Driving Profitability with CRM in Uncertain Economic Times

Synopsis: Banks and Credit Unions are facing new and unique challenges as the US economy continues to change with higher inflation, waning consumer confidence and uncertainty about how high rates will continue to rise.

The question facing everyone in the industry is “How can we continue to grow profitably in the face of this uncertainty?”.

Learn more about how your peers in the industry are using the Salesforce platform to focus on the following initiatives heading into 2023:

• Technology Advancement
• Evolving Customer Expectations
• Economic Conditions
• Competitive Threats

You’ll walk away with a greater understanding of how peers in your industry are leveraging Salesforce to drive a single view of the client to increase profitability and more personalized interactions

Speakers: Jim Collins, Sr. Director of Financial Services at Salesforce and Laura Sullivan, EVP, Chief Marketing Officer at Hancock Whitney

0:00:07.0 Will Kelly: All right, so I think we’ll get going. So first off, I just want to say thank you so much everyone for joining the call today. We’re really excited to have this session. You all should be able to see my screen. It is Driving Profitability and Uncertain Economic Times with Jim Collins of Salesforce and Laura Sullivan of Hancock Whitney Bank. We’re really, really excited for the webinar today. This is the first one in a series that we’ve done in quite a while. We’re excited to do more of these. We have people joining today all the way from New York to Hawaii. So we’re really excited. Really the point of this webinar is for Jim and Laura to talk about their experiences with Salesforce, the uncertain economic times that we find ourselves in, and how your peers in the industry are tackling these questions and these challenges with technology today. I am Will Kelly. I’m with EMS Consulting. We’ll go around, we’ll do introductions just in a second. But personally, I’m very excited for this webinar. I have been traveling quite a bit over the past six or seven weeks, seen a lot of our clients at EMS, banks and credit unions. And these are the questions that everyone’s asking right now. I was on with the director of lending, having dinner a couple of weeks ago, and they were talking about their projections for next year, what products, what segments they’re gonna focus on.

0:01:26.6 WK: Up until this time, it was all about how can we drive more loans and then suddenly for a lot of customers of mine, it’s now how can we find more deposits? How can we find more product lines to start cross selling and upselling our clients? So very excited to have this discussion. If I haven’t said it once, I’ll say it about ten more times. Thank you so much for attending. Thank you so much for your support and we look forward to continuing these conversations. If you’ve ever been on a Salesforce webinar before, it is the infamous forward-looking statement slide. Instead of just pausing and waiting for a thumbs up, I’ll just briefly explain. You’re gonna hear a lot of information today. Among other things, you might hear some future development or future products.

0:02:12.1 WK: Please do not make any buying decisions based on anything forward-looking, only make your purchasing decisions based on what is in the product today. So for a brief overview of the agenda, we’ll do introductions with our panelists. I’ll talk just a little bit about EMS consulting. I’m gonna pass it to Jim Collins to talk about the industry point of view and really the main topic today. And then we’ll talk to Laura Sullivan about her Salesforce journey and how she’s tackling some of those questions. And then with the time remaining, we’ll open it up to Q&A. So Brittany Mays from EMS is going to be monitoring the chat along with Chris Davis of Salesforce. So at any point, if you have any questions or comments that you’d like to have addressed, please drop them in the chat and we will tackle them as they come up. So to briefly introduce myself, my name is Will Kelly. I’m an account executive with EMS Consulting. I’ve been in the Salesforce ecosystem for about five or six years now. I am a seven times certified Salesforce admin. And this is really my favorite part of the job, connecting with customers, learning about their challenges and their goals and working with clients all across the Southeast. So Laura, would you like to do a brief introduction?

0:03:30.6 Laura Sullivan: Sure, Laura Sullivan. I work at Hancock Whitney as the Chief Marketing Officer. I came here two years ago in January and moved down to the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, which is about an hour away from New Orleans.

0:03:47.7 WK: Awesome, and Jim.

0:03:50.3 Jim Collins: Will, thanks. Thanks for having me today. Jim Collins from Salesforce folks, Senior Director for our Financial Services Industry Advisor Team. I’m excited to be here. Former 27 year banker, been here at Salesforce for 18 months. During my 27 years, I was on the Salesforce platform for seven of those years. So can talk about the pros, the cons, and everything about Salesforce. I’m excited to be here today to share some of the point of view we’re seeing from the industry today.

