Zach Gleason, Founder at Atlanta Sales - PIR Ep. 614

Hello and welcome to Profiles in Risk. This is your host, Tony Kanye. Today I have with me Zach Gleason, founder at Atlante Sales. Zach, thank you for joining me today. How's it going?

It's going great. I'm excited to be here.

Awesome.

Thank you.

And it looks like you are in Michigan area. Grand Rapids.

I am on the west side of the state. It's, it's distinct and that it's near the lake and fall weather. So we're enjoying that.

I was gonna say, I usually break, break the ice over. Over the weather. Michigan day after Halloween, I would expect it to be cold, so. So no, it's. It's still beautiful.

It's unusually warm and we were in the 80s just a few days ago, so. Yeah, that was really unusual. Yeah. But it got somewhat back to normal and now it'll get cold fast. We've had snow on Halloween plenty of times, so.

Yeah, that's what I figured. So we always give the guests a chance to give the elevator pitch. What is a plan these sales?

Yeah, really good question, really broad question. In a ultra nutshell, if we go all the way back. I come from the independent insurance broker agent world and through a long arc have made my way through working through for a couple broker agents and then ultimately seven or eight years ago, started consulting exclusively to independent insurance agencies. One of the core functions there was coaching, training and managing salespeople. And a couple years ago we developed some software to help with that endeavor. And about a year ago we had gotten it to the point where we felt it was working so well that we wanted to expand that more broadly. And now Atlantis Sales is our sister company exclusively focused on a sales management platform. And in a nutshell, there are sales management systems out there like Salesforce and HubSpot and that type of thing. But we're unique in the fact that rather than a big focus on automation, which certainly has its place, there are email automation systems and that type of thing. We have a very big focus on organization. And so when we're talking about a salesperson, a producer doing their job day to day, literally every single design aspect of the system is about how do we help that person as a human doing their work, touching prospects, reaching out to prospects, do that in a bigger, better, faster way each touch. So organization over automation. And the second piece is, is that we have found, I found as a sales leader across dozens and dozens of salespeople and numerous different team teams, that it's always a challenge to have the information you need. You have a Major administrative and organizational challenge, just staying on top of what's happening and then let alone having good enough data to be able to mentor and coach and lead your sales team. And so that was the second big focus of everything, is to have a tool for leaders, mentors, agency presidents, that very, very, very easily kind of out of the box, they would have the information that they needed at their fingertips all the time to lead, mentor, train and guide their teams without having to be a tech genius or set up a whole bunch of reports or anything like that. It just comes, just baked into the system.

All right, so what's the day to day on the system like? Let's start with the actual salespeople.

Yeah, day to day. So day to day, every day, if you're in the system and you've been using it, then the system without doing anything with special, you'll have an email in your inbox at whatever time you designate, but at 8am generally showing you a queue of anything you've set up in terms of follow ups. So it could be that you're doing follow ups to cold call.

I lost your audio.

Can you hear me? Yes.

Okay, so it could be that you're doing a follow up.

Okay. Yeah, the. So starting your day at 8am, you're going to come in with an email. Your standard sales guy is going to have a phone that they get in their email on. They're looking at it all the time. So they get that early in the morning saying, okay, here's the follow ups that are teed up for today. So right at the beginning of the day, the system is kind of teeing you up and saying, here's the 10 follow ups you have. You see the names, the email is designed that you can actually work those opportunities directly from a phone. So you can click them and get to a phone number, get to an email and actually work them from a phone if you wanted to. That's really designed that if someone had follow ups they were doing on the road, they could do those. But primarily they come in, they've seen the follow ups in their email. So they're kind of, those are queued up in their mind in a linear fashion. And then that same list is reflected in the system in a linear fashion where they come in and they see the list of follow ups that they have for the day. And so the day in terms of follow ups really starts by going into the follow up that they've preset at the top of the list going into that. And the system has everything that they need at their fingertips. Account information, contact information, notes, details about the opportunity itself. It's all right there. And so we've really designed it so that us, a producer, can move fluidly from one opportunity to the next without breaking the process in a linear, almost like assembly line fashion. They can do what they do as a human without having to worry about where do I go in the system, where do I track this, how do I set it up. All that's all just, it's all just there for them. So, so yeah, that's, that's how your day would start. It's seeing the email coming in the system starting at the first row of data and, and, and the system moves you through to the next opportunity.

