Our VP of Partnerships Zak Pines recently sat down with Chris Camp, Founder of Insight Powered, as part of our ongoing Partner Interview Series. Zak and Chris had a far-ranging conversation that focused on digital innovation in healthcare, the evolution of Salesforce Health Cloud, and Chris’s experience with the Formstack Partner Certification process. Here’s an abridged transcript of the chat.
Background on Insight Powered
Zak: Insight Powered is a consulting firm empowering businesses through Salesforce. How did you start the business?
Chris: The idea to start this business came at the end of 2017. I was working for a company where we had just implemented a Salesforce product with a team of four IT individuals who were doing the work with marketing automation and cloud-based analytics. I started looking around and realized a common theme: small to mid-sized companies looking to grow and scale their business. Whether they were private-equity backed or they were part of a high-growth area, they had a need for systems but didn’t have a team in house to help them. Oftentimes, it’s one person who’s doing it all, and I saw that there was an opportunity to partner with these types of companies. Once I made this realization, I drew three circles to identify where I could best overlap my skill set to help this audience.
Zak: Three circles…what were the three circles?
Chris: The first was healthcare, the second was service businesses or technology-enabled services, and the third was the geographic area around Nashville. The premise was to help healthcare businesses in Nashville looking for technology services. The third piece is less of a focus now, as we quickly realized how easily work can be done through video conference.
Then in August 2018, I became a certified Salesforce partner, and we pivoted the business to primarily focus on Salesforce ever since. You know more than anyone that there’s a huge opportunity in the Salesforce ecosystem, and that’s how we approach our work.
Zak: OK so you have now been running a Salesforce-focused consulting firm for several years. What themes have emerged around the types of customers you serve?
Chris: Typically it’s the person who has been tasked by the entrepreneur to drive leads and the sales process. Sometimes that looks like a Director or VP of Marketing or a VP of Sales. In other cases, in a healthcare setting, it’s the Patient Coordinator—the person who’s trying to help people move through the patient intake process. So the customer has different variations, but in the end, the process we’re most often tackling is that top of the lead funnel down to conversion to becoming a successful customer.
Zak: How are you finding and identifying these high-growth companies that are a fit for your services?
Chris: Part of it is how I’ve aligned myself with Salesforce within their healthcare and life services division. Within that service line, I work with their small growth business sales reps, who are typically working with businesses implementing Salesforce for the first time. For the most part, they were running on spreadsheets and whiteboards, and they’ve made the decision to invest in the next level of digitized processes and systems. That’s how I’ve found most of my clients. I’ve also discovered local clients, here in Nashville, who have evolved out of that work.
Zak: How do you typically kick off a project with a new customer?
Chris: One thing we’ve been working on with our solution architects is creating a project start form that helps our clients capture some of the detail around their process, so that way our initial conversations provide more context, and we’re a mile down the road rather than starting at the beginning of the marathon line. We use Formstack for this. We capture what customers want to accomplish in the project in their own words, while helping them to start thinking about their process. Consulting is driven by people, but we’re trying to figure out how to blend in technology with the personal interactions.
Digital Innovation in Healthcare & Salesforce Health Cloud
Zak: You talked about innovation and healthcare being two areas of your focus. Can you break down for us what you are seeing today around trends in healthcare that are creating this environment of innovation?
Chris: A few things are happening to drive that change. First, you can’t talk about healthcare without talking about regulatory changes. This has increased the prevalence of systems in a digital world within healthcare. In the early 2000s, healthcare was a paper-based world. Then, health systems and hospitals began converting to technology-based processes, and it’s continued to grow throughout the industry. Now, smaller specialty practices have to think about digitizing their business processes, and you have an ecosystem developing around EMR. Integrating EMRs with patient reminders, patient financing, or doctor efficiency through virtual scribe/speech recognition services is just the beginning, and they’re all new areas of healthcare that couldn’t exist with paper-based processes.
The other piece is the technical aptitude of our society is increasing, and people expect the same experience they have in a consumer world to happen in the business world. In our personal life, we can take a picture on our phone, add a filter, add a meme, and we can share it with our closest friends on multiple platforms. It’s all done easily and immediately from our phone. People want to know if they can do something easily with something like Instagram or a consumer tool and translate that to a business setting. That’s where systems like Formstack or Salesforce come in. You don’t have to be a pure developer to be able to create technology in today’s world. And that’s what’s driving a lot of opportunity and innovation.
Zak: You just talked about digitizing paper-based processes. Would you consider that a trend accelerating in healthcare today?
Chris: 100%. And it’s where Salesforce and Formstack work so nicely together. It’s a process that needs to do two things. First, you need to make it easy to enter data. And then second, you need to store it in a way that you can report on it and manage automation with it. That’s where you pair Formstack and Salesforce.
Zak: We’re seeing continued investment from Salesforce in Salesforce Health Cloud. What trends are you seeing around how it’s evolving and what it means for your customers?
