ABOUT FORGESIGHT
Twenty years of enterprise analytics and CRM.
ForgeSight brings big-company analytics and CRM experience to businesses that need that kind of help, but not a full-time hire.
Why I started this
DON LAPASKY · FOUNDER & PRINCIPAL CONSULTANT
I've spent over 20 years doing this inside companies that took data seriously. Rocket Mortgage, RouteOne, ProQuest, American Advisors Group, and most recently Career Now Brands.
Those companies put real money behind analytics and CRM because they understood both are foundational to growth. I got to build things properly, with good tools and good people, and I learned a lot that you can’t really learn anywhere else.
That's what led to ForgeSight. Smaller companies have the same problems. They just can't get to the same answers, because the people who know this work are either sitting inside a big company or getting billed out at $300+ an hour by a firm marking them up three times over.
I don't carry that overhead, so I can charge a rate that works for a $10M business and still deliver work as good as what a big firm would hand them.
Here's the kind of thing I mean. At American Advisors Group, we were ranking loan officers by conversion rate to decide who got the best leads. The problem was that each loan officer is licensed in different states, and states convert at very different rates. If California leads convert at 10% and a loan officer is at 8%, they're 2 points below average. If Arkansas leads convert at 4% and a loan officer is at 6%, they're 2 points above. A straight ranking put the California loan officer ahead anyway. Once we compared each person to their own states' averages, we found the people who were really our best, routed the most profitable leads to them, and saw a big lift in conversion. That's the lead allocation work behind the $12M+ figure listed below.
I'm in Novi, Michigan. I'll drive out to your office when that's useful, and I'll bring sweet treats when I do. When you email, you'll hear back from me.
— Don
Where the experience comes from
Before founding ForgeSight, I spent twenty years leading analytics and CRM inside companies large enough to invest seriously in both.
Rocket Mortgage · Rock Connections · RouteOne · ProQuest · American Advisors Group · Career Now Brands
Career highlights
Lead allocation strategy at American Advisors Group that added $12M+ in annual revenue
A customer-facing Tableau reporting suite at Career Now Brands that lifted renewal rates 10% (while on staff)
Migration from Cognos to Tableau at RouteOne, saving $100K a year
Churn prediction models at ProQuest that cut cancellations 4%
Lead allocation redesign at Rock Connections: 25% higher conversion, 20% better gross margin
A call center scoring model at Career Now Brands: 15% more contacts, 6% more conversions (while on staff)
How we think about the work
Track what matters
A lot of the Salesforce orgs we inherit were set up by big consulting firms to track ALL THE THINGS. There are fields for everything, most of them are blank, and users complain they have to scroll past empty fields to find what they need. We spend real time up front learning what drives your business and what levers move it, then build around that.
Dashboards should point you to the answer
Some dashboards die because the business moved on, which is fine. Others die because they were built like an analyst's tool, and a sales leader shouldn't have to filter a report six different ways to find what matters. We put the important stuff right on the front page.
Pick tools your team can run
At RouteOne we moved from Cognos to Tableau. Nothing was wrong with Cognos, except it was built for companies with a team of developers to support it, and RouteOne didn't have one. Tableau let the team build reports faster, and people started using data in ways they hadn't before. We recommend tools based on who will run them after we leave.
You should be able to run it without us
Everything gets documented and handed over. If you want to bring it in-house next year, or hire somebody else, you can. We'd rather you come back because you want to.
And a few things we don't do
We'd rather tell you early than halfway through.
If you need a Salesforce developer to write a lot of custom Apex code, we're not the right hire, and we'll tell you that in the first conversation.
What we do is senior admin work: objects, fields, permissions, page layouts, flows, reports, dashboards and AppExchange integrations. Most businesses never need more than that.
Let's talk about what you're working on.
Book a free working session with Don.