All right, what, what does it look.

Like for the leadership, for the leadership team? There's a, there's a few things and this is kind of baked in. It really depends on the leader. So I guess I'll, I could talk about different profiles. So as a, if you are a sales manager, this obviously could be an agency president who's managing their sales team, then this is going to show up in a couple of different ways. But week to week, each sales leader at a designated time gets an email showing all the follow ups that every salesperson has for that week. And so it looks back at anything that hasn't been done that should have been done. And keep in mind these are, these are follow ups that the salesperson themselves said. So if they're past due or coming up within the first, within one week, it's kind of to the cadence of a sales meeting, then it's going to show that, so your sales leader is getting that email and they are getting queued up on, okay, who is John calling on? Who's Susan calling on? And naturally this is going to spawn them to, to go, oh I know that company or there's a good market for that, all those kinds of things. And so they see that in their email without ever going into the system and then that's there and that the time of that email can be customized. We did that so that depending on if your agency sales meeting was on a Monday, you could have that email generate right before that meeting. If it was on a Wednesday, you could have the email generate right before the meeting and you would see anything were past due and anything for the coming seven days. So you're getting that bird's eye view as a leader right out of the gate. Additionally, on a, on a, well day to day, if you're in a sales meeting or in A one to one sales coaching situation. The sales leader can go into the system and basically see very, very quickly everything that the salesperson is working on. And just in the exact same way they can go into the same opportunities instantly, smoothly, fluidly, and work through the same list with their, with their, the person that they're leading, managing or mentoring and ask the questions. And the way I do it as a sales manager is I, if I'm talking to John, we open up his list, I go through what I would deem kind of the big opportunities that are further along in the process. We have some automated filtering that does that. So basically he may be seeing every follow up, but maybe I'm only interested in the big ones or the ones that are, you know, at marketing stage or whatever. So then at that point I'll filter that, go through that list, add my own notes to each opportunity. He sees the note, I see the note. Massive accountability. We're on the same page. We come back a week later, two weeks later, I see my note that I left on his opportunity, he sees it too. So we are rock solid on the same page. And so it gives the same linear functionality that a producer has. That's what a leader uses as well to help organize or to help follow up. And then on a monthly basis, there is an automated report, we call it the core report. And on the 1st of every month, every leader, every manager, every mentor, everybody involved in the system gets a report that shows the key metrics, basically a snapshot of the key metrics as of the first. It goes individually to each person on the first and then they have five days. Each person has five days to make sure that everything is buttoned up, up to date in their pipeline. We call it pipeline. And then on the 5th, every manager, leader of each salesperson gets a combined report. And so we kind of queue it up, remind everyone, hey, this is coming out, make sure it's accurate. They can see it, see obvious problems, or man, my pipeline seems low, whatever it might be. Go into the system, fix things, and on the 5th, it's regenerated and then you get a pipeline. We could call it the core report, but it has sales performance pipeline, both backwards looking and forward looking. We've put a lot of time into kind of crafting that report so that it has a smooth flow all through the year and even into the new year, because it actually shows last year, this year and the next year all in the same report. Feel like it's set up really smartly. And so that core report keeps Everybody accountable. It's ranked by pipeline. So you get some good accountability and healthy competitiveness in that. So as a leader, you're getting your weekly functional tactical report and then monthly you're getting your metrics. And then the system is designed with, where as a leader you can easily quickly mentor and hold people accountable on an opportunity by opportunity basis.

Fantastic. What, what, what, what is the implementation like? So, so when we get the system into, into our agency, does it need to plug into our management system?

Yeah.

What is the implementation like generally?

