RHS 138 - Andrew Darlington on Adding Love to Your Customer Experience

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Speaker 5 In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.

Speaker 4 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show.

Speaker 6 Today we have an absolutely tremendous episode for you, a conversation with Andrew Darlington, the founder of Veritas Insurance out of eastern eastern Tennessee.

Speaker 6 Gotten to know Andrew over the years because of shared interest in tech and CRM. And as we talk about in this conversation a lot, he's been on Salesforce for almost a decade now.

Speaker 6 And I think I originally met Andrew through Paradiso and some of the things that some of the events that Paradiso has.

Speaker 6 And just we mastermind a little bit and just tremendous amount of respect for Andrew, what he does, how he markets, how he looks at the industry, the kind of very intentional focus that he has on building his agency, growing his agency,

Speaker 6 and as he talks about it, having a love for his customers, showing love for his clients, what that means and how he's delivering it. So absolutely tremendous episode.

Speaker 6 You're going to love this episode of the show. Guys, before we get into the episode itself, I want to talk real quick.

Speaker 6 You know, I've mentioned it a bunch of times. I will stop mentioning it here coming into the future.
But I know that I've been hit or miss with episodes of the show coming out.

Speaker 6 And a lot of that has to do with some big announcements that we have coming out, both around Rogue and this show. And,

Speaker 6 you know,

Speaker 6 my, my.

Speaker 6 That needed that time to get some things squared away, to get pointed in the right direction again on a lot of different stuff and tremendously exciting things. Just can't wait to share it with you.

Speaker 6 Lots of learnings that I think you guys will find valuable. And I want to be much more intentional with the content of this show and delivering value to you guys

Speaker 6 and really around growing your business, around leadership, development, sales, and particularly getting back into my roots of marketing.

Speaker 6 You know, marketing is an enormous part of Rogue, of my life, of my belief structure in terms of business and how much time, energy, and assets we should be allocating towards marketing.

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Speaker 6 As always, I have a tremendous amount of appreciation and love for you and the fact that you listen. And I hope that you continue to get value out of this effort because I love doing it.

Speaker 6 And some of the conversations we have coming up over the next few weeks, I think, are going to be really start to

Speaker 6 push you forward and give you a path to growing your agency through digital sales and marketing tactics, which is really my expertise. And I want to get back to that.

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Speaker 6 Let's get on to Andrew Darlington.

Speaker 7 So, dude, I'm so happy to have you on the show.

Speaker 7 We're kind of, so I didn't, I didn't tell you this before we started, but the last, like, I'd say two months or so, I've been very spotty with the podcast for a whole bunch of reasons, many of which will come out in the next couple of weeks.

Speaker 7 I've been teasing it for a while, but you know, we'll make an official announcement soon. But,

Speaker 7 but I wanted to take this that coming out of this break. And I wanted to really start to focus on, give the show a bit of a focus.

Speaker 7 It tends to be a little all over the place. And I wanted to give it a bit of a focus on

Speaker 7 production, but specifically,

Speaker 7 we'll say digital production, production in a way that we're like the, how are we, you know, we got Cruthers, we got Mick Hunt, we got some of these other guys that are just amazing at the kind of, I don't want to say the old school way, because there's a lot of new, new school shit and what they do, but like kind of the standardized person.

Speaker 7 I want to talk about producing business.

Speaker 7 How do we create business? Now, I will say, as a coastal American, it is my preconceived notion that where you're from, it's like, there's like 15 people there. And how the hell do you grow an agency?

Speaker 7 But you have managed to grow a very successful agency and do it in a,

Speaker 7 I mean, everybody I know who knows you respects the hell out of you and the way you do business. And you've been very successful.
So,

Speaker 7 and obviously, I just love our chats in general. So, I wanted to bring you on and just learn more about your business and what you're doing, and just wrap some insurance for a while.

