From Data to Trust: Tory Pachis on Mastering CRM

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Torrey Packus, CMO of Amico Mutual Insurance Company. Based in Lincoln, Rhode Island, Torrey is a seasoned insurance executive with nearly a quarter century of industry experience.

0:39Corey oversees the department's five functions, marketing data science, ED and platform, branded comms, operations and project management, and digital experience. He joined the company in 2020 as VP of marketing and has since led a brand renaissance, which we'll get to soon. That work includes the implementation of a new advertising agency of record and the refreshing of Amika's logo and brand platform. He's also pushed the brand to pursue larger and more impactful branding opportunities to build name recognition. For example, the jersey packs, the now infamous jersey patch if you're a sports fan, on the Boston Celtics jerseys.

1:17And the naming rights to Providence, Rhode Island's 13 ,000-seat arena, now known as the Amica Mutual Pavilion. Torrey holds a BA in journalism and an MA in marketing communications from the University of Connecticut. He and his wife, Stacey, have four children, Sophia, Christian, Jaden, and Rosie. And when he's not at work, you can find him on the sidelines coaching his children's basketball games or serving the community through his involvement with a company called Foster Forward, a nonprofit that aims to empower lives impacted by foster care. Torrey Packus, my newfound brother from another mother, excuse me, thank you for joining the show.

1:55Thank you, Steve. Thank you for reading that long bio. So it's great to be here to play back. But it's a pleasure to be here. I should get paid by the word. Yeah, that is a lengthy one. I got to figure out a way. Maybe I can use AI to find a way to condense that. You know, but you've done so many amazing things. I didn't want to shortchange you. Like, no. You got it. So I wanted to start and give the audience some background on you. Now, I know your whole career, right, has been in insurance. Correct me if I'm wrong. From Hanover to Travelers to Nalameka, correct? Travelers to Hanover. Sorry, I got it backwards.

2:30So talk to me or talk to us about, obviously, you like the industry, insurance. What's kept you in this industry? Yeah, it's an interesting story. And I think like many people in the insurance industry, I didn't set out to be here for a career. I kind of stumbled into it. In fact, growing up in Connecticut, a lot of the insurance capital, Harford was the insurance capital of the world at one point. Your parents either work for the state or one of the universities or typically an insurance company in Hartford. And I swore I was never going to work for insurance. That's an old kind of stale industry.

3:07I wanted to be in advertising, marketing. I wanted to be a journalist. And I wanted to live and work in a big city. But I was convinced by a friend to join him at a job fair in Hartford. And I went there with one resume crinkled up in my pocket. And I ended up having a conversation with a recruiter at Travelers who talked to me about a leadership development program. And I was just finishing up my master's at UConn. And the rest is history. I mean, that was 1999. And accepted my first job there and been in the industry since for over a quarter of a century. What was the first role? So it was a leadership development program in the personal insurance space.

3:45The first role was I was sent to Knoxville, Tennessee, where they have a business center based in an old potato chip factory at the time. And it was actually incredible. For a year, I did many rotations, about six to eight weeks in every aspect of the business. I'm talking from the mailroom, underwriting, customer service, even got licensed as an insurance agent. So I had to pass my exams. and the most dreaded rotation was sales when I was actually hearing the beep on the phone and I had to sell policies. But looking back, I really think that first year in the industry gave me an incredible perspective of what it takes to protect people with this industry and just how many people it takes to bring a policy to life.

4:30I think it, I don't want to speak for you, but to me, there's a two-pronged effect of that. It forces you to learn all the different moving parts. But now, looking back, it gives you that appreciation. 100%. Yeah. It was forced rotations. But at the end of the day, it gives you perspective, appreciation, and also gives you a sense of what do I want to do with the rest of my career? I've experienced six to eight different roles here. What can I see myself doing for the future? And it wasn't until my last role in marketing where I said, this is really interesting things. I can work with, at the time, independent agents to help them sell more business in a B2B fashion.