Yeah, it's a really, it's a really good question. We hear it all the time. You know, what systems does it work with, that kind of thing? You know, one of the very intentional decisions so far has been to have this really baked around generating new business and tracking the new business process, whatever that might be for an agency on personal lines or commercial lines. So it runs in parallel with an agency management system. We can import accounts, we can export accounts so that, that, that can facilitate it. But we've designed it intentionally to kind of puzzle piece around an agency management system. So for most agencies, they're not going to be storing files in this system. They're going to be using it for the accountability, the reporting, the procedural aspect of it, the transparency. While they use the agency management system as kind of the data repository that, that, you know, everything's 100% locked down. We have great security and everything is locked down. But it, but they know their systems and the account managers are in there. So basically the way, if you were viewing this on a Gantt chart, you would see salesperson is initiating suspecting in the system. They're going along and then suddenly they get to the point where they're actually going to. Well, now the process in the account agency management system is going to kind of kick in and move in parallel with the system. And we train people on this all the time. But okay, how does this move in parallel? You've got account managers in the agency management system, you got producers kind of in both. And so they kind of run along and there's a little bit of a dance between the two systems, but it works really well. And in a way, actually by having those systems distinct, you get a really rock solid focus in your team of like this is sales process, this is all about building the relationship, bringing value and winning the client. Whereas the agency management system is kind of designed for tracking all the documents going to market, kind of the logistical piece and both need to do what they do and do it well. And salestool is obviously built to do the sales process extremely well. Obviously we're biased, but we feel like it does it better than any system. So. Yeah, all right.

What is the pricing like?

The pricing is interesting. This was a massive conversation. How do we bring value? I will just preface this by saying, as an agency leader coming from the industry, I felt the same frustration of you go by your agency management system, you're locked in for a year, anytime you want to add a license, so you start sharing licenses kind of maybe. And then you. And you have that administrative person who works part time, but you're not really sure it's worth them having a full license. So you kind of bailing, wire and twine all these things together and pretty soon you got, you know, a maze of licensing problems, right? And you never can quite figure out what's going on. You just know you're getting massive bill every month. And so the way we've designed it is we have three licensing tiers. They are all month to month and they can all change at any time for any reason or no reason. It's completely simple. Anybody can do it self service. I love how it's built. As an agency manager leader myself, in my role as a consultant, I love how it's set up, how simple it is, because I use it. But basically we have three tiers. So we have a producer tier that basically is. Is when anybody who's going to actually own a sales opportunity, so their name is in that list, they can own a sales opportunity and currently that's $55 a month. And then we have a what we call a facilitator tier, which is $15 a month. And that would be like an account manager or a CSR who's getting in and maybe adding notes and wants to know what's going on. And so they can't own an opportunity, but they can literally touch every other aspect of the system. So it's literally the only difference. And the premise on there is that your producers are going to be most intense users. They're going to be the ones using the AI feature, things like that. So the cost is there. We wanted to keep it really simple on those other tiers and get people in the system without a big burden. The third tier is what we call the promoter tier. And this is a functionality where basically they can get in and they can see everything, but they can't change anything on the sales opportunities. And the use case here is you've got an agency manager, a coo, someone like that who wants to get the Reports, who wants to see the data, who's maybe tasked with setting things up, but they don't need to own sales opportunities and they're not contributing to the notes and things like that. That's only $5 a month. So it's a really, really, really nice setup. So you can imagine you got a COO, getting them in the system is literally only $5 a month. So we had, so we really set it up for the different use cases within the system. So. Or within an agency is that obviously informed everything so fantastic.

So month to month and choose your licenses as needed.

Yeah, someone, you, someone leaves immediately remove the license, someone comes back immediately add it back, happens in the system instantaneously.

It's just how it should be when it comes to.

Seems like it seems like it would go without saying. I don't know why it's so hard. People obviously want to get users stuck in their system. I mean that's part of what's. As a user myself, as an agency leader myself, I hated that. And so this whole thing is on the premise of like, you'll keep using it if you like it, if you don't like it, hopefully you'll tell us and we'll fix it. But if you don't like it, you just get out and we're done. No, no harm, no foul. In fact, you can export your data and then be done right. So simple, clean, good business. That's just a golden rule kind of basics. So that's how we've set up everything.

