PegaWorld 2025: CRM Redefined: Innovation, Insight, and Value

PegaWorld 2025: CRM Redefined – Innovation, Insight, and Value

Thank you all for coming. Thank you all for being here at PegaWorld. I hope you are having a wonderful conference and thank you for choosing this session. I know it's a tough choice. There are a lot of great sessions to choose from and you made a wise choice. This is a great session. You're going to have some wonderful insights, great innovation. Um, and whether you're here for innovation or insights or just to get over your post-lunch food coma, you're in the right place.

I'm Ram Nagarajan, director of engineering at Pegasystems for the sales, automation, robotics and Process Mining products. I'm thrilled and honored to be your host for this session this afternoon. Now, let's take a moment. Let's imagine you're part of a global sales organization. You're juggling complex tools, rigid tools. You're working with various complex workflows, data scattered everywhere.

You're pulling it from various places where closing a deal feels like solving a Rubik's Cube blindfolded. What if I were to tell you that there's one company who have turned this into a fine tuned sales engine that runs smoother than your favorite playlist? Sounds too good to be true. Well, you're in for a treat. We have these two gentlemen from InterSystems, a company that's pioneering in health tech space.

They are here to share their story of how they transformed their global sales organization into a fine tuned machine that's generating revenue for them. Um, Um, I'll just take a minute to introduce them. We have, uh, Corey Ledin. He's the director of CRM at InterSystems who blends technical innovation and engaged leadership to deliver excellence. He owns and manages the entire CRM suite of applications for InterSystems globally.

We also have Kanishk Mittal, principal technical specialist at InterSystems, who turns complex business needs into scalable, data driven solutions to strategic vision and technical leadership. He manages the tech stacks and build solutions for the marketing and sales teams. So let's give them a round of applause. Next slide. So in the next 40 minutes we're going to be going through InterSystems. Their story, their challenges, some of their transformation journey.

And we're also going to talk about some real results followed by a quick Q&A session. And let's make this interactive. We have a small audience, so if you guys want to sit in the front, get comfortable. And if you want to ask any question at any point in time, raise your hands. We will try to accommodate your question through the through the session. With that, I'll hand it over to you, Cory, and welcome. Thank you. Um, I guess we'll sit down. Um, thank you for the warm welcome.

And good afternoon, everyone. Um, again on the food coma and everybody probably still at lunch. So this will be a very intimate session, which I think will be great. Uh, we'll be open to answer a lot of questions. Anything that you can come up with and think about.

And during our journey here, um, for me, Vegas, uh, I'm up on the stage at the MGM in Vegas, I would think when I was a kid, when watching David Copperfield, uh, you know, disappear the Statue of Liberty, I thought maybe I should start with a trick or something and do some magic. But I think that's going to be highly embarrassing for me. And I think all my tricks that I learned as a kid, like a card trick, probably won't go over too well.

so I'll just take this chance to, uh, to just, you know, enjoy the moment and talk about our journey and really hopefully share some really good insights for everybody in the room. Ganesh, thanks everyone for taking the time. I'm Kanishk and I'm excited to walk you through our transformation journey. I'm going to start off with a quick one minute video of InterSystems and that that really captures who we are as a company. Success relies on preparedness.

Businesses can't wait for answers that could change their trajectory. Organizations can't wait for insights that could eliminate disruptions, and healthcare providers can't wait for life saving information. It all comes down to a single moment. And for any organization managing huge amounts of disparate data, there's no in between. You're either ready for the critical moment or you aren't.

With InterSystems, you're already ready for providing the right treatment, or meeting new regulations for sudden swings in the market, or supply chain disruptions for real time applications, with lives and livelihoods hanging in the balance. For all of it, InterSystems is the most trusted solution in data unification because when the stakes are high, the situation is tense and data is complex. You need to be ready for anything. Thanks a lot. It's cool. Excellent.

So this really this video is very powerful. I think it really illustrates the company's passion. And dare I use the slogan, the power behind what matters. And that really does impact, um, the world we live in, whether it's for our company, really, whether it's a small bug or a large bug or a crisis. It's really important to us that our customers are successful because literally lives depend on it.

Um, when it comes to reliability and technology, um, InterSystems is really a pioneer and a foundation. And you say InterSystems, you're like, Who is InterSystems? That comes up a lot because we are really behind the scenes. We're not really up front, something we're trying to work on and highlight. Right. I think this gives us an opportunity today, but really it reflects in our culture and I think the culture, and we'll speak on it a second, has really born from that.