0:04:20.2 WK: Awesome, thank you, Jim. So who is EMS Consulting? EMS was founded in 1998. And my dumb dad joke that I always like to make, good Lord, is that we’re one year older than Salesforce. Salesforce just happened to get a little bit larger than we are, but this is all we do. We focus in the financial services space, end-to-end Salesforce consulting, anything from CRM to FSC, to complicated integrations, to marketing cloud as well. Over the course of our journey, about 24 years, we’ve made a number of partnerships in the ecosystem. So we’re a Jack Henry partner. We’ve done integrations within Compass, LOS systems, POS systems, really end to end. We tackle the challenges that our clients ask of us. We’re about 150 employees, a little over 1500 completed projects. And the thing that we really tried to do, we’re not always perfect, but we do our best is not only do we want to be the consultant that’s the best at turning on the light switch, but challenging our customers to say, do you need it? What are you trying to do?

0:05:22.4 WK: How are you engaging CRM and your frontline staff? Are you thinking through the challenges of change management and governance? Because really what we’ve seen across our years in consulting is that it’s not necessarily the features and functions that make or break a CRM project. It’s how you’re engaging your users, how are you tackling those challenges, of change and really tackling the culture within your firm and at adopting these changes at adopting CRM. So we’ll be monitoring the chat, happy to engage in conversations, talk a little bit more about our experience, but I didn’t wanna spend too much time on this. I really wanted to get over to Jim Collins and get into the meat of the discussion. So Jim, I’ll pass it over to you.

0:06:03.5 JC: Thanks, Will, appreciate it. And thanks for your partnership with EMS. I know you’re one of our critical SIs that really help us fulfill our implementations with all of our banking partners. So if you can go to the next slide, please, and I appreciate you driving the slide show today. So thank you.

0:06:18.2 WK: Yeah, absolutely.

0:06:18.7 JC: So folks, one of the things that we do every year is really talk about our key industry trends. And in the beginning of 2022, we came up with these four major themes based on the research we’ve done within the industry. I mean, the four haven’t changed, but economic conditions has really been the dominating trend that has made the strategic decisions within organizations more prevalent today than in the beginning of the year. But when we take a look at the four major trends, technology advancement, when we think about technology advancement, it’s really about digital capabilities.

0:06:48.0 JC: And those digital capabilities are being driven by the demands and expectations of our customer base. Our customers experience so many things during the pandemic, but the one thing that they really came, that came out of it for them was we can we live in a digital world and now we expect our financial institutions to provide those same digital capabilities for us to fulfill our financial obligations. Because of that and the technology advancement that not only we’re seeing within our industry, we’re seeing it from our competition, in the competition today, we’re not just dealing with the banker, the credit union across the street anymore. We’re dealing with big tech, big tech that’s embedding finance within their applications and taking consumer business away from financial institutions. So when we take a look at our competitive landscape, it has completely changed over the past three years. But let’s dive into one of the top trends.

0:07:40.4 JC: Unfortunately today it’s really economic conditions. So if you can go to the next slide, Will, I appreciate that. So when we take a look at the economic challenges that we’re all faced with, number one is inflation. And it’s, it’s interesting today, I was writing down the CPI numbers that came out this morning and the market is cheering because we had 7.1% inflation. Now think about that, they’re cheering because we expected 7.3, and last month it was at 7.7 and at the peak it was at 9.1% year over year. The inflation has been out of control in our economy this past year, and that’s really driving the interest rate environment that we’re in today. The Fed is trying to tame inflation by raising interest rate and slowing down the economy. Remember the Fed’s goal is to really focus in and get back to that 2% inflationary rate, and that’s gonna take a lot of work and some time.

0:08:33.8 JC: But the most important thing to think about about these economic challenges is about our customers. And unfortunately our customers are, their sense is we’re about 20% of them feel that their needs are being met. 80% do not feel that our financial institutions are helping them during these challenging economic times. So what can we do better to help our customers? Next slide please. Let’s double click into the economic conditions and the impact on our financial institutions. First of all, the 10 year treasury, this 3.6% actually changed. I just took a look at it before the call, it’s a little bit lower at 3.5% with the two year treasury hovering around 4.2. So they dropped a little bit today based on the positive inflation news. But because of that, if you still think about it, the two year is higher than the 10 year, which means we have an inverted yield curve.