Speaker 5 Well, all those things are nice, Ron, but I know what really happened is you've been through the barrel, you've already scraped the bottom of it, now you had to turn it over, and you're taking the crap off the bottom that fell.

Speaker 5 I was the next one that fell.

Speaker 7 Oh my gosh, that's not true.

Speaker 7 Um,

Speaker 7 I mean, you're you're you're one of the the pioneers of salesforce using salesforce for insurance um

Speaker 7 you know i mean all the things

Speaker 5 yeah i mean

Speaker 5 we were one i mean and i don't know the exact number but i mean you and i talked uh when tech canary first came out that was kind of the the first salesforce thing and i didn't know how early in the process we were but they put later on a graph of like the timeline of salesforce of tech canary i'm like

Speaker 5 so it started like two months before we got in on it i didn't i mean because they didn't see that when we first got in there i was like holy cow so yeah so we've been playing in the sales salesforce game i don't know since 2013 i think 2012 2013 it's been it's been a long time i think probably almost 10 years and maybe a little bit longer not not a little bit shorter but we were we were right there at the very beginning uh so i kind of jumped in uh hopefully no one on the team sees this because they're going i told you so but

Speaker 5 we jumped in, I mean, at the very beginning, trying to get moving with it. And

Speaker 5 it's been a challenge. It's been neat.
It's been fun. But yeah,

Speaker 5 it's been interesting with Salesforce.

Speaker 7 What was the like initial, like, what were you initially looking for that maybe you weren't finding someplace else that taking on a tool like that kind of caught your attention and was worth the effort?

Speaker 5 The thing that, I mean, and you know it, and I think everybody does, Salesforce is a massive, massive system.

Speaker 5 And it can literally do anything that you want it to do, including wash your dishes, which is great for around here because we have to go outside of the outhouses to get our dishes.

Speaker 5 That's where we still live. I mean, think,

Speaker 5 I mean, the clampets are from where we are from. I mean,

Speaker 5 that's what you got there. But it allowed you to be able to take anything you wanted to do.
and pull in anything that was there.

Speaker 5 I mean, this was before Zaps came out and you could do all those things if you just had a little bit of programming language. And I wasn't an I.T.
person starting out. I love computers.

Speaker 5 I mean,

Speaker 5 that's somewhat of my passion, but it allows you to, it allows us to create everything because before then, I mean, you had old AMS and Vertiform and those types of things.

Speaker 5 And it was so clunky, you couldn't integrate. You couldn't do any automation and those types of things.

Speaker 5 And I had a vision, a lot, I think, like you have, of being able to automate, but make your automation in a real genuine way

Speaker 5 because we all have 24 hours in a day and you want to love on your clients you want to take care of your clients you want to make sure there's nothing that makes you feel worse than your client you sit down and you get the audit back on your client and their payroll is 842 000 and you still had two hundred thousand dollars in there and you never checked with them and you found out they got a huge contract and then they now owe $34,000 on a worker's comp audit and you look like an idiot.

Speaker 5 And I was like, you know what? If we could just send an automated email, hey, Bob, listen, we got your payroll, $200,000.

Speaker 5 Anything changed this last quarter that we need to make a change on that?

Speaker 5 And just checking in where it's not the spam emails, but just relevant information that you're getting to your client on a timely basis that lets them know you care, what you do, and make sure that they have the coverage they need.

Speaker 5 And we're protecting them the way we need to, because that's our promise. Our promise is to protect you.
And that's what we wanted it. And that's what the thing about Salesforce is it

Speaker 5 lets you do anything that you want with the system to be able to take care of your clients better than anyone else.

Speaker 7 Now, this is so.

Speaker 7 I think if you're listening, you may or may not know this. I've talked about it a couple of times.
We about two months ago started the transition off of agency Zoom over to HubSpot.