That's where we started and we've kind of grown into that and we really want to highlight that. So finish. Thank you. So a little bit about our history InterSystems was born out of the healthcare data revolution. Our founder, Teddy Reagan, was at MIT during the early early days of, um, the computer age. So in the 70s. And he was around when mumps, which is the mm, utility multi- purpose system, um, a language built for medical records, was first pioneered by researchers.

And so since that time, InterSystems has been at the cutting edge of innovation and healthcare data. To give you some context. 1 billion patients is data sits on our database that's larger than any other database out there. Um, and here's, um, here's a here's a short blurb. So we launched Caché, which is what the database was called initially, and then we added more and more modules to keep up with, with modern times.

So one of the big things that our database offers natively is interoperability, which as we know is super important in healthcare. Um, and our flagship products include Iris and Telecare, Iris for health, um, and Telecare is our own EMR that we sell internationally exclusively. And Healthshare is is kind of like a data sharing network. So to give you a sense of what that does.

Imagine you see a specialist, um, somewhere in the city for a certain chronic condition, and then they flag certain symptoms, symptoms for follow up for your primary care physician. That data needs to be sent securely from your specialist to your primary care doctor, and Healthcare facilitates that exact application. So where are the engine behind some of the world's most powerful applications? Applications that cannot fail. Um, and we're not just large in the healthcare sector. We're also reliable in in the financial sector, in logistics, in government, because some of these properties that our database has, you know, the interoperability, the super low latency, the multi- modal querying, it supports, um, naturally lend itself to applications in these in these very critical sectors. And back to one of the epic, I think one of our largest and longest partners really illustrates, you know, the our commitment to to that what she was talking about.

So and with epic, that is where all the data lies. It's where it's very important that our technology supports that. So yeah. So we've been recognized for excellence by third party vendors, by third party organizations that study different databases out there. Um, you know, I'm sure you've all heard of Forrester and Gartner, and class is actually a little bit Healthcare specific. But again, we've been recognized as as leaders and pioneers by all of these companies.

We really are at the cutting edge. And what matters to us is making sure customers, and by extension, patients, have the best experience possible. Great. That was a great introduction to InterSystems and thank you for that. And let's get to the meat of the session. So specifically you had a transformation journey to transform your CRM. Um, you used Pega to, to do that. What were some of the business challenges you were aiming to address by this transformation journey?

Can you just take us to that transformation journey and some of the business challenges you wanted to solve? Yeah. So we we realized that our tools actually did not reflect the way InterSystems approaches sales. You know, our people were adapting to the tool rather than the other way around. You know, as we said, we're very passionate about making sure that patients have a great experience. For us, sales is not a numbers game.

We don't call mail hundreds of thousands of people hoping someone responds and then that turns into an opportunity. We go to hospitals, to operating rooms, and we work with doctors, and we see where the bottlenecks in their workflows are and really, really try to solve for that. And so our previous solution definitely did not support that. We were trying to force it on to our sales folks, and that just was not working out.

And we really needed something more than a CRM, something, something like an ecosystem that reflects how our apps actually work. And the last thing is, we just had way too many silos, from process to data to communication, and there was no visibility at all from when we first start a sale. The early stages of a lead to a success story, where our customers really see the value in our products, and that was the big wake up call for us.

Yeah, I think can really hit on it there is that our Salesforce process is very unique. It's truly unique because we're selling a very complex product. It's a it's a Ferrari, right. in the space of technology. So you can't. It's not like it's hard to move that into like a SaaS space and try to sell something over the counter. It's really. We really work with our partners.

We call a lot of our customers partners because we partner with them along their journey to try to get the best out of the out of the systems.

Another big one is that for us, having a single pane of glass view of our customer across the organization really to, you know, hone our passion for the customer and understand their journey, but not for just current customers, but for the prospects, because it literally starts from the first conversation with us that we want to build that relationship through the buyer journey. Um, and ultimately about driving customer success.

And it's really about the right data and process to help us achieve that. Lastly, I'll say the change approach also stemmed from our need to kind of move away from that rigid, as Ganesh was saying, Salesforce, which was what we had before. Pega, which was a challenge in itself. Yeah. It's really interesting that you used to have Salesforce and you decided to move to Pega.