0:09:23.5 JC: And for those economic majors out there, they know that an inverted yield curve means we’re heading into a recession. So what does this mean for banks? It means that we have to focus in on our efficiency ratio. We have to become more efficient in order to keep those operating expenses lower in order to create profitability within our organizations. We also have to take a look at our loan to deposit mix to make sure we have the proper funding. Because as interest rates rise Fed funds at 4% today with a forecast of about five to five and a quarter based on Goldman Sachs’s latest research, it’s going to impact our borrowing and our funding costs. So that’s a critical piece in our profitable growth model that we’ll talk about in a little bit. But overall, the economic conditions are driving key strategic decisions that we’re making on a day-to-day basis.

0:10:08.6 JC: And one of the most important things to look at from when we’re in a recession are potential non-performing assets. Asset quality is a top priority of banks as we head into 2023. Next slide please. So areas of focus for our executive team. So we talked to, you know, executive teams across the country, and these are the three key areas based on what we just saw from the economic challenges. Number one is profitable growth. So the good news is we did see net interest margin NIM expansion in Q3 because of the interest rate curve and interest rates going up. Banks benefited from additional net interest income. The cost of deposit hasn’t caught up to that yet, but it is heading into Q4. So the cost of funds, the cost of deposit is rising, which will potentially contract NIM and impact the profitability of our banks and our organizations.

0:11:00.2 JC: So gaining deposits share and low cost core deposits is one of the number one priorities of banks today. And as Will said with his conversation recently, it was all lending, lending lending in the first half of the year. Now, banks that had and were flushed with deposits have lost those deposits because our consumers had to spend those deposits and our businesses had to spend those deposits in order to keep up with inflation and to keep up with normal everyday expenses. So because of that, banks are now looking for deposits and profitable deposits, zero cost deposits to continue with their NIM expansion. As I mentioned, the economic downturn and a looming recession. Inflationary pressure, asset quality is the number one focus. How do we minimize our non-performing assets when we’re in a rising interest rate environment? So we do not have to take more loan loss reserves and impact our financial statements.

0:11:52.9 JC: But lastly, infrastructure investment executives today, and we just saw a study for 2023, and it was the same in 2022. Banks are going to spend more in technology this year than they did in previous years and next year compared to this year as well. And the reason is they wanna unlock the value of automation and create scalability for their organizations by leveraging technology. And if you think about the economic environment that we’re in today, inflation that includes wage inflation, wage inflation, the last report I saw was at 7.7%. So the cost of hiring people versus leveraging technology to scale is very expensive. So technology stack optimization is one of the key priorities of our executive teams today. Next slide please. So when we double click into some of the key initiatives and key tactics, it’s about operational efficiency and it’s creating that end-to-end digitization to focus back in on that technology stack optimization that I just mentioned.

0:12:55.7 JC: It’s enhancing the customer experience and really focusing in on data-driven decisions that are going to impact household growth, household attrition, and improve household revenue. And lastly, it’s workforce productivity. Even though we’re heading in a recession today, unemployment’s still at an all-time low at about 3.7%. So banks and and key credit unions across the country are still trying to attract, retain, and develop top talent so that they can deliver the digital capabilities and the customer experience that their customers expect. And that’s a challenge today. So by focusing in on leveraging technology, we’ll help improve workforce productivity. Next slide please. So when we talk about sales and we talk about driving growth, it’s loan growth, it’s deposit growth, it’s sales transformation, these are the four different pillars that everybody is focused in on the customer segment focused, how to create those personalized solutions, self-service options, that omnichannel strategy, sales enablement, releasing capacity, leveraging data and digital tools, and most importantly, speed to market in this highly competitive environment.