Awesome. What are the AI features?

Yeah, the AI feature is something that I am really excited about and at any point I can demo this on the screen as well. But in a nutshell, we have embedded ChatGPT technology, the latest and greatest into the system. And instead of email, traditional email templates where you would write something out, you have AI templates where basically you say, okay, I have a general type of follow up. I do over and over. And so you give just like if anybody's familiar with Chat GPT, it's all the same kind of natural language input. Say, okay, this is the purpose of this email, to follow up with a prospect. But what is really amazing and powerful and I'm so excited about this and how we're using it is that it automatically pulls context from the account, from the contact and from the opportunity. And you can call that out in your instructions. So when you're setting up a template, you're saying, look at the opportunity notes for any logistical considerations, look at the account notes for anything about Their personality. And so if you say John Doe is seven foot tall and he loves compliments about his height in the account notes, it will show up in your email. If you've referenced it and it's applicable, it's very smart. We continue to refine our own backend algorithm. We so we have proprietary natural language that we are using across the entire system to basically tighten up the email language as it goes out. So a leader doesn't have to be like a chatgpt genius or something like that. Super simple users, each user can set up their own AI templates, but you can kind of be assured that they're going to look pretty good out of the gate because we have given ChatGPT instructions that go across the entire system that tighten things up and then they're going to add things. The second use case, which is really, really, really cool, can't even overstate it, is that you can we every time you use an AI email, AI generated email template, just a couple of clicks, but if you have additional detailed ad in real time, you can get that incorporated into your AI generated email. So easy. Use case is personal lines customer. You're trying to explain coinsurance. So literally you click there, the button, you say, I want a coinsurance email and you literally just type. The house is worth 572,000 and their coinsurance clause is 90%. Click generate and it will generate a perfect email that uses the actual math from the customer explaining coinsurance with their clause, with their amounts, everything buttoned up. One more button, it's in your Outlook or whatever email system you're using and you can edit it or tweak it however you want and you're done. So we're talking something that would take even an experienced insurance person 20, 30 minutes to craft it just right. And we're generating this in a tailored fashion in seconds. So very, very powerful the way it's pulling in the context from all the other components of the system. You can't even, even if you have chat GPT, you really can't replicate the capability because of how it's pulling in the context.

So yeah, fantastic. What are the clients saying? What feedback are you getting about the system and the ROI of the system?

Yeah, great question. Well, keep in mind our consulting model is very much that I function as a sales manager and sales leader. So in a kind of weird kind of way, I'm often my own client and I love the system. But the, but as far as our clients, the producers and the leaders, they really appreciate the simplicity of being Able to just get the report, see the information, and then you think about how hard it is to hold your sales team accountable. I'm a leader. I get the report. I forward one email to Jenny and say, hey, your numbers seem low. I mean, one email and we've got accountability created for as long as they know that you as the leader are looking at it just happens. So getting very good feedback on that and the cleanness of the system. Right. When they see the licensing model is so inexpensive and so easy, they really like that. And then for producers, they just, the feedback is universally, this is smooth and easy. It's just easy. I mean, we won't name any names, but there are some other systems out there for sales management. And I kind of joke about when I hear them, I'm saying, oh, you're using such and such system. So you also have a bunch of Excel spreadsheets. Right. Because it's so complicated. And they all, oh yeah, I got the Excel spreadsheet. People aren't having to use Excel spreadsheets in our system because it, it does what you need it to do smoothly and easily. And so that. So yeah, the main point of feedback is smooth and easy for a salesperson.

All right. So I always ask about, about the origin story. So in this case it, it sounds like, like basically you were, you ran an agency, created a consulting firm to help other agencies sell better.

Yeah.

And were tired of needing Excel spreadsheets regardless of what CRM they were using.