And what were some of the key benefits or, or say, pleasant surprises that you encountered with the Pega solution that you didn't have before. So, oh, actually, do. You want to take that one? Yeah, I think first and foremost, we've already chatted about it a little bit and I talked about this with Ram especially. It's the culture. Um, Pega just felt like the right fit from the beginning. I know we have some original echoes in the room.

Um, and like others that we've worked with from the beginning, and really, it was that strive for customer success that Pega has a similar structure in their hierarchy, the way they do business, their company culture really aligned with us and in a big way. I think the flexibility on this, and I'm sure Nish will touch on this more deeply in the technical side. We needed we needed to be on prem at the time in Pega fully supported it.

And while Salesforce didn't, Pega was very adaptive and their workflow processes and SLAs are Pega as bread and butter. So it made a lot of sense to to work that are very specific and unique sales process into that workflow and SLA Layer Cake as Alan showed up, and they were also willing to grow with us as a partner and understand that we're we're a bit of a unique customer, and they were very open to working with us. So. Yeah, I mean, flexibility is the biggest part of it, right?

As as Cory said, we're a very different company. We're completely private. Right. So in contrast to what a lot of companies have, where, you know, at the end of the quarter, you're rushing to finish projects. You know, our founder says, hey, you know, you take the day off at the end of the quarter, come back the next day, work harder, build a good product. Right. There's a lot of emphasis on long term incentives. He personally is also a really big philanthropist.

You know, Teddy Reagan has given hundreds of millions of dollars to healthcare research at MGH. So he really, really cares about the cause here. And our sales process reflects that. Our sales reps are in the operating room with physicians in trauma rooms trying to see what the what the bottlenecks are, how we can make sure that we're doing the best we can to help patients, make sure we have the best outcomes. And a rigid process does not reflect that.

And so Pega flexible approach really kind of lended itself into that model that, that we use. Um, and it's adaptive architecture was was another big key point. So everything is structured as a case type in Pega. You're truly highlighting the power of Pega Sales Automation as well as the underlying platform and the situational Layer Cake, which is all something that we live and breathe every day. So I'm glad that you're making full use of all of those. No, we really are right.

I mean, the case types were such a game changer because, you know, everything from a lead to a renewal is structured as a case type in Pega. And that lets us track every all the activity and all the outcomes with with 100% traceability. Um, you know, our culture is very collaborative. We've jumped on calls with Pega engineers, and we appreciate that because that's something we do with our partners as well. Um, and their engineering teams, you know, don't just kind of hand off solutions.

They don't say, oh, you know, we're not an implementation. They'll they'll get into our environment and help us out, you know, see what's happening. Um, and citizen development with Pega is just isn't a theoretical concept. I mean, we have someone in the room here who can go into Pega and make changes that traditionally in tech, only people from a CS background can do. And that's really, really powerful. It helps us utilize our entire team across the spectrum.

Um, and the time to iteration is so much faster when everyone can jump on, everyone can ideate, everyone can make changes as they need. It's truly very powerful. This is all really, really great. Um, what were some of your timelines for this entire transformation journey? Uh, yeah. Great. So for this one, sorry, I'm not going to dry mouth a bit. Um, I think that's really important. The timeline. We kind of broke up with Pega from the beginning.

We were able to actually go around the world and kind of do requirements building with all the different teams, and we really took an agile approach. I think Pega does this as well. We define stories with our users, listen to their needs and kind of build the CRM with the end goals in mind, right? We were able to leverage the Pega capabilities very early in the migration.

Because of this agile approach, we were able to build with the cases and kind of launch and find that those, uh, those processes that they really wanted to target and go after them really early. Um, the 20 2122 drive was really trying to really we started to hone the system. And I do want to give a shout out to the Pega consultants, and soft serve is in the room as well.

Big, big help in working with us and making sure we got the right direction and, you know, leverage the software and understand the technology. Um, but then even I think I really want to highlight 23. This is just recently went around the world again, and this time we kind of with the, you know, with the advent of our latest sales process, with new leadership, we were able to revisit the core process and actually leverage the case types, the opportunity case type we had before.

But build on top of it. And can I use the Pega inheritance structure and to clearly, um, you know, based on the original process, but actually align with medpac customer variable outcomes and other things that we kind of targeted with the new sales process. And this really gave us a the ability to know our customer better along the journey and anticipate and react to issues and the problems rather than, you know, run into them later. So, yeah, if you have anything that's. That is really awesome.

Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest hits we've had is that, you know, we're on the agile methodology as well. And so we can roll out updates every couple of weeks in traditional development, you know, fixing a bug can take up to a month. But in Pega, you know, you go under the tracer, you go to the live UI and you can you can immediately triangulate where the issue is. And that makes a big difference because users know you care about them.