0:14:03.8 JC: Wallet share. How do you deepen wallet share as we talked about earlier, improving, household, growth and household revenue. How do we find those deposit or loan only customers and selling to them deposit products that they need and that we need desperately. And lastly, from a sales perspective, simplification, optimizing front to back office and truly creating end-to-end digitization and process automation. Next slide please. The other piece of profitability is operational priorities and efficiency and scalability. And the four main areas, of that banks are focused in on today is improving that efficiency ratio, as we talked about earlier, focusing in on regulatory and compliance matters because that’s always top of mind moving with speed and agility in order to free up capacity and be able to create that scalability that you need in order to grow your business and grow your profitability. And lastly, transparency and visibility and improving the visibility across all lines of business.

0:15:02.9 JC: So let’s double click into this real quickly. Next slide please. When we look at sales transformation approach, you’re either gonna be in the same thing as operational transformation as you’ll see with the next slide. You’re either gonna be in the renovate, evolve, or transcend stage. The question I have for all of you on the call today is, which stage are you in and where do you want to go? So are you in the renovate stage where you’re preserving your current legacy applications and you’re incrementally moving along in the sales process? Or are you in the evolve stage where you’re actually trying to create that competitive advantage by focusing in on customer centricity and data-driven analytics? Or if some of you already moved to the transcend stage, which means you’re future ready, you have lean processes, your self-service solutions are in place and you’re leveraging machine learning and artificial intelligence, same goes true for operational transformation.

0:15:52.6 JC: Next slide please. So which mindset best fits you? Are you optimizing a process or service in a renovate stage? Are you re-engineering across value processes in a value chain or are you transcending to reimagine your operations at scale and truly transforming and creating the economies of scale across all lines of business? When I’m talking to community banks and credit unions out there today, some lines of business are in one stage versus the other. And everybody of course is trying to get to the transcend stage, but it is going to take time. Next slide please. So when we take a look at Salesforce and how we’re helping our customers and our partners succeed, it’s really providing with an enterprise platform solution more than a CRM. The technology is an extensible platform that’s going to help you connect data, documents, people, and processes and truly unlock the holy grail of line of business sharing.

0:16:46.3 JC: The customer experience is absolutely, driven by data and creating personalization at scale and most importantly, optimizing customer journeys. And lastly, integrations are critical. You have many different platforms that you’re dealing with. Having that integration layer with Salesforce and creating that digital engagement layer is critical to provide insights so you can make fact-based decisions and so can your customers. Next slide please. And so because we have that solution, we actually went out and surveyed our customers and said, what value do you see you’re getting from the platform? And these are some of the results. And actually the first result is very critical today to driving profitability. And that’s reducing those IT costs by 25% and improving employee productivity by 26%. The others are, are fantastic results as well. But truly to drive profitability, it’s, it’s a revenue and expense gain. And that’s why we’re here to help from an enterprise solution perspective.

0:17:44.8 JC: Next slide please. One of the cool things that our business value team did was a recent study of comparing revenue growth and financial performance of Salesforce customers versus non-customers post-implementation. And this is a study done between banks, one to 10 billion in assets from 2017 through 2021. And as you can see, the Salesforce customer financial performance exceeded those not on our platform. And four key critical areas that I know all executives are focused in on incremental asset growth. We were up 5.6% incremental revenue growth, 4.5%, incremental ROA almost 10%. And very important in this market, it improved operational efficiency of 50 basis points. So overall, trying to help create value and profitability in organizations is what we’re trying to do to support your efforts here at Salesforce.

0:18:36.0 JC: So with that, let’s take off this slide and let’s get to our guest star today, which is Laura Sullivan. You guys don’t wanna hear me talk anymore. You wanna hear from Laura? So Laura, you talked a little bit about your background. Can you give us a little more extensive history about where you came from, and what you’re doing today at Hancock Whitney?

0:18:52.0 LS: Sure. So, I started my career actually running a non-profit. So in times of efficiencies, I am well versed in what it’s like to have to make sure you’re careful with your pennies, but I spent a decade in New York City at American Express, and to reflect on that time and where we are today with Salesforce it’s pretty amazing transition that we’ve had. I started out my career in the power of client targeting and how do we get smart about insights and to see and know how we can leverage automation and we can empower the banker and the marketer and leveraging data in the way that Salesforce can has been terrific. I then spent a, close to a decade at Wells Fargo, standing up a customer experience and excellence team there and supporting the commercial business with their strategic insights.