5:08How often do you find yourself, Tori, looking back or when you're in your day-to-day and falling or not falling, calling upon that time spent doing all these different roles as you wear the marketing hat now? Does that ever kind of enter your consciousness, so to speak? Yeah, I often think about my career. First of all, I've been incredibly blessed to have touched so many aspects of the business and worked for so many incredible leaders. I don't often reflect about those specific roles, but I do think all the time about the thousands of people that I've encountered in this industry. Both, you know, three companies now that I've worked for and, you know, the agents or distribution that often represent these companies.

5:52Just an incredible, you know, the insurance industry has some incredible people and it is a people business. And, you know, it's at an interesting, we're at sort of a tipping point in our industry where there's, I think it's around 5 million people that work in the insurance category. And we're facing a pretty incredible retirement cliff in the next five years. I had someone call the industry male, pale and stale at one point. And I think it's right for some disruption and there's some changes coming as over a third of the industry could potentially retire in the next five years. Amiga has been around over 100 years, correct?

6:27118 years this year. Did I read right though in terms of an awareness? It's really low or was and that's part of this transformational journey you're on? Yes. In fact, interesting tidbit here. For the first 90 or so years of our existence, the only way you could get an Amica policy was to be referred by an existing policyholder, a friend or family member. So we were a referral-only company until about 1996. And the premise there was good risks, good insurance risks, often either have relatives or friends that are also good risk. Birds of a feather flock together. So it was an incredibly successful strategy for the direct company over the first 90 years as it was growing.

7:13And a decision was made by the leadership many decades ago to expand and open it up. And that's when the company first started advertising. So the good news is we still have this incredibly loyal customer base. And there's a lot of multi-generational families that we have that date back to those referral days. In a lot of ways, many customers still see us as a referral-only company. And when I got here, one of the first things that our team did was really trying to understand what's our brand awareness. And we launched a brand tracker for the first time. And that's when we found that our awareness was in the low single digits, meaning unaided brand awareness within our target audience.

7:55If you ask them to name five insurance companies, less than 2 % at the time would name Amiga in the top five unaided. And why is that important? Well, in our category and in many categories, there's a direct relationship between brand awareness and how often you're quoted for insurance. So when you're up in a category against some very large advertisers, State Farm, Allstate, Progressive, Geico, Liberty, Mutual, we all see the commercials. You got to find a way to sort of stand out and let consumers know that, hey, you know, we're an option too. So that led sort of a, what I call like a brand renaissance or revolution here, where we've invested more in marketing.

8:37We found more balance between our performance marketing channels and brand. And it's really started to pay off. Good segue here, because the next thing I wanted to talk to you about, you know, this is a highly regulated other than healthcare may be the most regulated industry. So you mentioned performance marketing with long-term brand building. That's a tricky balance to do those in any industry, let alone one as competitive and highly regulated as insurance. How do you do that? Yeah, you're right. It is a tricky balance. I think a lot has been made in recent white papers and studies around the trade-offs between brand and performance or brand and demand, I think they have to coexist and live with each other.

9:19What makes it tricky is brand investments don't often show up in the short term. As you know, there are long-term investments that could take months or years to actually show up in results. But what we do know is when you invest in brand and your awareness grows, it makes all of your performance channels more efficient in the long run. So you have to have this sort of patience and ability to play the long game when it comes to brand, which is very challenging because sometimes if you're looking at short-term results, leads, sales, calls, web clicks, and you're not seeing what you expected in terms of plan, it's easy to question, should we shift some of this budget over to the performance channels in favor of short-term results?

10:02But I think you mentioned a highly regulated industry, You have to have patience. You have to study and understand your share of voice in the marketplace. And you have to find out what makes your brand distinct. Sometimes it's not just the media part of it, but it's also the creative storytelling as well that can help a challenger brand like Amika breakthrough. I would add to that. You would also, I'm sure you have this, you have that C-suite support, right? To know this is not going to happen overnight. Yeah, it's, again, another example of how we're really fortunate here. Because I've worked at companies or I have friends at other companies who are in the marketing space, you know, who leaders see marketing as more of an expense versus an investment.