It's it's unprecedented that someone reaches out to you, you know, as a developer, and you're able to get back to them and say, hey, you know, by the next release, which is usually every two weeks, this bug won't be an issue anymore. So that really makes an impact. And if it's critical and if it's something impacting business, the the ability of Pega and I really I kind of thought of this in the moment, the rule sets and the way you could actually bring rules out.

If there's a bug that we introduce into the system or there's something that a flaw that comes up. Like a backup plan you. Could easily pull out. You know, David from our team, call it to David can go into Pega. And even if we're like on PTO, you could say, well, the bug just happened. He'll check the Jira, he'll check the number, he'll go look at the rule set that matches that and say, well, I think they pushed a change in. I'm going to just back it out for now.

And yes, that new feature comes out, but we now solve the problem. And that is a no developer. That is a support. My support manager is able to do that. So I wanted to. Highlight. Really highlight that one. That's really, really powerful. Cool. So I know you had a transformation journey. Transformation is not always easy. It takes a lot of change management and stakeholder buying. Winning through the resistance in your organization, the end users adoption.

How do you drive adoption across your global sales organization, especially when you're talking several countries and disparate teams? I think I'll have to take this one. I mean, I don't know if I should tell the story, but I was in Dubai talking to a sales rep, and we were struggling with some adoption there. And he said to me, um, you know, to me, CRMs are like crucifixes to the devil. Um, and I kind of get that right. Um, I get it right. In most cases, it's a chore for them.

You're putting in all this data, you're not getting any value out of it. And that's that's, I think, what set our rollout apart. You know, we showed them this, that this wasn't just a vanilla CRM. You know, it was inside an automation and a real, real reduction in mechanical work, right? And we kind of backed this up with with an in-house data lake that unifies activity from all our systems. And that's kind of when it clicked.

Because, you know, that's when they saw the value that, that, that this had, you know, they could go and see what stages sales were failing at. They could see where the time to value could be improved, and they could really use the data they were putting in, as opposed to just putting it in for the sake of it. Um, and the biggest difference when you're trying to sell someone on something is you need to show value first as opposed to after.

Because if you try and hammer people in, it's never going to work. The quality of data won't be good, compliance won't be there. Um, and no one will be happy. Yeah, I think you hit it on the head. He took all my talking points because he hit it on the head there.

Um, but really, to to address the resistance, show the need, highlight the data value, but also in the process and also in the win loss analysis in order to come back to the rep and really understand how they can close deals faster, and we'll touch on it with the challenges. But like the pipeline velocity, all these really good things that sales see value from. But also I think a big, big one again can touch on it. The time back to sales. Sales don't want to be entering data.

They don't want to be in the CRM. They have their old school Rolodex and even newer, newer salespeople still have that same mentality. So they really don't want to be in a CRM. And if you can make the CRM just be a part of the process, something they just kind of go into aligns very much with their sales process, then that value outcomes. And I think a big one as well, management visibility into the state of the business, you know, driving change through leadership.

And also just one quick example of I think in the UK they had um, they were building these nice they were nice presentations going through each of our customers and like what the state of the, the business is now. They just drive that out of Pega. And they saved over, I think, 50 hours between all the salespeople in the UK just on that routine that they were doing.

Now they just pull up Pega and they go through their list and we have a nice view and we use a dashboard and we save them a ton of time. We give them that, some of that value, we get them to go and enter some data to show it. So cool. I mean, in fact, that's a nice segue to what I was really trying to get next. The crux of any transformation story is key outcomes and real results for your real users, your company, and your bottom line.

Your, uh, or in this case, top line because you're in the sales operations. Can you shed light on some of the tangible metrics or some real life examples on what you capture as KPIs for proving to this audience that your transformation was indeed a success? And then I'll jump into. Yeah. I mean, to just kick it off, right. You have activity velocity, pipeline progression, um, you know, all sorts of touchpoint analytics across the entire life cycle of a case.

And the biggest ROI is just better decisions, right? When you have a lot of data that allows you to see where things are failing, where there's room for improvement, um, and this helps us be proactive instead of reactive, right? We can see that there's a certain stage in the opportunity where a lead may be handed off from, say, marketing to sales, where there's a gap in communication. And that's where a lot of deals are falling off. Right.