0:19:52.1 LS: In between that, I also was a marketing strategist and market researcher, and then got recruited to the other saltwater body, the Gulf Coast of Mexico to live in Mississippi, right outside of New Orleans to work for Hancock Whitney. And what really excited me about coming to the bank and this role as Chief Marketing Officer is the sweet spot size we are as a regional bank that banks from Texas to Florida that cares deeply about the full relationship with our clients and has a very robust commercial offering, wealth offering, and consumer offering. So it’s been, I’m two years in and it’s been a fun ride about, towards the beginning of this year I was assigned to be the enterprise sponsor for our use of Salesforce and how we align our approach and scale it, and also deepen our use of the marketing cloud and the marketing tools within Salesforce.

0:21:00.7 JC: Excellent, phenomenal background and your experience, I think is tremendously adding value to Hancock Whitney, and to our call today. So thank you. Thank you for being here. When we take a look at the Salesforce journey at Hancock Whitney, now you’ve only been there for two years and I believe the journey started before that, but can you talk to us a little bit about the journey of where they were and where you see it going?

0:21:18.9 LS: Yeah, so I think if I have my history correct, I think we’re probably on, it probably started around 2015, and I think, your slides up front are just, did a great recap of kind of where we were, where we are, where we aspire to be. So I think that we first stood up Financial Service Cloud, and we are really humming in how we leverage Salesforce in the retail space and our servicing operation. And we’re in the midst of trying to evolve to actually transcend. So, and we have started to layer in some of the marketing cloud, sales capabilities that you have over the past year first with Einstein and then with Marketing Cloud. And I think I can talk a little bit about this year and one of the first things that we did was partner with EMS to actually get to, how do we evolve and how do we transcend?

0:22:29.9 LS: So, we’ve been doing a sprint around what does Salesforce governance look like that inspires and empowers all of us from the executives, from our marketing presidents, from the front, all the different flavors of front lines that we have to leverage Salesforce to do our job better, and to surface insights and create better user experience for the associates. And so that’s been a really great project for me to reflect and better understand the history of where we’ve been and think about and align with the executives about where we wanna go.

0:23:09.9 JC: That’s fantastic. So focusing in on the user experience, you’re really trying to optimize the platform working inside out from starting with your own team members. Was that accurate?

0:23:20.7 LS: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think, I am, as a brand steward and I think I learned this at American Express as well, but so much of how we show up is how we actually serve and understand the client and the banker experience and the associate experience and making, leveraging Salesforce and that user experience to help us be smarter about how we then engage and how do we automate that engagement with our clients is really where we see unlocking the power. And then it goes back to the efficiencies slide that you talked about. You can be smarter about what you’re doing and where you’re spending your time and what to focus on and what’s re really meaningful. So it serves from an executive management perspective, it’s a phenomenal coaching tool for a new hire, it’s a great automated prompt. We often use the analogy of it’s a bit like learning how to maximize your iPhone and all the apps that sit on that, or those of us who battle with the calorie count of living near New Orleans using Noom and how it prompts you to be smarter. So, and we’ve just really appreciated all of the kind of the secret tools that it can do to help us scale and be more efficient.

0:24:47.8 JC: That’s fantastic. So when you touched on automating the engagement of internal and also your customers talk about the impact you think the platform has had on your external customers.

0:24:58.3 LS: So hopefully we’re getting smarter about understanding them and when to actually engage with them. And I go back, early in my career, a lot of my jobs are around customer engagement and the importance of, are your customers happy and what are the things that help them love your brand and make them feel understood? And the automation piece for me gets to that nurturing, it reinforces with our sales team and our service team, how do we actually date our customers well, that we understand and listen and we’re courting them in a way that makes them feel like we understand what their needs are, when their needs are. And that’s the exciting thing. I mean, I came back from both Dreamforce and Connects, super excited about some of the demos that I saw about the automated journeys that you have. So I just continue to get excited about what the future will hold, as we start to evolve and transcend.

0:26:05.8 JC: And Laura, talking about nurturing and nurturing your customers and the insights, in my opinion, that helps drive profitability, because you need to understand more about your customer and leading the marketing charge, getting that data and that insight is critical for you in order to drive profitability of that customer base. So your your thoughts on profitability and how it ties to all the nurturing that you guys are trying to do.

