In our post-pandemic world, the ability to scale 1:1 interactions and relationships for your sales team has taken on new urgency and relevance. With a compliant text and voice solution like Hearsay Relate, teams are effectively enabling advisor and agent productivity to cut through the clutter with faster (and better) responses to drive new business.

Recently, I had the honor of facilitating a Hearsay Summit session with two Relate innovators, Allison Couch, from Modern Woodmen of America, and John Heidrich, of Allstate. Allison and John shared how they’ve helped their teams lay the groundwork for sustained success with Relate, and improved field productivity and speed to service in the process.

Both Allison and John had excellent advice when it came to inspiring the behavior change needed to successfully implement a new technology, including:

• Have advocates in the field. When representatives from around the country can provide feedback, test new features, and share their success with their network, you’re able to identify and eliminate roadblocks to adoption.
  
• Work closely with other stakeholders in the organization to ensure the program serves end users well. So for a marketing team, this means partnering with distribution and compliance leaders, so that messaging is consistent and goals are aligned.
  
• Understand and segment field users to provide appropriate onboarding materials according to their technological proficiency. Customized materials and onboarding go a long way toward improving adoption.
  
• Provide guidelines for how often to text, when you shouldn’t text or how you shouldn’t text. Templates and dialogue examples of what you can text, or should text, are also helpful.

To maintain momentum, some of their best practices include:

• Communicate new Hearsay features on an ongoing basis. This can help new users get off the fence, and also increase usage for current users.
  
• Use Hearsay’s new weekly messaging report for Relate users. This allows field representatives to do their own analysis and benchmark where they’re at with text messaging, and how it’s affecting their business on a weekly basis.
  
• Move to an opt-out as soon as possible, because the field loves it and consumers are receptive to it. This allows representatives to initiate conversations sooner, which helps them get results sooner.
  Finally, both speakers recommended having Relate office hours.

One more advanced strategy that Allstate has implemented—and which Modern Woodmen is considering—is integrating Relate with their CRM systems. The integration solves challenges around streamlining processes, maintaining accurate records, and providing corporate visibility. Agency users were saying, “Hey, we’ve got too many things open at the same time,” and also wanted to capture what conversations are taking place, with whom and when, for errors and omissions purposes. In addition, the visibility for management has been highly insightful. John’s team has gained visibility into conversations with new prospective clients, for example, by looking at how those interactions are taking place, and seeing what is and is not working.

Thank you to Allison and John for sharing their successes and learnings from their Relate journeys!