Speaker 7 We still use now certs for right now, but

Speaker 7 we've been building out HubSpot. And one of the things that I find, I know, I know

Speaker 7 if you talk to any of the gurus in this space, right, they'll tell you, build your process first and then build the technology around your process.

Speaker 7 And I think that is, in general, as a broad stroke, the right thing to do. That being said,

Speaker 7 I have found that

Speaker 7 in applying our process into that system and then seeing what the system system is capable of, we've actually morphed a little. Like, I guess what I'm saying is, like, the system

Speaker 7 has

Speaker 7 dictated a little back into our process. Like, so, like, we, we apply our process, and then there is some like gray area where the system kind of dictates it too.

Speaker 7 So, like, I guess my question for you is: as you've gotten into Salesforce and seen its capabilities and what's possible, that kind of stuff,

Speaker 7 has Salesforce

Speaker 7 helped engineer processes as much as the processes have engineered Salesforce? Have you seen that and

Speaker 7 found that as you've worked through it?

Speaker 5 Yeah, I mean, great point. I mean,

Speaker 5 when you have your processes, you write them down on paper and you're going through, that's what we're trying to do right now is get our processes better.

Speaker 5 And thanks, Mick, for working with us, plug for you.

Speaker 5 we're we're working on that process because that's what we've need to do we've we've gone through and um

Speaker 5 praise the Lord, we've always been busy. We've always written a lot of business and business has been coming in.
And we're working on that process.

Speaker 5 And it was neat because we used a tool to graph everything with Mix Help. And as we start, as we're putting that into Salesforce to automate it,

Speaker 5 we're seeing, oh, you know what? What if we did this at this point in time? And you can make it a lot

Speaker 5 even more user-friendly than you thought because you're like, you know what?

Speaker 5 I mean, again, going through this process, we're like, okay, so let's do this when it comes up. And then you're like, oh, you know what?

Speaker 5 Because we have Salesforce, I can actually pull in every bit of data now.

Speaker 5 And so instead of just having a quick question on there, and that's where a yes, no to work through the process, now it's going to show up their policy number, the limits, the vehicles, and it pulls up everything right there.

Speaker 5 So you really are able to make the process a lot smoother for your team. as they go through it and they're not having to click 84 places.

Speaker 5 And so that's one of the really cool things that these let you do and so you're able to actually broaden your process and make it easier as you go through that so i yeah i agree 100 with you your process is going to change a little bit i think it gets even better once you understand the full scope of the tools that you have in front of you because in the past you're like well if i can get a name and a phone number and the account

Speaker 5 then that's good. And then we can go in the account and look at stuff.

Speaker 5 With HubSpot and Salesforce, you don't have to do that.

Speaker 5 I mean, everything pulls right in and it's there

Speaker 5 if you're willing to take the time to do it.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that was one of the reasons. So I evaluated systems for

Speaker 7 so I, this, and I don't want anyone to take my,

Speaker 7 I mentioned before, I was moving from agency Zoom as a knock on agency Zoom. I think it's a great tool.
And

Speaker 7 Cat and Mo and the whole team over there, big, big fans of them and very happy for them with the Vertifor acquisition or whatever.

Speaker 7 But I have a pretty you know i something i believe to be true i've always believed this about basically everything i've done is that i like to figure out what the rules of the game are and then let everyone else play by those rules and come up with my own and what i mean by that is like

Speaker 7 if everybody is if 7 000 agents or whatever it is are using agency zoom then there are 7 000 agencies and i know exactly how they're capable of playing i know what they can do i know what the limitations are i know the things and they can only do as much as everyone else who's using that tool, right?

Speaker 7 You're, you are, as much as that's a great tool and you can do a lot with it. And I'm not saying you can't be successful without it.
That's completely possible, very possible, more than possible.

Speaker 7 But I look at that and I say, okay, everybody's hampered by the limitations that come with Epic, the limitations that come with AMS 360.

Speaker 7 Great tools, but you are, you have a box that you cannot break out of. You are only capable of doing what that box allows you to do.