And so then we can go and proactively remediate that instead of wait for a big deal to fall through the cracks. And then we're trying to figure out what happened there. So and when you pull up the challenges all right let's go. So pipeline velocity this is a big one that we saw. Um, a pretty big number from 30% increase in deals closed in 2024. And this number is definitely growing in 2025. And what you see here really is and it's not just about the wins, it's about the losses.

I think this is really important. And a lot of salespeople have trouble with this. And I think when you're working with your salespeople, letting them understand that closing a loss is very, very important and they shouldn't just hold on to that opportunity in Fortuity essentially say, well, it wasn't really a loss. They, they kind of ghosted me or, you know, they wouldn't meet with me or whatever excuse.

You can kind of come up, come up with, put those results in, leverage them in a win loss analysis. But again, big numbers there, silos and gaps. I think just having Pega as a source of truth and connection a few times. But we really have a CRM we call CRM by, and it's a data lake of all of our data together, and that really points people and be able to build analytics off of the truth of, you know, truth.

So all the way to put it, instead of having the salespeople have all these activities and meetings and separate systems, but not only salespeople, but internal applications, other departments, legal, etc.. So Pega is really honed us. Yeah, I mean, sales has a lot of data that everyone can use. You know, sales engineering can use that. Sometimes you get feedback, sales folks get feedback that they can pass on to developers.

And so having Pega consolidate all that data really helped us kind of break down the silos that. Product marketing. Organizations. Yeah. Like all over the place. Yeah, this is a good one. Activity capture. And this is it's up over 600% with our Salesforce. That's a big number. Wow. They did not want to put data in now because of that value driven that we were talking about.

They are really getting there really understanding that their data makes an impact, especially with the advent of AI and what we can go with next steps. Building that out as something they need to put into the system has just been tremendous. And hopefully we see more, more and more of that. And just to kind of clarify, an activity is basically like a touchpoint that anyone in an organization has with a potential lead, right? So that can be going into the Or and seeing what they're doing.

It can be a phone call, a voicemail. But basically having all that data stored helps us make better decisions, sell better. Understand our customer. And I kind of already touched on this. So it's better targeting closed dates closed deals earlier. And for us this is a big one because our sales process originally, and I'll dive into this for a minute, was a very long sales process. We're talking a year or more. It's a long sales. InterSystems because it's very complex deal. It's a very complex product, and you really have to understand and build and, you know, know who you are to to leverage it. And obviously there's a lot of key points along the way. I think with our new sales process Pega, we're able to understand where we are in the process and try to make that a shorter sales cycle. We've had some deals recently closed and within one month, which is just amazing, unprecedented. And yes, sometimes the the things just work, right?

It's just the you have the right meeting. You sit down at lunch with someone and it just ends up being a deal. But, you know, just having a system that can leverage that and understand it is very powerful. So pretty cool. We only we have like seven of these. So we got forecasting and pipeline. That's interesting that I didn't keep I don't know what okay. This is having I don't know what he's doing with the clicker over there. I'm sorry. I'm not sure what's happening, but let's go to the end.

There we go. Yeah. Um, I'll hit on a couple of these real quick forecasting pipeline again. Cadence. I already spoke to a cadence review. Better accuracy. We actually built, um, forecasting module in Pega. It's its own case type. So we were able to leverage that from a SaaS model and kind of bring it into like a real hardcore forecasting module that we're able to review and get the deals through really quickly.

Um, another big one we're still working on globally is defining measurable results, driving KPIs atop a funnel. This is a cross-departmental problem. We've seen this in any company we kind of talk to or my peers is marketing and sales. I don't know what it is, but they just kind. Of don't like each other. They don't like each other a lot. But in this case, it's just we have the underlining goals, right.

So we just need to understand how to facilitate the pass off, get the feedback loop going and understand where we can kind of. Um, it's not just marketing and sales, it's marketing and sales, sales and product, product and engineering. Yes, exactly. There's always. You understand. There's always tension and resistance between these groups. And I totally can relate to that. Yeah. And I know we already hit on change management.

So yeah, that's the kind of the top ones we have more like detailed data. But I didn't want to get into all that. And I think. These are really, really big outcomes. So I mean kudos. Yeah I know so far it's been like a hunky dory story. InterSystems moving away from Salesforce, embracing Pega, embracing all the great features of Pega the culture to us, working closely with you to make you successful and all of that.

