Boost Sales with Reimagined Enablement | Dreamforce 2025

Well, hello. Thank you everyone for being here. We're at the end of the day, at the end of the conference. I hope you all have been inspired and we just really appreciate you all making the time and coming out to this session to Dreamforce to San Francisco. So my name is Molly Frome. I lead industry business consulting across healthcare and life sciences. And I'm just thrilled to be here today to talk with my friend Brandon from Humana. So Brandon, would you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about Humana and what your role there is and kind of the world you live in?

Yeah, absolutely. So good afternoon everyone. Really excited to be here. My name is Brandon Smith. I'm the director of product management within Humana's MarketPoint division. So for those of you not familiar, Humana is a large healthcare payer and specifically the MarketPoint division is the division of Humana where our, where we support our sales agents. Right. So that's sales agent activities across a lot of different sales channels, inclusive of telesales, agents that sell on our behalf, agents that we call our career agents that actually sell on our behalf that are spread across the country. And then we also have a large population of agents who sell on our behalf from an external perspective. So they partner with us and they sell on our behalf. You might have heard them referred to as brokers from time to time. So really a large differentiation of different groups that we work with. As the product management director, me and my team are really charged with driving the right technology solutions and value for all those different agent channels. So it's, you know, it's a really great space to be in a lot of challenges, but we're always there to meet them and make sure agents are able to sell and meet our customers needs.

Yeah, yeah, there are a lot of challenges in the market in the world right now. It's super dynamic. Lots of moving pieces. Talk to us a little bit about the challenges that are facing Humana and in your org in particular, like what's keeping you up at night?

Right, right. So you know, in the payer space really, you know, a lot of pressure from a sales perspective around, you know, what is the right, right mix of sales and outcomes and those, those members that you bring into the, into the fold. And you know, from a technology perspective we're always looking for how can we be more effective in connecting our agents with the consumer, the right consumer and make sure that once they're in that funnel they get the most seamless process from a sales perspective. And so if you look at our Existing or our old ecosystem that we were in, it was very, I call it kind of a spaghetti slide. Right. We had a lot of different sales channels. They all had different types of technology that supported them. And you know, as you can see here on the left hand side of the screen, there were just a lot of lines going a lot of different places, a lot of complexity. With that complexity comes a lot of cost and a lot of pressure on our product teams and our IT partners to really maintain that level of complexity. Really one of the things we wanted to go after with the work we did, and what we did is we actually partnered with Salesforce to implement the Salesforce Health cloud platform. And internally we dubbed that MarketPoint360. So as we started to implement MarketPoint360, we said, what do we want to do from a. From a future state perspective? As we look at this, we really want to consolidate all those different lines down to more of a streamlined approach. And we want all of our different sales channels to be able to. To follow that streamlined approach, whether it be a career agent, telesales agent, ultimately an external agent, to really follow that approach. And so that was one of the big challenges we had starting out is how do we do that? How do we look at things like business processes and stuff like that and really consolidate them down to where a career agent process doesn't look that drastically different than a telesales agent process. If we're able to accomplish that, then we can really use an out of the box system like Salesforce Health Cloud to meet our needs without a lot of customization. So that was really one of the approaches we took.

Yeah, that's great. And so that was about a year ago, middle of last year, we started working together on Market Point360. Can you tell folks in the audience and those folks listening online a little bit about kind of what that all looked like, what we're building together in this partnership?

Right, right. So in the summer of 2024 is really when we started to move toward the implementation phase of the work. And a little bit before that, we had spent about 9 to 12 months really understanding what do we want to do. Right. Like conceptually, we want to go from here to here. I always talk to my team about what do we want to be when we grow up. Right. And we really had to do a lot of soul searching around that early on. So we took a good nine to 12 months to do that. That took us all the way up to the summer of 2024. And we really felt like we were in a good position to start the implementation at that point. We had done a lot of work. And you see on the screen here, this is an example of what I would call one of our primary business flows. The team did a really good job of focusing on how do we look at this from a technology agnostic perspective. At the time, we hadn't made a decision we were going with Salesforce or a competitor or anything like that. But what we did is we really sat down and we defined the key business flows, the value that we could get out of them, and put those on paper and said, whatever system we go with, we're going to need them to accomplish these things.