10:46And that's understandable. But I'm fortunate here to have a board of directors, a C-suite, a CFO who understands the value of marketing. But at the same time, we're accountable as marketers to demonstrate the value that we're bringing to the business. And I'm accountable, my team's accountable to translating marketing metrics that don't mean much on a balance sheet to what it means in terms of revenue and market share. So while we are a significant portion of the expense here at Amica, we also take great pride in demonstrating the value that we're bringing to top and bottom line results. Yeah.

11:29And it goes back to what we just talked about, that balance between performance short-term versus the long-term in the brand building and having the understanding to distinguish between the two, but then also to have that support that you need and you have all of that. Exactly. Yeah. And it takes time. It takes time to build trust. It takes time to demonstrate those metrics. We're also fortunate to have our lead director on the board who is a former CMO. That always helps too. That doesn't hurt. When they, you know, when, when all the leaders see sort of the value of what we're doing. Yeah. I want to get a little granular here, specifically on the first one, a question I'll talk to you about is CRM, which every company deals with and not struggles with, but has to, you know, deal with.

12:12And how does Amika use CRM to enhance like retention and policy order engagement? Talk a little bit about your CRM strategy. Yeah. So another investment we made here at Amika is in some of the best technology, I think, in the industry, whether it's Salesforce for CRM or Adobe for web platforms or Guidewire for back office systems. We've got some pretty good technology here, and it's all been invested in the name of customer centricity. I mentioned earlier that one of our greatest assets is our loyal customer base. Our average customer here at Amica stays with us for 18 years. Over 20 % of our customers have been with us for over 30 years.

12:54In the insurance category, those numbers are unheard of. That equals tremendous loyalty, tremendous lifetime value. But it also means we have a responsibility as a company to know them better than any other company can. To know our customers' preferences, to almost anticipate their needs before they even have them. So I think, just back to your question around CRM, we've invested in technology to be able to understand every aspect of our customer, to connect the web experience with the phone experience to understand next best action, life stages, what data, data in terms of what needs they might have to offer the right product market fit for them.

13:36It's so... I was talking to someone the other day about CRM and I said, to me, the most operative word in that acronym and that word is relationship. And you're in a relationship and it's no different than being married to somebody or being friends with somebody. And the longer you're in a relationship, and I'm going to tie this back around to the responsibility you, not you specifically, the brand has to know me. If I'm sticking around for 18 years, you better know me by then and not send me something that isn't relevant to me. Yeah. You know, most people don't really want a relationship with their insurance company.

14:10Right. What's interesting is our mission statement is actually to create peace of mind and build enduring relationships. And there's not too many companies that I know of that want to, insurance companies at least, that want to build enduring relationships with their customers. But yes, you're right. We need to understand all of their needs, their family members, especially because of that multi-generational aspect. And I think we do a really good job of that. Clearly you do. I mean, those loyalty numbers speak for themselves. The numbers don't lie. Okay, let me go to the other side of the brain here, the emotional side.

14:42And I can tell by looking at your ads alone that you're a big believer, as am I, in hitting that emotional side when it comes to creative and just engaging with your customers and prospects. Talk a little bit about why do you think that is so important, not just for your brand and your industry, although maybe I can make the point that it's even more important, but just in general, marketers in general. I believe on my soapbox, the more you can tell stories that hit that emotional in a very true way, the more successful you're going to be. Yeah, 100%. If you look at the insurance category from a creative standpoint, I think there's a pretty consistent theme of the use of humor in advertising.

15:25I'd also add jingles, mascots, spokespeople. And that works for a lot of companies. I think there's been studies in the past that link humor from a tone standpoint with brand recall. So I think that's why a lot of companies use humor. And it's very successful for some companies. For us as a national direct writer with a much smaller budget, even though we're 118 years old company, we consider ourselves a challenger brand up against some of these Goliaths. And, you know, we sort of had this revelation a few years ago with our new agency partner that we can't play the Me Too game, right? We should really look for the white space in the category.