Yeah. And I can add a little more to that. So the. So I, I had a finance background, so kind of money background. Well, in school, so I had a finance degree. I later got an mba and then I was working for Aon. So I kind of saw that big, big broker, complicated world. Did kind of got into the operational side of that business, gave me a lot of insight. Moved to an agency where I worked for three years where it was a kind of touch everything role where we built a sales team and went through hiring a lot of people very quickly. And did the same thing at a second agency where I was overseeing every aspect of the operation from accounting to sales training and management, which is technically speaking, probably too many areas of focus, but it did create a lot of learning where I got to see how money is made in an agency from start to finish and came to really appreciate that at a deep level. And then in the sales management piece we developed back then, I developed a spreadsheet that we used to track our team's sales opportunities. I would weight every sales opportunity that they had. And there are weighting systems out there, but I would weight them. And what I found is that if I sat down and did a whole bunch of Excel gyrations, I could actually get what I refer to as conversion ratios and win rates on a salesperson, by salesperson basis. So someone might have a $200,000 opportunity in the system or in the spreadsheet, but I would weight it and I would equalize and get a much better leading indicator on how they were performing. And that was invaluable in making decisions about who was doing well and who wasn't, who needed help, all that as a sales leader. But it was very cumbersome to do that in Excel spreadsheet. And I was always limited by how much you could do because you couldn't have so many steps because it would get, you know, complicated. So we have built all of that functionality into the sales tool where you can weight things, you see all your conversion ratios, win rates. There's a really tactical operational tone to the system where as a leader you can get usable out of the box information. It's not intended to have a bunch of, you know, gadgets and gizmos, just, just the core data and charts that you need to make decisions as a sales leader. And this, this is the origin story is coming from the person who was tasked with this for years across dozens of salespeople and needed to find a way to go kind of bigger, better, faster across all those functionalities.

Fantastic. What else is coming down in the future of the platform that you're excited about and can already talk about?

Yeah, there's a couple things. The AI thing is going to continue to inform some of the things. One of the next things is that we do have an, we can, you can already attach large files to the system, which is a great functionality. But chat GPT, that back end as a developer gives us the ability to actually analyze files. So you could put in a coverage schedule, you could put in a property schedule, you could put in any kind of exposure schedule and say write an email analyzing the loss history and trends and you could literally have your template put in. So put your loss history in there, two clicks and you've got a great customized email in your voice with, tailored to the customer that's actually analyzed the file. So that's one of the things coming. The other thing is we already have some, some basic mobile pages for the site so you can use it on a phone. But we are probably a week away from actually releasing full Android and Apple apps and and then what else? There's things we're constantly talking about. Oh the other one is one of the things we, in the consulting side we always coach that salespeople, new salespeople going through the training do what we refer to as a daily brief, an everyday email of like what's going on, what am I touching? And this is a game changer. As an aside, as a, as a, as an agency, your new salespeople should be doing a daily brief. So we've already built this in and we're literally pushing it live tonight to do what we call a sales brief. It's an automated email that will go to the sales leadership team every single day for every salesperson giving a, a, a snapshot of what they worked in that day. Admins will be able to set it if they want it every day or every Friday or whatever. But it will be a week as a snapshot that builds on each day throughout the week ending with Friday and then, so that'll be released tonight, we've been testing it already and then we'll, within probably two weeks it will have an AI component will actually use the AI to analyze the activity of the salesperson and provide a written write up. So that's in the works but probably two to three weeks away on that. So yeah, there's many other things I could go on. One of the beauties of having right now kind of a closed system a little bit, the Apple model where able to just kind of control our own features and technology is that we are iterating ridiculously fast. So that's a key thing. When you start saying well we'll connect with this and connect with that and connect with everybody then you are suddenly going to be slowed down because every update has to be checked out. With 15 other companies we don't have that. And so generally I'll have a producer say man, I wish it would do X, Y or Z. And we will have that feature built, tested and in the system quite often within some, if it's little, within a week sometimes, but rarely within more than a month or two if it's like really complicated. So yeah, lots of little examples of that. The latest one was a guy wanted a copy email function. Even though we can email from somebody wanted one button email to copy the email address of the contact. And so it was four days later we had that button tested and live in the system and he can copy his emails. And so we just continue to iterate basically every day on that premise.

Fantastic. Very exciting stuff. Yeah, thank you for your time today. When this goes live, I'll tag both you and the company on LinkedIn.