You're really thinking about that experience. What's the experience we want to create?

Right, right, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And Personas. Right. Making sure that we're accounting for all those Personas. So you may have a telesales agent, but within that telesales agent group, you may have some sub Personas that you need to do a little bit of different stuff with. So doing this part of the process really helped us figure that out. Then when we did eventually come to Salesforce, we said, hey, here's what we're thinking about doing. Is that doable in your system? Mostly through configuration, not customization. Right. And that's what really helped us get a solid feel that we were going to have a great partnership.

Tell us a little bit more about configuration versus customization and why that was important.

Right, right. So historically within Humana, a lot of the systems we had built, and you kind of go back to that spaghetti chart, right. And you saw all those different lines going all those different places. We were building almost point to point solutions for the different sales channels. So for example, a career leader might come to us and say, I need a system that does exactly this, or I need. The telesales leader might say, well, I need all these nuances. And so therefore we have to have different systems or different ways to maintain them. And so for us, as we move to the Salesforce Health cloud journey with MarketPoint 360, it was really important that we said, okay, we're going to do this one time, Right. And we're going to use configuration to differentiate between what a career agent does and a DMS telesales agent does. And we are going to, in that process, change your business. Right. We are not going to go into this. And our business remains exactly the same as it was yesterday. And So I mentioned nine to 12 months before we actually did the implementation work. We were doing all this pre work. I was also going to a lot of conferences with my peers within marketpoint and I was delivering that message that we are gonna change your business process. As we go through that, be prepared. We're gonna come to you and have a lot of conversations about what that looks like. We're gonna document it and show you what the new process looks like. So we're not just gonna show up in a room with a blank whiteboard. Right. And ask you to help us figure it out. We, as the product org are going to figure that out for you for the best case. And then we'll have a conversation about where we need to tweak it. Right. So that was kind of the approach we took.

And so we built Market Point three six zero together. And that's not where the partnership ends. We've got an exciting phase two on the horizon.

Yep, absolutely. Absolutely. So, as I mentioned, you know, the work we've done up to this point is for basically our internal captive agents, whether they be telesales agents or our career agents. The next phase is our external agent population. Those brokers that I mentioned earlier. From a volume perspective, the brokers do account for the largest volume of our sales activities and they account for the largest part of the agent population. So you look at our internal agent population is probably anywhere between 3,500 and 4,000 agents. On the broker side, we probably have anywhere from 60 to 70,000 agents who are contracted with us in some form or fashion to sell plans. So much larger population. We know that large population can't necessarily be brought into the Salesforce ecosystem from a cost perspective, cost benefit perspective. So one of the things we're looking at doing is in the next phase, really going to Salesforce communities to build a portal experience on top of what we've already built that will serve those external brokers. And that's really kind of the next phase that we're looking at and excited about.

That's super exciting. And I think at this point our amazing solution, engineer Stephanie Kistner, is going to give us actually two demos, I think. Right, Steph?