0:26:32.0 LS: Yeah, I think that the nurturing and the automation helps you focus in a way, as a smaller bank and you really can do hand to hand combat. You’ve lived in the market, you probably grew up in the market, you know your customer, you know their neighbors, etcetera, and you’re really engaging with them on intuition and history and the automation and the allows you to nurture and surface data as your bank scales. So as a community bank grows into a regional bank and you start bringing younger associates on board as well, it serves as that prompt and that coaching mechanism to help you see things that you might not have realized were opportunities or needs of your client. And so that’s one of the things that I love. And again, also there is, in the banking industry as you reflect on, a little bit of the history of when we’ve gone through recessions, they’re ebbs and flows of the people who have been attracted to work at in the banking industry.

0:27:40.1 LS: And many of them are a little bit older like I am. And as younger, exactly as younger associates come on board, they’re more familiar with leveraging this, but they also don’t have the history or the intuition. And some of the market research I’ve done in the past actually says just that, of as we bring on board younger associates into executive roles, whether they’re running companies or they’re bankers or marketers like I am, they are relying on and have an expectation that automation and digital user experiences are helping them to do better work. And so you need tools like you would find in Salesforce.

0:28:23.9 JC: No, great, great insight. Thank you for that. You mentioned data, at Dreamforce we talked about our new real-time CDP. Is that something that you see potentially Hancock Whitney leveraging in the future? Or how do you think that will be, an impact overall on financial services? A real-time CDP?

0:28:40.2 LS: I mean, data is the, that’s the golden ticket of having your client data be rich and informative and actionable. And that’s one of the reasons why we worked with EMS to set up the overall governance. And we actually put a role, an enterprise role that is meant to coordinate how all of the lines of business engage because we are focused on deepening the full relationship of a client. And smart and clean data helps you prompt your team to be more effective and focus where they’re working. So that is a big, huge focus. There are two teams that we kind of split apart and elevated in my marketing organization this year. One was around client analytics and capabilities and really being maniacal about what are the capabilities that we’re standing up and how are we leveraging client analytics. And the second one was around client and banker experience, which includes insights as well as how are we maximizing the use of Salesforce and the governance of how we leverage Salesforce across the bank to scale what we’re doing.

0:30:00.9 JC: Excellent. I loved your comment about smart and clean data with driving deepened relationships in the organization, and that’s critical. And is that something, and I’ll throw this metric out there, maybe you can share some of the metrics. How do you measure the relationship building in your organization? I know some other organizations have different key metrics about products and services per household and things like that. How do, you measure that deepening of those relationships?

0:30:24.4 LS: I think they’re the basics which you hit on. And I think pushing to the model, when I grew up in the, my first role in financial services was really about longevity of your client engagement. So I think that it is not only what products and services that you have, but it is the engagement that your client has with your people, with the benefits that you offer them, as well as the digital channels and how we are actually, and when you’re in the commercial business and small business, it’s also how you’re engaging with them in events and outside of the organization to deepen that trust. I mean, I think trust is built in person in your mailbox and online, and you have to figure out how to coordinate and orchestrate all of those.

0:31:23.3 JC: It makes perfect sense, and I love the attrition metrics, the longevity. Longevity means, it means a ton about loyalty and brand loyalty to, and to you delivering the capabilities they need for the future as well.

0:31:36.2 LS: Yeah, I mean, going back to my, and my team, I talk a lot about the dating analogy. You really wanna be methodical about courting and you don’t need to go from one sale to the next. You read, the client needs to feel like you actively care and understand them, and care about their communities. Again, that’s also our brand. Our brand is deeply invested in the communities that we serve in big and small ways, and care about what our clients care about. So it is as much about our investment in what their interests are and what they care about and the communities that we serve as it is in growing the business.

0:32:17.4 JC: And it makes sense because delivering your brand and your brand promise is really driven by the data and the knowledge your bankers have.

0:32:25.9 LS: Exactly, exactly.

0:32:28.0 JC: Makes sense. So I know there’s a lot of different priorities you got going on there at Hancock Whitney, a lot of projects. You wanna tell us a little bit about some of the things that you have going on that you’d like to share with the team?