16:08And there's not a lot of carriers that are, you know, talking seriously about insurance, right? Because most people don't think they're going to have a loss or don't want to think about a loss. But we went through an exercise where we listened to sales and service calls for days here. And one of the things that we noticed were our people do such an incredible job. Our frontline sales service claims folks do such an incredible job of listening to consumers and policyholders, to understanding their needs, to take whatever time they need to understand the coverage they're about to buy. And we came out of that call and had a sort of a brainstorming session and said, you know what we deliver is empathy.

16:47We really put ourselves in the shoes of the customer. And our agency and our team came up with this concept of empathy is our best policy as a brand platform. And from there, it's really taken off into this emotive storytelling of what connects all of us together as humans. You know, we're a mutual company, which means we're owned by our policyholders. And if you're policyholders owners, you have to be empathetic to their needs and understand what they want. So, you know, last year we launched our campaign we called More Human that kind of spoke to where we're going as a society, how technology in some ways has made us less connected.

17:26And I think it struck a chord with a lot of people because right now we're over 40 million views on YouTube. And if you sit back and read some of the comments, you know, you have people saying, I sought out this commercial here on this platform because it just spoke to me or I have tears in my eyes or this is my family. So I think there's something about humor. I'm sorry. Humor works for some folks. I think there's something about emotional storytelling that appeals to sort of our system one thinking. And for us as a brand helps us really stand out from the clutter in our category. It really does.

17:59I mean, in fact, I've done I have some experience. In fact, I did some work with a company called System One Research that measures the emotional side of advertising. And it's it's the results, again, speak for themselves. Yeah. I mean, you could appeal to system too. And there's a place for listing out all the RTBs and very rational facts as to why you're better. But there's something about connecting with humans on that emotional level that can also help appeal. Without question. And the further we go down the AI rabbit hole, the more impactful that's going to be, in my opinion. Yeah, I totally agree.

18:33I completely agree. We can't lose sight of the human in the loop. Exactly. I mentioned in the beginning in your bio about the partnership with the Celtics and the patch on the jerseys. Talk to us. How did that all come about? And what results are you seeing from it? How are you measuring that? Yeah, it's a great partnership. We kicked off last summer. And how did it all come about? It was probably two years in the making. I happened to know a sales director who's a friend over there and reached out to me and told me that the incumbent on the patch was moving on and thought it could be a great opportunity.

19:07And there's no secret that we're sports fans here at Amica. I'm a basketball fan. But the reason why the patch itself appealed to us was for business reasons. And I think as marketers, sometimes it's easy to go with things that we like, hobbies, sports, interests that we like. But you have to pull yourself out from a non-biased standpoint and say, what's the business problem that we're looking to solve? And for us, we are a New England-based company and we want to grow our market share in New England. We have tremendous upside here in six Northeast states. Our customer base skews older over the age of 60.

19:46And we want to get and bring and connect with a younger consumer. We want to align ourselves with a brand that's reputable, that we can borrow the equity from, that will help us connect. And oh, by the way, where are all the eyeballs in media? They're going to live sports, right? Because of the fragmentation that's happened with streaming. So you start to put all these business problems or challenges up on a board and you get offered an opportunity like the Celtics. You're like, wait a minute, this checks all the boxes. Half of the NBA audience is under the age of 35. Basketball, you know, behind football is the second most popular sport in the country.

20:21Celtics are coming off of their 18th championship and they're poised to be great for the next few years because they've signed their core. and oh, it'll help us grow in the Northeast. You know, it's a partnership really made in heaven. So that's what led us to syncing up with the Celtics. We signed a five-year deal because we really want to make this work. I spent a lot of time talking to the CMOs at both GE, Linda Boff at the time, and Vistaprint, who were the prior two Jersey Patch sponsors. And I said, you know, what is the value that you got out of this? And separately, they both told me they saw their brand awareness grow significantly to the point where there was very little upside to grow even more at the end of the partnership, which is why they didn't re-up the time.