Yes, I am. So Humana actually gave us really special insight. I will make this a little bit bigger for you to see. They gave us special insight into their environment. And so what you're going to see displayed out here is actually Humana's market point 360 that Brandon was just talking about. It's really built, like he said, to support those internal telesales agents. They consolidated several systems to give those agents one place to go through the partnership with Salesforce Professional Services team, they leverage core platform components to build what you see here on the screen, which is that needs analysis. It's launched directly from an opportunity and it really equips their sales team when they're on the phone speaking to a potential customer or member. What you see is real time decisioning that takes into account a customer's unique stories. What do they care about when they're searching for plans? This is all built within our low code environment and they were able to build in this screen or this logic within this screen flow that directs that agent to collect that information right in real time. The utilities disclaimer takes the experience to the next level because it pulls in what we already know about that member. Because Health Cloud is that open API, HIPAA compliant platform, we can automatically factor things in, like when a member's switching plans, like who are their doctors, what medications and pharmacies do they take in time? The system is securely built to bring data in in real time. So when they're supporting them, we know exactly what doctors they're going to see, what medications that they need to be factored in, what pharmacies does that, does that member want to continue going to. What we know about members is they don't like change. They have redeveloped a relationship with the doctor. They wanna make sure that the plans that they're quoting evolve and include the doctors that they've already built relationships. Now that doctor and pharmacy information, it lives in one system. But what you're also seeing in here in the screen flow is that medication factor as well. And that is going to live in another system. We're able to intelligently pull in data from multiple systems to, to create one consolidated system where we can get the information that we need. Then we gather the members consent, package up all of that data that we've collected on that phone call and send it over to Humana's enrollment flow, making it extremely easy for them to enroll their members in plans. And what you saw here in less than two minutes is how Humana supports their internal sales team. But as Brandon was saying, they didn't stop there. They came to us and they say, how do we leverage the data, the automation, the workflows that you've seen to support our external arm of our sales team. And that is the work that we're doing now. And so through Experience Cloud you can actually extend an existing org that you have today. Humana has MarketPoint360 built on health Cloud. They can extend that experience, taking in Appropriate permission, sets security all within the same environment that they have and supporting the other arm of their team. What's very unique about this experience is it's extremely personalized to the broker that's logged in. This is an authenticated experience. Me as a broker, I will log in and I will see things that are very relevant to me. We know that brokers are quoting across multiple plans. We want to make it extremely easy for them to quote Humana plans. So we make this experience personalized to them, whether it's from the onboarding to credentialing or in that selling phase. We're in open enrollment season as we all know. What we can do is we can push member information directly to a broker if we know that broker is working with a member. This is a very unique intersection when we're looking at not only a broker360, what do we know about them? But now we're combining it with a member360 all in one place. So a broker now has access into that member information that we have collected through market.360 and what we know about that member. We've added that a step further. We can see that this member is in open enrollment. We can expose out information to the broker to know exactly what communications they have gotten so far. But we're also adding calculated insights with Einstein on top of this so that we truly can explain to the broker and give them insight into what matters to that member. So when they get ready to pick up the phone, they can have or email that member. They can have a very intelligent conversation and that member feels like they know them and they know what matters to them when they're choosing a plan. We know, like I said, a lot of members don't like to change doctors. We expose that objection out and provide an easy provider mapping form that allows that member to see that they don't have to change doctors with the plans that are being quoted now. That's the selling side of the house. But what if we could also support these brokers so they don't have to pick up the phone or send an email every time they need help from Humana? What if we can use workflows that we just talked about and extend those out to the brokers to allow them to do easy things like book of business transfers? What if instead of picking up the phone, we can provide through our case management data model, the ability for answers for brokers to get answers very fast, like where's my missing commission? Embedded knowledge, all within the system allows a broker to get the information that they need, make it extremely easy for them to quote those plans, but then also make it easy for them to work with Humana and truly be a trusted selling partner. And that is hopefully what we will be working with you on in the next few months.

Thank you, Steph. Well, Brandon, that looks incredible. Congratulations. This is really exciting stuff. And market point 360 that we got a chance to see live here is out in the world. Open enrollment season is upon us. Talk to us about how it's going. Has it been successful? What kind of early insights have you seen? How's it working?

Yeah, as far as success goes, it has been an incredibly successful implementation. I think, you know, most of me and my team would say this has been by far the most successful implementation we've ever been a part of in our careers. And I just, yeah, I just, you know, we're starting to look at some hard metrics around, you know, what are we seeing from a lift from the old set of systems, new systems. One of the things that's really tough in our industry is the product we sell not only changes year to year, but changes zip code to zip code. Right. And so it becomes a lot of times very hard to really measure, you know, how much of a lift of the system provide versus, you know, some of the changes in the product you're sell selling. But we're working through that. We are seeing some initial indications that things like, you know, conversion rates and things like that are looking more positive in the new environment. We'll have more insight to that after AEP ends here in December around, you know, how we can compare some of those things.

So we're going to see you on the main stage next year sharing all.