0:32:38.1 LS: Yeah, so I talked to you a little bit about the first kind of big project which is how do we actually orchestrate and organize ourselves so we’re all playing from the same playbook, which is setting up an action-oriented, non-bureaucratic governance process that is helping us figure out how do we build and enhance our use of Salesforce as well as how do we leverage and improve the banker experience and the client experience. So that governance piece has been a big job. The second job that we’ve been working with EMS has been on, cleaning our closets. So it’s evaluating as technology evolves, let’s look at all of the dashboards that we’re using and how do we clean those up up. And so we’ve been doing a little bit of cleaning our closets and organizing them with a dashboard cleanup.

0:33:34.1 LS: And then some of the fun forward-looking things that we’ve been doing is actually standing up Datorama. And what I love about that is, again, one of the biases that you have in smaller organizations is that marketing is about arts and crafts. And marketing in today’s world is much more interesting. I love the arts and crafts, I love the events, I love the sponsorships but it’s also about how do you scale the use of data and how do you optimize those insights to be smarter and more efficient? And we see Datorama as being one great way of giving transparency to our line of business leaders, of how we’re investing and how we’re getting smarter. So we’ve been super excited about that. And then we’ve been exploring some of, we came back from Dreamforce and we’re excited. So just continue to dialogue and learn more about some of the work that you announced there and whether or not it would have, be applicable to us at this time. So we’ve been enjoying those conversations as well.

0:34:43.8 JC: Excellent. Well, thank you for sharing those. And sometimes you gotta clean those closets in order to make a fresh start for the new year, so it’s the perfect time to do it. Absolutely.

0:34:53.1 LS: Exactly.

0:34:53.8 JC: So heading into the new year, anything that you’d like to share with this audience today strategically that you can share, of things that are going on at Hancock Whitney that you’d like us to know about that relates to Salesforce and profitability and deepening relation? Anything that you wanna share that we haven’t touched on in our interview today?

0:35:10.8 LS: Yeah, I think I’ve hit on, I mean, our big goal, and it’s what attracted me to this bank, I moved down to the Gulf Coast, not just because my husband’s from Mississippi, but also because I believe in the bank, and it resonates with the culture that I loved about American Express and my work prior to that of we really care about growing and understanding the full relationship of the client. So that will always be a focus. And we also are an organization that wants to and aspires to grow and get smarter and evolve and leveraging Salesforce and automation tools and data helps us do just that in an efficient way, but also in a transformational way. So I mean, I think I touched on all of that and I just, I’m very excited to actually start using and driving better adoption.

0:36:13.9 LS: And for me, there’s also, way back in my early days I was a camp counselor and I’m a coach by nature. I love the challenge of driving adoption and inspiring those that work here about the power of leveraging Salesforce to start and end your day and all that, how it can make you more effective. So, that’s something that I’m looking forward to is to come, a year from now, if you asked me, are more people bragging and using Salesforce? Yes. Did we deploy our marketing dollars to drive better return on investment? Yes. Did we service clients that we didn’t know had opportunities for engagement through this effort? Yes. Those are the things that I wanna see happen if I reflect on this time next year.

0:37:05.9 JC: Well, we’re excited to be here this time next year with you to hear about those great results because I think you have a great strategic plan and leveraging the Salesforce platform will help you enable that plan in order for Hancock Whitney to be successful. So thank you. Thank you for your partnership. Thank you for being customer of ours. And I do think Will, do we have any questions for Laura and the team?

0:37:25.0 WK: Yes, I see Jeff Russell has his hands up, so I’ll unmute you just in a second Jeff. Laura, thank you again for your time. If anybody has any questions, feel free to raise your hands and we’ll take you off a mute so you can ask it directly, or if you don’t feel comfortable doing that, feel free to drop a question in the chat. So Jeff, you should be off of mute, so you wanna go ahead and ask your question.