That's all great, but I'm pretty sure through the process you would have also had some lessons learned, things you may think about on hindsight, do it a little differently. If there is something that others could probably learn from and and in their own modernization journeys or sales transformation journeys. If you can shed some light on some of the lessons learned. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as I said, um, tech without adoption is just shelfware.

Um, you can build the best system in the world, the best system, the best marketing system. But if the users don't buy in, it's a sunk cost. Um, and we technical folk often kind of struggle with that adoption because we, we have this long term vision.

But I think when someone's in the heat of the things and they have, you know, ten hours of work that they need to squeeze into eight hours, what you need to do is you need to show them value, and you need to show it early because there's no reason for them to do what you want them to do otherwise. Right? So ship small, show value early, and always involve the end users. Get their feedback, make sure they know what you're building out and if you have their participation and if they know how it's going to help them, you won't even have to tell them to adopt it. They will come to you and say, hey, you know, this looks very cool. How do I kind of get involved with this? When are you rolling this new module out? Yeah. And I think, um, a direct lesson learned, I think is from the original. We did the agile approach, right?

We went around, we got the user requirements, but I think the users might not have known exactly what they needed. So I think after our reiteration of the sales process, where we kind of stripped it down to the bones and tried to really hone in to what the end goal was, right. Let us really dive into now an opportunity case type that made sense for us. The other one that we had was good and it worked overall for that kind of longer sales cycle.

But because, you know, in the new version, it just it just makes a lot more sense. And I think a lesson learned is that, you know, maybe pulling back a bit and getting in there earlier would have led to even more success. But I mean, we've had good success, so I can't really complain too much. But also when I think the carrot and the stick, we had some maybe too much carrot at the beginning. But you definitely want to show the value, right? And it's kind of a good there's a combination.

It's very tough and I'm sure everybody sees it of that balance between you need to put stuff in Pega, right? And the value they get out of it. Is it in their comp plans? Is there something involved like that? And finding that right balance, I think earlier is what led to more of those activities coming in later. So yeah. Super. Yeah. So you heard Allen speak today in the keynote and Kerim, there's a lot of revolution going on with the advent of generative AI.

A couple of years ago and it's been, um, going on its waves across all industries. So what are the next steps for you in your transformation journey? What what is InterSystems think in terms of where they want businesses to expand, the use of Pega or AI or any other tech? Yeah. So we're we're actually migrating to the cloud in a few weeks. Um, and that's a big milestone for us. Um, we're really looking forward to using the AI features we saw Coach and Knowledge Buddy.

We have a very large sales force, and our support team does a fantastic job, but we're a lean company and I think that's where these agents can. Really say Salesforce. You mean your salespeople? Yeah, salespeople. Sorry. You can't use that word here. No pun. Intended. I use it, no pun intended. Um, our Pega force. Our Pega force? Yeah, we have a large P&G force, and we get a lot of questions. And our support team is fantastic, but we are lean.

And so these agents can really help us save time with repetitive questions. Um, we're also building a mobile first experience, um, hopefully using Constellation. And so our reps are global and they need access to Pega anytime, whether they're at a conference and talking to a lead or whether they're on a flight trying to see what opportunities they need to work on. Um, and that's going to be big for us.

And then the last thing is that, you know, we've we've really taken the, the AI Blueprint features that you're rolling out. And I'm interested in seeing if there's some potential for replacing, um, some more third party apps we have in consolidating our stack within Pega. Okay. That's sounds cool.

I know we discussed discuss quite a bit and of your sales transformation journey, I'm pretty sure there are audience who want to ask some questions, but before we just get there, there's just one thing I wanted to ask. If there's one lesson that this audience should take away before they leave this room, what is the one thing that they should really take away from? I think that's. InterSystems. I think it's easy. Um, for me, it's the people hiring good people, you know?

Seriously, because you think from the advent of AI and actually, I think Alan or Kerim stole what I was going to say, pretty much he stole it earlier was literally, you have this all this great technology, but you don't have the people support it and push it in the right direction, leverage it and push back at you. Then it's just not going to happen. So I think don't forget the people in our in our move to AI and I think we already run very lean.

But that's that's where I think the takeaway should be for everybody. Just always keep the back of their mind as you adopt and leverage that technology, You know, that's a big part. And obviously another key takeaway is use sales automation for Pega. Did you point at Kanishka and say hire good people? I did hopefully. Hopefully that was hopefully. Yeah, I mean, the biggest thing for me was realizing that, you know, transformation doesn't start with technology or tools. It starts with trust.