Speaker 7 And when I was evaluating new systems, I was looking at Salesforce and then I was looking at HubSpot, a couple of others, Zoho

Speaker 7 is interesting to me.

Speaker 7 But I just said, I want to go someplace where the same rules that apply to all my competition do not apply to me, that I can do what...

Speaker 7 for the most part, whatever I want, whatever experience I can dream up in my brain, I can make this thing do it.

Speaker 7 And I know the vast majority of the people in my space can't do these things, or they have to do it the same way as everyone else, right?

Speaker 7 Like, and that to me was a huge driver of why I started searching. And then once I started searching, things like when you look at a contact record in HubSpot, everything is at your fingertips.

Speaker 7 Everything. There's no triple clicks down into subfolder categories to get to a thing.

Speaker 7 Everything, every deal, every policy, every company associated with that contact, all the records, every phone call, every email, every text message, every attached file, every bit of the activity is right here in the middle.

Speaker 7 So it's like, when my people log in and look at a contact record, they're not searching for what happened. The entire story is right in front of them.
And I was like, this feature alone sets.

Speaker 7 my ability to deliver a customer experience apart because they're not clicking through. There's no hold on.
Let me find that. It's all right in front of them.

Speaker 7 And it's like little things like that that have changed,

Speaker 7 actually changed the process for us because now it's things that were possible that weren't possible before.

Speaker 5 And yeah, and HubSpot's phenomenal. And I mean, back in the day when Tech Canary is making a change, I was looking.

Speaker 5 I mean, I know some of the folks that you've mentioned on here have spent countless hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars building out HubSpot. And it's a phenomenal system.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 you can build out with it.

Speaker 5 And I think, I mean, I think you actually put words to what I've always thought is when I saw EMS and I saw Applied and all the other ones, I saw what they could do and what they couldn't do.

Speaker 5 And then you'd hear some of the things going of people just saying different things. I wish we could do,

Speaker 5 wish we could do that.

Speaker 5 And I'm sitting there going, well, I can do that.

Speaker 5 I can do that. And I can do it.
And so

Speaker 5 it's not for the faint of heart. no um and you know that as well so it's it's time consuming you either need to pay someone or do it yourself

Speaker 5 but the ability to do that is off the charts i mean everyone else i mean everybody has to lock down their system because if they open it up then everybody's going to steal what they got and that's kind of why those other ones are have locked it up but with hubspot and with salesforce you have that ability to make it huge and bring everything in there into one place

Speaker 5 And it does, it does make things evolve because if you say, well, I want it to do this, well, you tweak a couple of things and it does. Yeah.

Speaker 5 Just like you said, it makes it really, really cool to be able to make those changes in whatever your mind thinks up. And I'm sure you come up with some crazy stuff.

Speaker 5 Whatever comes up, you can make it do it. And in reality, it's not that difficult.
I mean, I don't, have you been building yours out yourself? You've been hired someone to do it.

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Speaker 7 I, yeah, I've been, I've been building it myself.

Speaker 7 I'm, I tend to be the kind of my way is like, if I can figure out 70% of how to do it myself, then I feel comfortable hiring someone for that last 30, 20, 10%, whatever it is that maybe is a little beyond me because now I understand the general functionality.

Speaker 7 So like I'm in that phase where I'm just reading as much as I can and trying stuff because I want to know.

Speaker 7 And then when we get to the finely tuned or some of the more like 201 or 301 level stuff, I'll probably go get someone to make sure it's done right.

Speaker 7 I want to understand the basics because otherwise I feel like that's how you kind of get jobbed with some of these things is It's like you go in, you don't know anything about the system, and you start paying people tens of thousands of dollars to build it for you.

Speaker 7 And,

Speaker 7 you know, I think it's really easy for agencies to get taken advantage of when they do it that way. Now, look, you, me, we're nerds on this stuff, right?