That, especially with the broker portal coming and kind of having that holistic solution. I think, I think we'll really see a lot of lift there. But I think those are the big things. I think the other big thing for me this year, coming to Dreamforce, I was here last year and I was here last year in the context of man, we're about to go on this journey, right? And we, you know, I was like, what is this all going to look like? You know, you know, this is all overwhelming. How are we going to get there? And I come back this year and the thing that gives me so much pride and so much comfort is we've built the foundation, right? We have the strong foundation in place now. And the other thing I think is going to be great is now when I see all these new technologies that are shown at Dreamforce, we can start to launch with those. Right. We are in a position now where we can take that next step, take.

Advantage of all this information.

Right, exactly. Whereas last year it just said, we can't get to that until we get the foundation in place. And so it's really a prideful moment for me to come here with my team and say, we got that foundation in place and we're ready to take that next step.

Yeah. And the journey is just beginning.

Right? Right, Right. Absolutely.

That's awesome. And you said last year you were sitting here thinking, oh, wait, what is this all gonna look like? And maybe you saw some other customers on stages like this telling their stories. And there's folks in the audience and watching online who probably are where you were last year. So maybe you could share some parting thoughts here on kind of what went well, lessons learned, anything. If there are folks out here who are in your shoes from last year, what would you do differently? What did you learn? What can you share some wisdom with these folks?

I really think there's four things that. There's many things I would say to focus on when you do something like this, but there's four things that really stick out to me. I mentioned earlier that technology agnostic approach and spending the time up front to really understand who do you want to be when you grow up? Where do you want to go? What are you trying to do? And that was really critical for us because there was a lot of talk about, how are we going to fund this? And the team really did a good job of spending that time when we were trying to figure those things out, really understanding where we were going to go and documenting all this.

Setting that north star.

Setting that North Star. And then, so then by the time we got to the point where, you know, Salesforce professional services hit the ground and really helped us, started building, there weren't a lot of questions about what are you going to do? Right. We were really clear on what we were going to do. And I think that. I think that was. Was a big one. I think the other thing that was really critical for us is change management. Right. You know, we're here at a technology conference. It's, you know, a lot of conversation about. About technology. But change management is often overlooked, I think, in your success. And when I say overlooked, I'm not saying that most companies won't do change management. I think they do it too late. Yeah. So for us, we did it from day one. Right. We said, hey, you know, as we start this work, change Management's going to be involved day one. One of the biggest things we did is we actually created a, what we called our ambassador group of sales agents. And we actually they were the ones that were informing how we built the system. Previously we tended to go to leaders and get their buy in.

These are folks who are on the.

Ground in the houses, right. They're the ones that are, they're in the trenches doing the work. And they were our ambassador group and we actually rolled this out in March. The system was, was pretty bare bones at that point, but we rolled it out to 12ambassador agents and they were taking live calls immediately.

Right.

And we were learning from them and we were iterating and that was really good. The other two things I would, I would call out are partnership. Partnership is extremely crucial when you do something like this. I've talked about our partnership with Salesforce Professional Services. You know, couldn't have asked for a better partner there in, you know, helping us actually build this from the ground up. Slalom consulting. I also want to do a big shout out to. They were a critical partner to us in that pre planning stage. And then one of the great things that we were able to do with professional services was we were able to keep a number of those slalom partners into the actual implementation phase. So we had that nice synergy going from one phase to the other. And then our IT partners from Humana also helped us tremendously along the way as we went through those things there. The last thing I would highlight is just is people, right? I know that sounds very cliche, but this was a very people driven activity. And you know, my product team who most of, most of who are able to be here in attendance, I can't thank them enough for all the effort that they put in and what they did. And I was thinking earlier today, I was like, you know, if you have the right people, regardless of the challenges that are in front of you, you will be successful. And in that, to me that is the biggest takeaway from Marketpoint. 360 is we had the right people, we had the right mindset, we had a great technology partner and various other partners and that all led us to where we are today because we basically got this done in nine months and we all thought that was crazy when we started and we made it happen.

Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for being here at the end of the dealer. Thank you so much for sharing your story and we'll see you next year on the main city.

Hope so. Yep. All right. Thank you. Thank you all. It.