You know, I was a physics and math major, very number driven. And in my head, when there's a good solution, people should just adopt it. But obviously that's not the case. You know, the world is not an ideal place, and you need to build trust with people for them to buy into what you're doing. Um, build for your users, iterate fast and stay human focused. Cool. With that, we'll take some questions. Yes. Thank you both. Great presentation and very insightful.

I was wondering when you were making the decision to migrate the platforms, how do you sell the decision to the C-suite or to the stakeholders? How do you make this decision? I think you just have to. Again, it's almost like the well, for us, it's very unique, I guess. Um, our, our C-suite and our hierarchy of the company is very interesting. And I think in our case, the selling came for time back to people.

I think a big part for the C-suite is proving that you can actually give the time back to all the people that you work for, prove the value there, because that will lead to more more sales, more time to sell, especially for the sales for salespeople. Anyway, um, I think overall though, um, proving that. It's clear, right? I mean, our previous sales process was too mechanical. It wasn't working out. A lot of fields, just too much.

I think the proof in that value to them was really just highlighting, um, the simplicity of the process and alignment, I think alignment with our customer, we're very adaptive forward. Right. Um, I mean, it's again, as I said, we're a very unique company, different sales process. And so when you see something that's adaptable, um, and it has a good foundation that you can build on and customize on. Um, there wasn't too much selling needed. Yeah. Yeah. And we can talk more if you want. Afterwards.

Great. Thanks. Yeah. A lot of questions. A lot of questions. Okay. Feel free to ask other questions. Okay. How large was the team that was managing the change, but also the whole migration? Before you answer the question, let's. Let's see. Why don't you take a guess? I really don't know. Ballpark. Ballpark. I don't know. Let's put her on the spot. 2020. 2020. We had three. Just three. Three people. So? So when I say lean, I'm talking very, very, very lean.

So we actually have on the CRM team here 11 people, half support and three main devs. And you know, that's what I talk about when I say lean. Um, it took obviously. Okay. So it took more than just my team to to do that from the beginning. Uh, we expanded and worked with sales and other in different teams, in different departments. Our tech services team, we're kind of like an all hands kind of jump on company. So even though it was a very small core team, we leveraged other people for sure.

But it was I mean, especially now with Pega, I think you can and maybe some people are scared of this actually is you really don't need a lot of people. Especially on the cloud, right? I mean, a lot of what we did was because it was an on premise implementation on the cloud. I think you don't need tech services. You don't need someone who's going in and setting up certificates for you.

All you need is someone who understands Pega, um, and you know, you can you can find that person, kind of have them build on top of, say, to adapt to your sales process. So that low code really saves a lot of manual work that people put in. And that's what allows us to run super lean. We did obviously, like I mentioned before, we leveraged soft serve and Pega consultants, but only a few, and their expertise kind of helped us along the way.

We didn't need to hire 20 consultants, we just needed 2 or 3. Yeah, 2 or 3 to help our small team work efficient. Well. Thank you. Great. Just one last. I'm sure. We're. Filling the microphone. You mentioned that your activity activity capture, you increase like, I don't know, 600, 600%. Yeah. How do you make it? Just by changing the culture or it was something automated. It was a combination. Will touch a little as well. But we kind of went out and said, how do you capture activity?

And with Pega, it's the adaptive and kind of modular base we could build one. One example. I'll definitely share this as a weekly update. We added Actions Weekly Update, and in that weekly update using a nice UI module, there is just a couple of fields next steps, most recent sales summary, and a little checkbox to say if you want to make this into an activity. Now reps can just go in there once a week and just put put that information in and it literally makes an activity.

It it updates two different fields and it goes directly into dashboards and reports that management look at. So literally they can just go into their screen once a week or even more and just see all the weekly updates for all of our current opportunities. Yeah. So very concrete example is we spoke to reps and we said, hey, you know, on your in your one on one touchpoints with your managers, how are you kind of showing them the value you're creating. Right.

And a lot of them said, hey, we're doing this manual work in Excel. And I said, hey, if you just update this in Pega, you can build out a custom view that shows all the most recent updates you've put in, and then you can just sit down with your manager and say, okay, I have 20 open opportunities. These are the updates. It's a lot faster. It allows you to see what's happening, gives you a bird's eye view yourself. Um, and the resistance just vanished, right?

They they just needed to see the value, see concretely that it would save them time, make their life easier, make their manager's life easier. And that was it. So yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Different tools like outlook add in other things that Pega offers helped us kind of we evolved with that and we're trying to connect any type of integration we can with tools. They use. Email, phone calls, chats. Email, phone calls. We're moving to teams and we're wondering how that might help. We have native.

