When Broadshire Risk Partners began its digital transformation journey, Salesforce seemed like the obvious answer. It had the name recognition, a reputation for flexibility, and widespread adoption in other industries. The promise? A powerful, all-in-one CRM that could scale.
But six months in, that promise started to unravel.
Salesforce is a general-purpose CRM, and in our experience with insurance agencies, it often requires significant customization to support policy-driven workflows. And as Broadshire tried to map renewal cycles, policy types, and producer activity onto a CRM designed for tech or retail, they found themselves running up costs, delays, and mismatched workflows:
- Custom development just to manage basic policy lifecycles
- Expensive add-ons for texting, email marketing, and e-signature
- Complex integrations for syncing with Applied Epic and AMS360
- Training content was not tailored to the insurance-specific roles of CSRs and account managers, according to Broadshire’s experience.
Multiple analyst studies estimate that CRM implementation failure rates range from 50% to as high as 70%—including industry summaries suggesting Gartner observed a 50% failure rate—while some reports indicate figures up to 55–75%.”—especially when deep customization is required.
Broadshire also learned that aligning Salesforce with the nuanced roles of producers, CSRs, and account managers required much more than field mapping. It required a rethinking of the CRM’s core objects—accounts, contacts, opportunities—which pushed the team into a cycle of meetings, rewrites, and workarounds.