In this article, we interview our customer Kevin Galandy, President of Bayside Associates, based in Alberta, Canada.
We are a financial services company that specializes in Tax, Insurance and Estate Planning for Business Owners
Q. How do you use presentations in your organization?
We have a basic PowerPoint presentation that we use to demonstrate ideas and concepts to clients and potential clients.
Q. What original problem were you trying to solve that eventually led you to PresentationPoint?
On the insurance side, we are brokers and deal with many different insurance companies; with many different types of software. Also insurance companies just offer product and not concepts or presentations on how to use the insurance. Presentation Point allowed me to populate a presentation without having to type in each number. I was able to get the insurance carriers to provide me data in the form of a excel spreadsheet, which I linked together etc. used to feed Presentation Point.
Q. How did you come across PresentationPoint originally?
Internet, a long time ago… even though I have never met Kurt (PresentationPoint founder), I consider him to be a friend. He has always been there to help when there is an issue (they are always mine LOL), and the product has continued to improve.
Q. What software at PresentationPoint did you use to solve the problem?
Q. Have you found additional problems you are using our software to solve? If so, tell us about them.
At present we are so overwhelmed with customers and are focused on servicing their needs, so we are currently not adding any additional projects. But I do see another issue that is coming down next year. The regulators are adding in another layer of compliance, I am going to develop a process using DataPoint to use a dropdown choice method to customize the majority of the document with standard responses; there by reducing the amount of specialized input for each client.
I also believe that there are other products that you carry that would also work, I think that I haven’t taken the time to look into other areas, like our ongoing client services offering; as I am sure they can help there too.
Q. You mentioned that our software saves you hours every presentation. How is it saving you this time? How much time savings would this likely be for you in a month?
In the beginning of my company, presentations need to be customer specific, their tax rates, their age, their net worth etc. this took a lot of time. When I was doing all of the presentations myself it took me about 8 to 10 hours per presentation.
The good part of that was that they were very effective and very personal, but as a result I could not work with very many customers at one time… When I found DataPoint it allowed me to think differently on a number of levels; first it was I could link data and then recreate a presentation for someone else with way less effort. But then I started to think about the process differently in that most customers didn’t need an elaborate presentation but it helped to prove competency etc.
So I thought outside the box and designed a method to produce standard presentations that are highly customized with many different slides etc; but I trained a staff member to produce the sales illustrations from the insurance company software and them import them into a linked spreadsheet.
This was really a game changer for us, as it no longer required personnel with years of experience in the areas of sales, tax, structure and client knowledge to produce a presentation. All a needed was someone that followed instructions and then looked at several key slides to ensure accuracy. I went from spending 1 day a week meeting with clients (2 per day) for new business to 4 days per week and 4 per day.
The reason for this big increase I was no longer tied behind a computer doing the something that was good but didn’t really matter much once you proved you knew what you were talking about; because the sale after the first presentation is mostly listening to the client and then offering solutions. The difference I that I now was able to prove it to all customer size clients rather than just large accounts. Also printing documents was quite the challenge because you don’t want to give your potential client your whole presentation as it could end up in the hands for your competitor, so we used datapoint to produce custom printouts, with enough information, in a simple format that the client gets a good reminder of what we spoke about, but not how we got there.
This also led to an overflow of business of interested customers that could not all handle myself; so I hired additional sales people for the small case sizes.
Q. I am intrigued by your “assembly line process” for presentations. Can you tell me how this works?
If my business was like a restaurant, we are now offering a full course high-end meal (that used to take 8 hours to prepare) in 20 minutes. More importantly we lose only a small amount of time and effort of those customers that are not interested in our process. So in that way we are even getting some deals that we would have walked away from because they are too time consuming with little chance of getting the deal. So now we are getting some of those deals because we try.
Q. Please share any other thoughts or comments you think our audience might enjoy or benefit from.
It is my belief that all companies main purpose is sales and with that end in mind effective communication is very important. The majority of my time is now spent on the development of new ideas and better ways to communicate to our clients. The effort I make to design new ways to look at old problems is now easily and effectively transferred immediately to all of our new and old customers. This will transfer to larger sales and more of them. Last year, I was the number 1 independent life insurance broker in Canada for 2 of the top 10 life insurance companies.
I am certain that this would not be possible without DataPoint. At present I am looking at expanding into other areas and plan to use DataPoint to make it more efficient.