Speaker 7 Like, you, we've talked about it, like, you like diving in and learning all the crazy stuff about Salesforce, just like I do. Um,

Speaker 7 but I think that

Speaker 7 having a having someone in your agency that you can trust have a working knowledge of what should be possible.

Speaker 7 I think that should be a baseline for this kind of system.

Speaker 7 Again, you're on Epic AMS 360. You don't need that, right? They've been the same systems for 20 years.
Like, you don't need to have someone be an Epic Master or an AMS master.

Speaker 7 It's nice, but there's just not that much manipulation.

Speaker 7 When you take that step outside of those ecosystems,

Speaker 7 you really need someone who can, who knows

Speaker 7 the basics, because otherwise, you know, you're not really sure what's even possible. It's almost like you're limiting yourself.
And,

Speaker 7 you know, that's a big ask. Like you said, it's not for the faint of heart.
You can screw things up. You can, you can, there's a lot of things you can do.

Speaker 7 But I do think that if it's a commitment, if this isn't just something you're chasing a shiny object, because you heard Carruthers talk about it, right?

Speaker 7 Carruthers can talk about HubSpot and you're like,

Speaker 7 but by the time he gets done, you're like credit card is out of your pockets.

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 5 where do I swipe? Right.

Speaker 7 Like, you know,

Speaker 7 if you're in this because you believe it's what's best for your agency and you are willing to go down this adventure, then I think the juice ends up being worth a squeeze.

Speaker 5 Well, and

Speaker 5 one of the nice things, and I haven't spent much time with HubSpot, but the nice thing about Salesforce is we're building out this process is

Speaker 5 it's completely customizable. So we have a process and there's already a couple things that I'm putting in my kind of notes.

Speaker 5 It's like, okay, so I need to go into here and I can go back into it at any point and make a tweak inside of it. And it's not difficult to do.
And that's, that's one of the cool things.

Speaker 5 I'm not reinventing the wheel each time. I can add incremental steps onto the system that that will pull things in.

Speaker 7 Yeah, we just lost you.

Speaker 7 The nice thing about HubSpot as well is that you can do those incremental things and make it work and you're good yeah you know i'll give you a little example so we have um an internal customer life cycle that we've developed it's it this it's not wholly unique a couple small tweaks but um it's something that we could have never implemented in really any other system uh so basically uh we uh you start as a subscriber that means that we know who you are but you have shown zero interest lead Lead is someone who has shown interest.

Speaker 7 Suspect is someone who has shown interest and fits our high-level qualifications of a market we're interested in and have a market for. Prospect means they're actively searching for a quote.

Speaker 7 So we're working with them. Customer is customer.
Evangelist is essentially a VIP. There's a few triggers.
It's not just like VIP status. You know, you send us referrals or whatever.

Speaker 7 There's something there. And then lost is lost.
And at any given time, you can bounce out of there and go all the way back to subscriber if you're not a good fit.

Speaker 5 Okay.

Speaker 7 So that's our customer life cycle. And we, every

Speaker 7 contact in our system needs to have a customer life cycle. Well, what we're able to do is both one, create that customer life cycle.
So

Speaker 7 create those things, make that

Speaker 7 a field that we can track. I can then automate.
where they based on where they are in a pipeline, what stage of that life cycle they are. And then anytime someone can manually change them.

Speaker 7 And then I can use campaigns to attach to those life cycles based on industry, based on where they are, based on if they've worked the process or if they've never worked the process.

Speaker 7 And ultimately, what I can do is then build reports.

Speaker 7 And this is the part that I find the most interesting about these tools like Salesforce and HubSpot is I then have a very specific report that tracks where all those people are in that funnel at any given time.

Speaker 7 So I know where are they entering, where are they falling out, who's gone all the way through, where, you know, what's what's happening. And, and, and this is the insights that you get out of it: is

Speaker 7 we were having an issue with lead to suspect.

