A tech process one member can’t live without

Ryan J. Pinney likes to joke that he has been conducting business on the internet since before Google was a verb.

Except it’s not a joke. Pinney, an 11-year MDRT member from Roseville, California, has developed a web-based model that has qualified him for Top of the Table 11 consecutive years.

With a staff of 25 to 30 for this part of his business, Pinney generally provides term insurance for families with household incomes between $80,000 and $150,000.

In addition to texts and social media, he sends out millions of emails each month for re-engagement marketing, cross-selling and upselling opportunities. “We look a lot different than the typical MDRT member,” said Pinney, whose team includes full-time programmers, designers and user-experience experts to ensure websites, quoting tools and mobile apps look and operate properly. “We look a lot more like a large corporation or maybe one of the direct marketers.

“As the marketplace has become more crowded with people trying to do the same thing, we’ve had to maintain our edge and advantage by pursuing new technology and new ways of doing business.”

One way Pinney does that is by using Rocketchat. Like the popular program Slack, Rocketchat allows employees to communicate on shared internal threads. Unlike Slack, Rocketchat is open-source software that can be built into a CRM and phone system.

By adding it to all existing platforms in his practice, Pinney ensures his team will use the program, which prevents the irritation of reply-all emails. In Rocketchat, countless emails are replaced by chat streams divided into well-organized rooms, with more responses viewable much faster and the ability to see items you are tagged in.

Pinney finds the program so effective that he has put his whole family on it to manage all communication without jumping between text, email and social media. It’s an efficient way to establish a private chat group where, for example, his son in college can also share documents if needed.

See another must-have item for Pinney in the Round the Table story “Find the tech, establish a process”