Hillcrest Business Systems was founded in February 2009. We are a value added re seller of the Salesforce Platform. BenefitsGuide is a highly customized version of Salesforce that is specifically designed for the insurance vertical.
Back in December of 2004, I read an article in Fortune magazine about Marc Benioff, Salesforce.com and the democratization of CRM. It quite literally changed the course and direction of my entire life.
Back then Salesforce.com was beginning to create an ecosystem of partner companies that were each building different solutions on the Force.com platform. The idea was that as each new application is published, the value and relevance of the entire platform increases. It was brilliant.
Together they would create thousands of pre-built solutions for many of the most common business needs available. Those applications would be available on demand on the AppExchange. Some of these applications would be simple widgets and others much more extensive solutions designed to run an entire business of one kind or another.
Software as a Service.
I was sold.
We immediately signed a multi-year contract with Salesforce.com. Back then there were no pre-built applications on Force.com specifically designed as an agency management system for the group health insurance broker. To customize the platform for our group insurance broker business we hired one of their top consulting partners.
Immediately, the investment had a tremendous impact on our business. I went from being one of the cogs in the wheel of client service operations to being able to say “look mom, no hands!” Finally, I could focus my efforts entirely on selling new business.
From that point on, every 6 or 9 months we would continue to invest in the application by building out additional functionality. We had a feature request list. Each time someone in our office would say “wouldn’t it be great if….”, we called that a feature request and added it to our list.
Over the last 14 years as we built out our wish list of features, the application has evolved into a world class application that streamlines the process of selling and servicing group insurance from the perspective of the broker, general agent and insurance carrier.
Eventually, we actually spun off a separate company for the purpose of taking the application that was originally built to help us to better manage our own agency and turn it into this product that we now call BenefitsGuide.
BenefitsGuide is the Salesforce platform pre-customized for the insurance vertical.
Today, as an insurance broker, you can have the very same latest and greatest best in the world kind of tools that are being used to manage, track, support and analyze the different operations of the largest and most progressive global enterprise organizations.
You don’t need to customize anything. We have already done that for you. You simply pay a monthly fee for each employee who needs access to the service.
Jason Silverman, Founder
