TRANSAMERICA FINANCIAL NETWORK IS A TRAILBLAZER

Transamerica Financial Network enhances both its company culture and its bottom line with Salesforce.

The Salesforce Platform is a very mobile, 21st-century environment that complements [our] talents at connecting with clients.”

JOHN JOSEPH, CHIEF STRATEGY OFFICER
 
25,000 employees
Salesforce customer since 2012

33,000

Number of agents and advisors who transitioned to Financial Services Cloud in just 12 weeks

 
 

With Financial Services Cloud, Transamerica Financial Network deepens its client relationships.

Georgia-based Transamerica Financial Network (TFN) is a financial services marketing organisation that is part of Transamerica, one of the world’s leading financial services companies. TFN’s 60,000 independent agents and financial advisors are now using Financial Services Cloud to serve families for life.

“We are making Salesforce part of the culture of the organisation,” said John Joseph, Chief Strategy Officer. "We see Salesforce not just as a technology company, but as part of our family that helps us serve our customers every day."

Transamerica Financial Network is a Trailblazer in financial services.

TFN is using Salesforce as a way to reimagine what Customer Relationship Management (CRM) means for its entire field force. A Salesforce customer since 2012, TFN has put all of its agents and advisors on Financial Services Cloud, driving a massive customer-centric transformation of its business, with Salesforce at the center. Community Cloud provides a single hub for TFN agents and advisors to connect with their recruits and find training, while Service Cloud powers the TFN service and sales desks. Meanwhile, Einstein Analytics and the Salesforce Platform are helping drive actionable insights throughout the company. "Truthfully, we are capturing data on Salesforce that we've never captured before," said Joseph.

With customers, advisors, and agents all on the same platform, the full power of the Salesforce ecosystem provides more personalised engagements throughout a customer’s financial life journey. “Our mission, at the end of the day, is to help families,” he said. “As we start releasing more and more features and functionality on a regular basis, agents and advisors will see the value add of how Salesforce can help drive their businesses, help their client families, and help grow those family relationships.”

 
 

Build stronger client relationships with Financial Services Cloud.

 
 

FINANCIAL SERVICES

Get a 360-degree of your clients with insights that lead to deeper relationships with Financial Services Cloud.
 

EINSTEIN ANALYTICS

Turn the tide of your business with insights that boost growth and productivity from Einstein Analytics.
 

MARKETING

Drive action with intelligent marketing using Marketing Cloud.
 

Massive platform adoption takes place companywide in just 12 weeks.

Switching everyone at TFN over to Financial Services Cloud required an en masse migration of data to create all-new user records for more than 29,000 agents. The project, which included redesigning the user interface for agents, took only 12 weeks and was accomplished without needing an outside consulting firm to drive the implementation.

TFN developed a momentum program to promote the change, because, said Joseph, “We don’t want to force our field to use Salesforce. We want them to adopt it for the right reasons.” Employees from TFN headquarters will travel throughout North America to show what Financial Services Cloud could do for network members, both personally and professionally. Said Joseph, “A lot of folks really woke up and thought, ‘Wow, this is really a new way of doing business.’”

Learning through Trailhead becomes a fun companywide competition.

TFN has fully adopted Trailhead, the free online Salesforce training platform, and managers are creating Trailmixes — custom learning paths that users can create — for their team members spanning the entire company from the sales desk to IT to operations. So far, they’ve achieved 1,191 achievement badges with nine users at the impressive 25-badge Mountaineer level. TFN is now using the Trail Tracker app to make a competitive game of Trailhead badge attainment, with a public leaderboard that shows which individuals are leading in Salesforce capabilities.

“We’ve gone heavy on Trailhead,” Joseph said. “In order to grow the platform internally, we need to really motivate a citizen developer model. And what’s most exciting to me is that some of our most successful Trailhead Trailblazers are hourly employees, many of whom have been performing one or two functions in the same job for years. They caught the Salesforce bug. They are opening their eyes to the possibilities of how we could and should be supporting our field force in new ways every day.” The net effect of Salesforce, he added, is that “we’re transitioning ourselves from functions to relationships at all levels of the organisation.”

 

We see Salesforce not just as a technology company, but part of our family that helps us serve our customers every day.”

John Joseph, Chief Strategy Officer

Innovation is so important to the company, they're building a place to encourage it.

TFN is creating an Innovation Zone at company headquarters to create a special environment for TFN employees to learn, collaborate, and innovate with Salesforce. “We ask everybody in the organisation who wants to do something better, to ask themselves if Salesforce can solve for that,” said Joseph. “As all the customer journeys created in Salesforce complement our field force’s ability to go out there and stay connected with client families, then Salesforce is helping us grow our relationships with those families for life.”
 
 

Salesforce becomes an asset in recruiting new associates.

Through AppExchange, TFN has partnered with iPipeline®, leveraging its AgentOne® AppExchange app to connect the entire agent experience. Having the right technology in place is important to TFN’s recruitment efforts, as TFN’s independent advisors and agents tend to be more diverse and much younger than industry averages. Many are new to the financial services industry and are eager to start new careers as self-employed entrepreneurs within TFN’s network.

Marketing Cloud empowers TFN to scale its recruitment efforts with 1-to-1 journeys to attract a diverse group of new agents and advisors. “Diversity and inclusion are officially part of our culture,” Joseph said. “It's who we are. It’s our identity.” Transamerica Financial Advisors Inc. ranks as the top broker-dealer for women, for instance, and Joseph cites numerous cases of agents and advisors from a wide range of cultural backgrounds finding success within TFN’s network.

“First and foremost, we build businesses,” Joseph said, explaining how TFN trains and develops people hailing from such diverse backgrounds. “The Salesforce Platform is a very mobile, 21st-century environment that complements their talents at connecting with clients. The technology makes the administrative and compliance side easier to handle, so it’s an attraction and a recruiting tool in helping bring new people into the industry.”

TRAILBLAZER SPOTLIGHT

Little did I know, I would go from our small instance of Salesforce with 15 users, to becoming the go-to Salesforce person with over 30,000 support reps and field agents on the system and growing.”

Linda Rawsky, Supervisor, Programming Analysis
Learn more about Linda's journey with Trailhead
 

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