Each year, I have the pleasure of reviewing programs of excellence submitted to our Innovator Awards program, for recognition at our annual Hearsay Summit. So many of our clients had outstanding success using Hearsay in 2021, it was tough for our judges to make their final decisions! Read on to learn more about these financial services all-stars.

Most Innovative Compliance Strategy, Pam Hess and Kyle Klendworth, Country Financial 

In 2021, Country Financial embarked on a lexicon overhaul, allocating resources to a short-term project that resulted in long-term time savings for the Country compliance team. In less than six weeks, Country completely reworked their compliance configuration in partnership with our compliance advisory team, resulting in a 60% reduction in irrelevant alerts and saving the team hours of work.

Movers and Shakers, Tracy Benillouz, Natixis Investment Managers

Tracy and the Natixis team reorganized their content library in order to accelerate speed to publish—taking into account language, local region, and current events and themes. Natixis’ sales force can now leverage global, local and highly relevant content while mitigating risk, driving more lead introduction, nurturing, and business opportunities. 

Movers and Shakers, Kathleen Mayko and Kelly Twohig, Massachusetts Mutual

MassMutual drove a 33% increase in engagement rate through a series of initiatives: localized, firm-level content publishing by marketing professionals, multiple dynamic URL strings for personalized link content, AppCues to drive key actions for new users and auto-subscription to a social media starter campaign for new users. They also partnered closely with Hearsay’s training and education team to drive adoption and engagement across MassMutual’s firms and field force. 

Movers and Shakers, Lindsay Callahan, MFS Investment Management

In the three years since Lindsay has led the MFS social media program, she’s pivoted her team’s approach from agency to in-house for all things social, changing the internal perception of Social from a distant "nice-to-have" to a business driver. With over 80% of employees in their selling program using Hearsay, MFS has seen the strongest engagement in its program history, with a 130% increase in social publishing and a 13% increase in social connections. Lindsay's strategies and drive for continuous improvement has led the way for a reinvigorated program! 

Exceptional ROI for Social, Nicole Costantino, Ian Sepp, Allaire Guralnik, Morgan Stanley

To develop a sophisticated performance framework, Nicole and Ian partnered with Hearsay on an ROI survey to gather data on business results and demonstrate the strong value of their social selling program. Allaire overhauled Morgan Stanley's tagging strategy to identify what areas were truly high- and low-performing, what to do more of/less of around content strategy, and how to make campaigns more strategic—establishing an elevated content strategy for Morgan Stanley.

Exceptional ROI for Sites, Sarah Kinkead and Chris Johnson, Janney

Janney has played an integral role in shaping the evolution of advisor websites, not only for their team but for Hearsay Sites as a whole. Over the last two years, Sarah and Chris worked with Hearsay to balance advisor feedback and requirements with engineering and design best practices, to arrive at today’s NextGen version of Sites. Janney’s advisors now have the flexibility and customization to control their own digital narrative. Sarah and Chris’ deep knowledge of Hearsay, along with their forward-thinking vision for advisor sites helped deliver impactful results for Janney. 

Excellence in Digital Communications Transformation, John Heidrich and Alicia Burns, Allstate 

John took Allstate’s Lead Actions program from pilot to full rollout in record time—quickly gaining a high volume of enrollees and leads delivered to Hearsay for orchestration. This was in no small part thanks to his dedication to establishing a framework to measure value right from the start. As the leader of Allstate’s social program, Alicia transformed her team’s approach from publishing-first to publishing-with-purpose, in order to build agents’ personal brands. By implementing a modification-required content strategy, a social direct message content strategy and linking content performance to agent performance, her team continues to drive increased engagement.

Thank you to everyone who nominated themselves or a fellow leader this year, and congratulations again to all of our award winners. We’re so impressed by all that they’ve accomplished this year and we can’t wait to see what they’ll tackle in the year ahead!