0:37:48.9 Jeff Russell: Yeah, I mean, thanks so much for sharing. I’m just curious if anyone be willing to share, what did they do to drive that… I heard lots of big holistic big picture things, but what did we, how did we, how did you drive adoption? How did engagement go up? How did you overcome objections from frontline sales staff to you? How did you improve the tools that make them the tool of choice? I’m just curious, and maybe that’s not this kind of call, but…

0:38:23.7 LS: Yeah, no, I think it’s a fair question. So I think, there are lines of business that are doing great at driving adoption and kind of the key thing you always hear is executive sponsorship and KPIs and metrics that you’re reviewing. So I think that would be the success. The other thing is simplifying the user experience. So I think where we have leveraged dashboards that have been informative to help either the banker or the manager or the executive do better, you see more adoption there and also finding those Uber users and celebrating them and shining a spotlight on them. So we had a great example of an Uber user in our small business space who is now running our small business, and he really adopted it, became a huge champion and it became a ripple effect. And we’re continuing that.

0:39:22.3 LS: So there are in the, for those of you that are in the banking space, they’re legacy bankers just like me. I mean, my team will nudge me that there are things that I’m late to adopt, even though I understand the value and it’s not as intuitive to me, but I think it’s just, we believe it’s training. We believe it’s shining a spotlight on the phone, the friend and executive sponsorship and reviewing those metrics and also making the user experience simpler. So one of the reasons why we partnered with EMS to do the dashboard cleanup is our hypothesis is if we simplify the user experience, and it is more, it is clear and more intuitive what the banker should do to be more impactful, they will actually see the value. And that’s, again, it’s also goes back to that Apple phone, the design is as key as the training and as the executive sponsorship. So I don’t know if that was specific enough, Jeff, but that’s kind of the, we’ve had some success and our goal is to be even, to help drive, a consistent adoption across the bank.

0:40:36.6 JR: Sure, it might be all you could share on this kind of call.

0:40:42.5 JC: And if you don’t mind me adding my 2 cents too, because I was on the platform for seven years and led our digital transformation efforts at the bank, and I agree, Laura, 100%, it has to start at the top. If our executive team, if our CEO wasn’t leveraging those dashboards, I’m not sure anybody underneath at the management board level would have. So it does start with executive sponsorship. And then what we did, Jeff, just so you know we created a digital transformation office and we had champions in each business line. So those champions did two things. One, they helped train and help people get adopted and comfortable with the platform, but they also gave feedback two ways. So you know that in each different area, your team members wanna provide feedback, Hey, I wish I could do this, or why can’t it do that?

0:41:26.1 JC: And I wanna see this. So we had that feedback mechanism through the champions, through the digital transformation office, and then we prioritized changes on the platform. And as Laura said, you have to make it easy, ease of use. So once we got that feedback and people realized their concerns or their needs were being answered and met, adoption went up. And then the other thing we did, going back to Laura’s comment about KPIs, we had three levels of KPIs and we communicated them on a quarterly basis. Number one was all about actions and behaviors. It was about how many logins did we have, how many processes did we digitize, how many things we were doing on the platform from a behavioral standpoint. Then we tied that into banker results, sales, long growth, asset growth, deposit growth, etcetera. So how were activities driving results? And then the last measurement was KPIs against our peers, our industry peers. So we took those high-level things that I talked about earlier on today’s call about ROA efficiency ratio, and we compare that to our peers as we continue to transform to see if we were getting better to see if our technology was enabling success. So those were the things that we did at my organization in order to transform and leverage the platform. I hope that helps.

0:42:41.3 LS: Yeah, I mean, what he said, I think that that’s kind of, those are the specifics that seem to get traction.

0:42:49.4 JR: Yeah, I appreciate that. That’s super helpful. Thanks, Jim.

0:42:53.9 WK: Awesome. Thank you Jeff. I don’t see any other questions, or comments, but I know it’s always hard to speak up in a format like this. So, I just wanna say thank you again, Jim. Thank you, Laura, for your time today. Thank you for the conversation. Everybody on this webinar will get a copy of this recording and if there was questions that you had, or to Jeff’s point, if you had more kind of in-depth discussions or how do we set up governance, how do we set up change management? We’re thinking about these things on Salesforce and we just don’t know how to tackle them, feel free to reach out. Everyone on this call will get an email. We can follow up and have further discussions on the EMS or Salesforce side. So I just wanna again, say thank you so much for your time today. Thank you much for joining the conversation and we look forward to connecting with you further. So thank you so much everyone.