Speaker 7 Now, and the reason for that is we get a very broad spectrum of leads, so broad spectrum in terms of industry from a wide range of geographic areas.

Speaker 7 So, knowing if we had a market, so, so, suspect means we have a market that will fit that client or that prospect.

Speaker 7 all of a sudden i saw i saw the the the the lead to suspect the leads were just stacking up and they weren't becoming suspects and i went to my team and i was like what's happening and they're like it's taking us forever to figure out if we actually have a market for this particular thing because you know a liquor store in tennessee great liquor store in california maybe not so great right completely different market it might be ens or whatever i'm just making that up but um

Speaker 7 so that then had us me i had to go back into the woodshed, figure out what the hell was happening, build a new tool. And now we have a form that we call our new business questionnaire.

Speaker 7 And anytime a lead comes in, we then call out with one of our unlicensed people and they walk through this new business questionnaire. And then that's what validates lead to suspect.

Speaker 7 So now the producer is getting. more information in a validated suspect when they get it.
So the producer is not messing around with unqualified leads.

Speaker 7 And we're, you know, we're able to kind of triage stuff.

Speaker 7 So it's like, those are the kind of things that, like, that system allowed us to not only build the process, but see where the errors were, see where the roadblocks were, and then build new solutions and implement them on our own terms.

Speaker 7 And, you know, that's the kind of stuff that I think long term

Speaker 7 starts to set an agency apart from others.

Speaker 5 And you can't do that with a lot of the systems. And I mean, for, I mean, I really think, I mean, looking back for 90, 90% of the agencies out there,

Speaker 5 your agency, Zoom is a better agency, those types of things, those are phenomenal. And they do a killer job.
I mean, just, I mean, it's amazing what those things will do.

Speaker 5 But if you want to hit kind of the next level on a lot of that stuff.

Speaker 5 They have to make it so it can't be broken.

Speaker 5 We've broken Salesforce a lot. I'll guarantee that.
I mean, one day it's working. The next day it's like, what's going on? And

Speaker 5 oh, the trigger that you made made everything else air out. And so you've got issues there.

Speaker 5 So, and I get it, but if you, I really think, like you said, the process that you have with triaging those leads and suspects and that through, you're not going to get that anywhere else than what you build.

Speaker 5 And so, I mean, I think you're exactly right. Hit the nail on the head.
Salesforce allows you you to do those same things as well, but it's not for the faint of heart.

Speaker 5 I mean, my Salesforce bill is not cheap. And I know your HubSpot bill is not cheap when you layer everything on there.

Speaker 7 It's essentially an employee for us. I think about it, I think about it.
Carruthers has talked about this. Chris Green has talked about this.
Everybody I know, Mick that's on HubSpot.

Speaker 7 I know Salesforce the same way.

Speaker 7 You have to look at it like you're hiring an employee. when you take on that.

Speaker 7 You know, I think about what, like you said, Nick and Will are doing and that whole team over at Better agency i know uh from the recording of this they i've just seen the pictures online but looks like their conference they had better conference went off phenomenally i'm very happy for them like that tool is absolutely perfect for 90 plus percent of the industry absolutely perfect there is there is no reason to think you need more or to chase any shiny objects i just there that being said if

Speaker 7 If you have the desire,

Speaker 7 the nerdiness,

Speaker 7 that that, whatever that is, where like when you do something stupid, you don't beat yourself up about it, you just like fix it and move on, whatever that characteristic is.

Speaker 7 Like if you have that and you want to go to the next level, I think there is something very powerful in this ability

Speaker 7 to have a much bigger box, a much bigger sandbox to play in.

Speaker 5 And I want to go back to what you said, the reporting. that Hugspot offers and that Salesforce offers, if there is a field in the system, system,

Speaker 5 you can report on it. Yeah.
And you can pull anything in. I mean, so I mean,

Speaker 5 when we're putting things in, we can see where all our errors are coming from now. So we've got some, we've got a dashboard that says errors.
Every Monday, it pops up and we can see in the error.

