

Maintaining momentum and staying focused on serving clients meant Beecher Carlson needed a way to track and manage sales and client relationship activity. Because the company’s current system had been poorly adopted among the sales team, managers were forced to make costly and time-consuming modifications to obtain accurate information. As a result, Beecher Carlson decided to implement an entirely new solution with three primary goals:

· Make the system easy to use for early user adoption

· Provide the system as a tool for managing prospects and tracking activity

· Utilize CRM to generate revenue forecasts.

Communication of these basic goals throughout the company was key. Chief proponents of the project included management representation from the sales, finance and information technology (IT) departments. Each helped champion CRM in their particular functional areas to ensure a successful project rollout and make it work properly in their environment.

Customer Effective Personalizes the Plan

Tim Murphy emerged as Beecher Carlson’s CRM project leader and worked with Customer Effective during the project’s initiation. Working with Murphy, Customer Effective assumed leadership for developing an implementation plan to fit Beecher Carlson’s specific needs, including approach, steps and time frame for implementing CRM. Murphy supplied data gathered directly from his user community, including input provided by the company’s sales team and ‘producers.’ Customer Effective devised a plan to migrate data from Beecher Carlson’s dormant solution to Microsoft Dynamics CRM to ensure data integrity was maintained throughout the process.

As the team formulated the implementation plan, Customer Effective carefully determined the appropriate layout and required fields that Beecher Carlson needed for CRM, including ways to make the system easy to use through user-friendly views and screen layouts.

“Customer Effective took great care in developing a CRM implementation plan that was right for us,” says Murphy. “They worked directly with us to review our needs, address issues and explain the details of how the rollout would work. This was critical to our project success.”

Because of Beecher Carlson’s focus on specific vertical markets, CRM had to be configured to match the way the company tracked and managed their opportunity pipeline. Customer Effective customized the system using terminology familiar to Beecher Carlson’s producers, including how specific fields were labeled and how various sales stages were incorporated to track business development progress. Beecher Carlson also wanted managers in each vertical to have a consolidated view of their particular sales pipeline.

Starting Small to Gain Support

Beecher Carlson began CRM’s initial roll out while still in the design phase, so that they could easily make adjustments before full deployment. Beecher Carlson management was the first group to provide feedback on CRM. This strategy enabled Customer Effective to make system adjustments and iron out any wrinkles before the broader user community began using the system.

To ensure a smooth deployment and to foster user adoption, Customer Effective produced a training manual customized to Beecher Carlson’s use of CRM. Murphy spearheaded the training by traveling to Boston, New York

and Los Angeles where he conducted onsite training for new users. Customer Effective provided additional support with live training guidance. With the creation of a special ‘FAQs’ section built by Customer Effective, CRM users had ‘on demand’ access to answers for common questions. This lessened the dependency on resources as more users gained access to CRM – now almost 100 people who depend on the solution to track customer data and interactions, manage opportunity pipelines, capture prospecting information and generate forecasting reports.

Beecher Carlson’s construction insurance and risk management group employs a highly consultative sales process that can stretch into several months. It is critical that producers capture all activity associated with an opportunity. Since the group relies on Microsoft Office Outlook for email, CRM’s seamless integration with Outlook meant existing contact information and all contact histories for general contractors, developers and other prospects were easily migrated to CRM.

“We’ve experienced four times the user adoption with Microsoft CRM than with our previous sales automation system,” says John Jassmann, national sales leader, construction vertical. “By keeping our approach simple, our team has been more willing to embrace CRM as a tool they use every day.”

Detailed Reports Mean Realistic Forecasting

From a management perspective, Jassman routinely runs reports that indicate the health of his construction market group’s opportunity pipeline. He can review information that reflects when a decision is likely to take place and the potential revenue associated with it. The system even includes specific strategies to close business. With this type of available information, Jassmann has a clear picture of pending deals and the resources he’ll need to close opportunities.

“Our reports provide a very nice snapshot of where we are with our sales opportunities and remove the guesswork of our pipeline status. We are miles ahead of where we were prior to CRM,” says Jassman.

Having a financial forecasting tool for revenue projections was one of the three primary goals of implementing CRM at Beecher Carlson. Jeff Levit, vice president of finance, depends on CRM to create realistic forecasting.

Previously, he and his finance team were forced to make their best estimate based on limited data. Now, because opportunities in the pipeline are tied to real numbers and strategies to close business, they base financial projections on pre-defined probabilities of expected results. The team generates monthly reports that specify revenue potential, projected close dates and the probability of closure. Levit’s finance team runs reports by account for each ‘producer’ within the business leadership groups. Then the team tracks these findings against pre-established sales and revenue goals.

“The reporting we create from CRM provides our management team with a realistic view of our opportunity pipeline,” says Levit. “By reviewing progress, we’re easily able to identify where any gaps exist and develop strategies to close them in an effort to win new business.”

Activity reports for Beecher Carlson are important not only for revenue forecasting, but also serve as indicators to help people do their jobs better and more efficiently. Opportunity status reviews are available instantaneously and look-up features speed the process of finding specific accounts, contacts or prospect records.

Meeting – and Exceeding - Expectations

“We set out to achieve several project goals and feel like we’ve met them with success,” says Murphy. “Having the expertise of Customer Effective was key to our project. They were patient with us, understood our issues and responded well to our needs. Customer Effective knows CRM and they know how the tool is best used.”

As the fastest growing insurance brokerage and risk management solutions provider over the last three years, Beecher Carlson knows what it takes to be successful. Specialized teams with a client-first commitment ensure superior service and satisfaction. By leveraging the power of CRM combined with analytics, technology and services, Beecher Carlson and CRM will continue to deliver insurance and risk management solutions unique to each client’s needs.