21:06And just how the organization was first class. So it made a lot of sense for us. In terms of how we're measuring it, this is another example of it will take time to really show the value. We have brand trackers that measure specific Celtics audiences. And we can tell you that pre-post, you know, the announcement, our awareness and consideration are up significantly. What's even more interesting is like brand attributes, whereas maybe we were considered an older company. Now we're seen as more modern and cool in terms of brand attributes and certainly media value. You know, we have tools that help us measure how often that patch is on the screen against how large the audience is.

21:46And, you know, it's already delivered, I'd say 5 to 10x what we're investing in it in terms of media value. And should they get further into the playoffs, that exponentially growth. The impressions must be off the charts. They are. They are. But like I said earlier, like when I first started our conversation here, impressions only get you so far in the boardroom. You have to translate eventually those impressions to sales and revenue growth. And, you know, we've been able to do that even against the season ticket holders of the Celtics audience. We've set up a discount for them. We're able to show lower funnel how this program is working for us.

22:25Share a couple tips, please, for my listeners who may be considering partnering with a sports franchise. You said it took two years, right, for you to get this when it started to when it became an official deal. What are some things you would do differently? What's some advice you would give? It's a good question. I think, well, number one is make sure that there's a lot of opportunities for patches and it's for any deals with the sports team. In fact, after we signed with the Celtics, I think I've heard from every single major sports team across every sport, which is interesting because it's like we're trying to make this one work.

23:01I don't know if we want to spread ourselves too thin with another one. But first of all, you want to make sure you're aligned with a team and an organization that represents your brand values. And that's something we have with the Celtics. Just the rich heritage there is so aligned with Amika's, you know, New England based, really committed to the community. So at the end of the day, a sponsorship or a partnership, you're borrowing brand equity from each other. Right. I would argue that the Celtics are borrowing brand equity from Amika by having it on the patch. So first and foremost is do your due diligence, whether you're partnering with an organization that represents your brand values.

23:36Number two is, you know, make sure that you're solving a business challenge or problem. Don't just sign up with your favorite team or because it's a looks like a great offer on paper. You know, make sure that of your objectives and your key targets, your OKRs, however you frame them up, you know, what does this solve for you? And then maybe a third would be make sure you have the measurement tools in place. I started this conversation by saying you have to be able to translate these into revenue market share sales numbers at the end of the day. So make sure that you have, whether it's a brand tracker or many other tools that are out there to measure performance, because you will get asked, how's it working for you?

24:18Yeah, that shine of that, oh, wow, I can go to a sporting event and meet the players. That wears off. What are you doing for the bottom line? That's right. Exactly. And maybe one other thing I'd throw in in terms of two other things I'd throw in that I forgot to mention around the benefits of the Celtics is the employee engagement aspect of it. But when you're on a Jersey patch, and obviously you mentioned meeting players and hospitality that's included with that, when you can bring your employees or your distribution to some of those and their families, there's a sense of pride and excitement around that.

24:57And it also helps you recruit great talent, too. It lets people know that you're there for the long run and you're investing in the market. So, yeah. Yeah, it's a collateral benefits, if you will. I like that. Exactly. Yeah. Well, also, you know, I should be remiss if I didn't say we're also big audience that we care about is our communities and our investments in nonprofits. So we're partnering with the Shamrock Foundation, which is the Celtics nonprofit arm. And we're going to build an early education center here in Providence to support children in need. There's a lack of quality early education that the Celtics have really shined a light on.

25:33And we're going to partner together to build a center to help children in the area. So love absolutely love that. Okay. Coming towards the end. It's random five time you're sitting down. That's always a good thing. No, these are the five random questions that I just pulled from a very big repository of questions. And it's to have the audience get to know you want a more personal level. Okay. All right. All right. Number one, if you had to give a Ted talk on something outside of your expertise, what would it be? Ted talk on something outside. Let's see. I'm a first generation American. Both my parents immigrated to this country from Greece.