Speaker 5 If someone put in

Speaker 5 a new account and didn't put a referral source in there, it airs. We have that on report.
If they forgot to put in the commission amount, that airs out. If they did

Speaker 5 new business instead of rewrite it airs out so we can keep up with all those things that come through to protect and make sure what we we've got going on is is right and we're not losing data because that's the other thing that you get into unless you have good solid data

Speaker 5 it's worthless yeah because it's it's junk in junk out or diamonds in diamonds out yeah and if you if you're keeping those good data so

Speaker 5 yeah i mean it's

Speaker 5 when folks in the office say, hey, can we do a report on this? And the answer is, well, yeah, we can do a report on that.

Speaker 5 What do you want? And

Speaker 5 it is cool what you can do and what you can break out. And then the automation that you can do with that.

Speaker 5 I mean, you can segment everyone however you want to and then send whatever you need to to those people based on anything. I mean,

Speaker 5 the last time, I mean, If you haven't talked to someone in three months, it automatically sends them a text to say, hey, I I just want to check in with you. So yeah, it's,

Speaker 5 you and I are nerds and we enjoy those types of things, but it's, it lets you think outside the box. Yeah.

Speaker 7 I want to be respectful of your time. And we start a little late, so hopefully I can hold you over for like five more minutes.
I, um,

Speaker 7 I, I wanted to ask you, like, so, so.

Speaker 7 Obviously being someone who has a feel, who's used a lot of new technology, thinks about this, who likes computers and likes computers being part of our business.

Speaker 7 What What is there, one, is there anything? And if so, what?

Speaker 7 Like coming down the pipe or that's happening now, anything new that's happening from a technological or digital space that gets you a little excited, that you're like, man, I can't wait for this to hit or I'm watching this project or I'm watching this company.

Speaker 7 And I think it could be a real game changer. Is there anything like that for you?

Speaker 6 You unmute on me again.

Speaker 5 And you're familiar with that as well. I think that's a game changer.
I mean, say that one more time.

Speaker 7 You unmute on me there.

Speaker 5 Sorry.

Speaker 5 Donna

Speaker 5 is,

Speaker 5 I mean, I think that's the game changer right there. I mean, there's going to be more later on, but the ability for an agency like me and you to be able to take, and for those of you who,

Speaker 5 you've had the folks from Donna on

Speaker 5 here.

Speaker 5 Go back and listen to that podcast that Ron did. I mean, it's the stuff that they do is amazing.
And just for a small agency to be able to use that is a game changer.

Speaker 5 And I mean, I'll say this, I mean, I know HubSpot has their own AI built in. Salesforce has their own AI built in.
And those, that's the thing is to be able to have the power of a massive AI system

Speaker 5 inside of a small agency where you can take your phone calls, run them through AI, take all of your uh your emails and texts and run it through an AI to be able to understand that.

Speaker 5 Are these people leaving? Are they coming?

Speaker 5 That's that, I think it's a game changer because you're able to compete with anybody at that point in time because you're getting that data by being able to come in.

Speaker 5 I think that's, I'm excited about being able to have that. And just, I mean, can you imagine, Ryan, they're taking the

Speaker 5 voice inflection in a phone call and telling you how it works.

Speaker 5 I mean, if you pull in some of the stuff inside Salesforce, it shows you during the phone call, their voice inflection, and it can highlight if they're happy or mad during the phone call.

Speaker 5 And you can see that. I mean, that's, I mean, that's next level stuff.

Speaker 5 And that way, I mean, you can even drill it down to if they like one CSR better than the other and shift them to the CSR they like better.

Speaker 5 I mean, talk about, and what I'd always go back to is loving on your clients. We want to do what.
what our clients want and we want to take care of them. They trust us.