Teams. We have teams for calls. We had we had Mitel before and now we're moving to teams for calls. We use teams all the time, so we're really happy to hear that.

With the connection with teams, we're able to pull in a lot of this activity and I think even more once we get to the AI is we're hopeful we're going to open it up and really allow outlook to just feed in for sentiment, driving and all the things that say automation and gen and coat well as a coach or as they change the name now it's agent. Agent. Yeah. And one more thing, um, one feature, um, of Pega that that really sort of was a was a big hit was how easy it is to build integrations. Right.

You can build a service test or a connect test, and you can pull in data from different systems of record. Um, all you need is that they have an open API or a set of webhooks. And so that also really increased activity capture because obviously Salesforce use, you know, a dozen different tools.

And if they can just keep their current workflow and you can pull all that activity information into Pega, that makes it a lot easier for them, gives them that source of truth, that single pane of glass that we keep talking about. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. So. Yeah. Please. Yes. Hello. I have two questions. The first one is about the complex product. You said that you have a complex product. And talking about complexity.

What is your experience working with multiple clients that have different processes to build the same, or to do the same task? Because, you know, sometimes we we belong to a bank that is running operations in Central America. And we have six different countries, and maybe we want to do the same process, but in each country is different because regulations or maybe culture. So how do you manage that with the CRM in Pega. So that's where you can really use inheritance, right?

You can have a parent level opportunity with many different case types. And then you can kind of instantiate those with only certain stages that certain countries need, right. So for instance, if you're implementing in Europe and you need an additional GDPR compliance agreement or something of that sort, you can add that to your workflow and have that remain specific to Europe.

But the but the parent opportunity can have the steps which are common across the globe, which your company always does, the implementation steps. We also have type we have opportunity types. So in our case with our comp like you said complex. And we only have a minute. So we could talk about this after um is having like a partner type end user type and like CCN, RFP, RFI type of opportunity different types of right on the same opportunity case.

Because when we're selling our complex product, usually it involves an RFP and we have to, you know, we go in against other platforms and. Sometimes. There's extra legal agreements you need to sign. So again the inheritance. You can able to line. Up. Yeah. You have the parent case. You can have all of these as children. You can really leverage that that object oriented structure. Yes. Yeah I mean I think we are kind of almost on time.

I have another one and it's a small it is really short and sorry. Sorry. And the other one is, uh, about when you, when you choose Pega, uh, one of the options that you choose is that you want to go on premise right on prem and. Initially. Yes. Initially. Yes. And that's why you, uh, Salesforce didn't do that for you. Right. But right now you are migrating to the cloud. Yes. Why that change of direction? Trust. Yeah, we. We.

Are, um, the senior security people at our company had to sit down with Pega at their offices, and they came back to us, and they said. It blew us away, essentially. So when it comes to security trusts on the cloud, it was a big thing for us. We're healthcare technology company. We understand that. And it was like moving to the cloud was a big hurdle. Big a lot of he pushed really hard. We went to the C-suite, we went to the security.

We met with Pega, and Pega was super generous with their very, uh, you know, sense of team, of security. They all visited us in person. We we had offices across the street from each other, actually. So we all went over there and, um, just they blew us away. They blew us away. The value add for the cloud was clearly using, you know, AI and agents, which is, which is exceptionally hard to implement on prem. Um. The speed at which you get features with the cloud, that's also. Yeah, that's.

A big one. But all that is really, really good. But I'm telling you, the reason why they agreed to it is because of the trust with Pega. That's it. I mean, yes, this is all amazing stuff. We want to get there, but we wouldn't have even they wouldn't have allowed us unless they sat down with us and they showed that they could support us that way. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

And, um, in case you didn't know, Pega Sales Automation has been, uh, leading in the Gartner Critical Capabilities Report for four years in a row, beating Salesforce, beating Microsoft Dynamics, beating Oracle CRM. So if you want to learn more, please come to our booth and check it out. We are in the innovation hub. Um, once you get past the lounge, if you look to the right, you should see the sales automation booths and we should be able to help you there. I'll be there.

We'll talk about all the features, integrations, email, outlook, teams, zoom, whatever you want. We'll show it to you. It'll be there the whole time too. We'll also showcase some of the cool features that is coming out in the next release. So thank you. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you all for coming.