If theres anyone who knows how to get traditional businesses to consider new ideas, its Roi Agababa.

Thats why he was recently asked to sit on a panel at SaaStocks touring event held in Tel Aviv. The topic: Sales and Marketing Lessons in getting your SaaS into traditional industries. Insurance distribution is about as traditional as it comes, relying heavily on conventional business models and approaches to problem solving. But its coming around with the help of tools like Novidea.

SaaStock is a major European conference for SaaS founders, investors, and executives designed to help drive innovation and progress in the industry through networking and knowledge sharing.

Heres a summary of Rois comments during the Q&A session:

Q: What were the factors that spurred the conception of Novidea?

Roi shared his personal story of spending a lot of time inside insurance distribution companies and witnessing manual, paper-based processes; faxing; brokers using spreadsheets or ancient computers with green screens. He saw a world where everything was based on intuition and gut feel when in fact they had so much data at their fingertips.  He knew the solution was in the data and in showing customers how to centralize, manage, analyze, and use it to make better decisions.

So he and a group of founders came together with a great mix of industry expertise and big data acumen. And, of course, they decided to go with the SaaS model.

 Q: Today, what do you think are some of the biggest pain points in the insurance distribution industry?

  • Growth and retention
  • Simplified workflow is another
  • The end customer demanding better service, transparency, and for brokers to provide more value in the role of consultant/advisor.
  • Limited ability to increase revenue from existing customer base
  • No real-time view across entire business
  • No actionable BI to improve KPIs

Q: How is Novidea leveraging technology to address these pain points?

  • Consolidated seamless front- and back-office systems
  • Streamlined workflow management across the policy lifecycle, including renewals and endorsements
  • Book of business profitability analysis and optimization capabilities
  • Real-time analytics for informed decisions
  • Customer-centric vs. operational business focus

Q: What are the key benefits of building your platform on Salesforce AppCloud?

Roi described how AppCloud provided the ability to build a vertical SaaS solution with a focus on customer needs instead of infrastructure, global scalability, and fast time to market. Novidea chose Salesforce technology over the competition because they could build quickly and leverage the trust, security, brand, and scale of AppCloud without a huge R&D team.