Speaker 5 And if we can do things like that that are going to help out our client and make them feel more comfortable with us and make them have a better experience. That's what we want.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I think that's what's blowing me away right now:

Speaker 5 are the daughters of the world and truly how we can have that AI experience.

Speaker 7 I

Speaker 7 agree with you. I think

Speaker 7 the thing for me is, and I guess this is what I hope people take away from this is

Speaker 7 we have to, I think, whatever system we use, whether it's, you know, an Epic AMS 360, it's an agency Zoom better agency, or you're going, you know, even further to a Salesforce hub spot or whatever.

Speaker 7 To me,

Speaker 7 it's not just having the system, which is cool. It's, or really just, or the reports.

Speaker 7 It's, are we as a company, as an agency, looking at the data and the way that it's coming in and actually thinking about how we can use that to make improvements in our experience and what we do.

Speaker 7 That to me is shocking. People will say, Ryan, why do you need this? Why do you need that?

Speaker 7 It's like, because I would not have figured out that I needed a new business questionnaire between my lead and suspect

Speaker 7 life cycles if I wasn't going back into the data and looking and going, why is that number so big and that number so small? Well, you know, this is happening.

Speaker 7 Okay, let's figure out how to solve that problem. Like if

Speaker 7 the system can't get you the data, that's problem number one.

Speaker 7 But if you're not actually taking what you get and spending some time with it, and that's what's so cool about Don is it helps you automate that process of finding the insights so you can make the tweaks.

Speaker 7 That's where the magic happens, in my opinion. That's why the investment in these systems is worthwhile.
And you can get a lot of this from a better agency, agency Zoom.

Speaker 7 So, again, I absolutely, it's, I think the takeaway should not be what system you should be in from this, but rather, can you

Speaker 7 can you use what you get out of your system to actually make changes and improvements in your process to, as you say, Andrew, love on your customer. I absolutely love that.

Speaker 5 Well, and that's what you, I mean, you can't do what I've done a lot, and that's

Speaker 5 not ever get it done. And that's what I'm guilty of.
Oh, we can get this, we can get this, but never truly get it done.

Speaker 5 If you're in that cycle, use one of the ones that's pre-built that's nice and get it done. Yeah.
Use it because. it using half of something is better than all of nothing.
Yes.

Speaker 5 And so use that and use it and do it to love your clients better and if you'll do that you're going to be successful do know going in that hubspot salesforce it's an investment of time it's an investment of learning and you're going to pull out your hair yours your team's going to be irritated with you but if you can get it done right like you said ryan that data that you've got is invaluable and you've been able to turn that data into gold and that's that's what it allows you to do it's not for the faint of heart and it's not for the folks that aren't going to put money down for it and put time to make it work if you want that and you're willing to make it work you can have anything that your hearts desires when it comes to those two systems but if you want something that's a plug and play and ready to go those other ones are off the charts amazing yeah agreed dude i want to be respectful of your time i appreciate you so much thanks for coming on the show um you were not a barrel flipped over scraping the bottom having it fall out uh we could have talked for another hour but uh we did too much and when we should have been podcasting at the beginning of our block of time, but which is that's that's fine.

Speaker 7 That's that's you and me time, which I love too. So thank you.
Um, I appreciate you. If someone just wants to check out your agency, you're on LinkedIn,

Speaker 7 where can they get at you? Where can they just check out what you're doing?

Speaker 5 Um, VeritasRM.com, Veritas Risk Management, VeritasRM.com, LinkedIn, and I think it's LinkedIn, A. Darlington.
And yeah, if you put Andrew Darlington on there, pretty easy to find me.

Speaker 5 I am a first generation American. So there's not a lot of Darlingtons that I'm related to in the United States.
And there's not a lot of Andrew Darlingtons around here. So pretty easy to find.

Speaker 7 All right, buddy. Hey, appreciate you.
As always, be good. We're out here.

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