Chris: It’s been really interesting. Before I even started this business, one of my first memories of Salesforce was them saying you can build an EMR in Health Cloud. That was about five years ago. Now, they’re much more focused on patient engagement and are finding their stride as they think about care management and referral management. It’s the top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel with EMR sitting in the middle, and they’re overlaying industry context on existing tools that they’ve built. The other thing Salesforce is expanding in is recognizing how they can create a complimentary data model to an EMR so data can be exchanged in an easy way without having to recreate the wheel on either side of the system.
Zak: And that’s the broader point, right? EHRs are not engagement systems, and Salesforce and surrounding tools like Formstack are serving a complimentary purpose. That’s how it all evolves.
Chris: Bingo. And in some ways, Salesforce isn’t always the perfect system of engagement by itself, but it has the ecosystem around it to expand far more than an EMR. It’s not easy to extend functionality within your EMR without a huge development team, but with Salesforce, you can do this through “clicks not code.” For example, if you want to add dynamic data capture and/or document generation, you can do it in Salesforce and combine it with Formstack’s products.
Becoming a Certified Formstack Partner
Zak: Let’s take a trip back in time. Do you recall when you discovered Formstack?
Chris: It was about a year ago, I was working with a client in the behavioral health space who had a 15–20 page intake form. They had to capture a ton of data around their clients so they could better serve them, and as they were doing that, we looked at our options directly on the platform. I went back to them and said it’s going to be really expensive for us to build a custom product to do this, so we started digging around the Salesforce ecosystem and identified Formstack as a strong option.
It goes back to the concept that you don’t have to be a developer to do things. I was able to train their team to use Formstack, and now it’s not just the one intake form—they have 10 or 15 forms they’re using now to collect data. Now they use Formstack to submit the requirements they need, which triggers a workflow to get to the next person for approval. We can route this stuff without the back and forth of emails, which is a huge value-add to the business.
Zak: We are seeing our Forms, Documents, and Sign products as modules you can use to create productivity around Salesofrce.
Chris: Exactly. I had a client ask me yesterday if Salesforce can do document generation. It’s not their core functionality; their core functionality is database, UI, workflow and automation, etc.. He had this aha moment that they’re not a solution for everything, and they have very intentional boundaries in what they built.
Zak: Are there any other use case examples that come to mind in working with Formstack?
Chris: A client is looking at Salesforce, and their specific use case is to have a form filled and then the data related back to existing contacts in their database. So the ability to do direct lookup within the form is a really big deal, and we’re starting to explore that. One of my questions to your solutions engineer was if they exist in the database, how do they handle that—and vice versa if they don’t exist. It was a clever solution to have a form built with a link, so if they search for the person and don’t find them, they can click the link, add the contact, and then in real time update the data so it can associate back to the new contact. That’s how my customer is building their referral database. It goes back to managing the top of the funnel as clients come in. If they have another kind of referring provider that doesn’t exist in their database, they want to capture that information. This allows them to do that.
As you said, the modular nature of Formstack gives you supreme flexibility in how you want to use it. Whether it’s only document generation or it starts with data entry and moves to document generation and eSignature, it’s along this workflow continuum, and there are a lot of different ways you can plug and play along the way.
Zak: That’s exactly it. It can be flexible based on each customer’s need.
Chris, can we pivot to talk about your partner certification. You recently joined our partner program and became a certified partner. What was that experience like in terms of working with our team to get certified?
Chris: The other day I was talking to a local company here in Nashville that’s an analytics shop who is thinking about starting a partner program. I used Formstack as an example because I really like your process.
I’ve never felt like I was just a number in the machine with Formstack. It feels much more personal. Justin Jackson, your Partner Enablement Specialist, worked with me to present some of the work that I’d done while also giving me a run through of the products I hadn’t used yet. I ended up recording myself doing a demo and then sent him a link to it because I couldn’t find the time to actually do the demo with him live. He adapted the process for me.
I also like your language around how you’re building the program—that partnership isn’t a channel, it’s a community. How you approach partner onboarding shows that you practice what you say.
Zak: That’s awesome and great to hear. We’re thrilled to have you as part of our growing community. Our partner community is as good as the collective experience of our partners, and you’re bringing a very valuable skill set around growth businesses and healthcare to the community.
Chris: Thanks, I appreciate that.
Lightning Round
Zak: OK let’s move to the lightning round. What are some of your personal interests or hobbies?
Chris: I’m an Auburn fanatic. Otherwise, my life is pretty consumed with my three girls—whether we’re running around at the basketball court or watching their games. They’re all in different activities. I’ve also coached football at their school for the last four years now.
Zak: Do you have a personal productivity tip you can share?
Chris: I don’t sort my email. When I’m done with it, I archive it to a single folder, and I’ll let email search do its thing. I use Trello for task management, but I laugh because there are some things that are too small to put on Trello. So I also rock an old school paper list. If I’m on a call and I can’t take action on it right at that moment, I’ll write it down. In theory, I should be working through these lists every day and then throwing them away and starting fresh the next, but they’re probably more on a weekly cadence. The other thing that I love that has been a huge help is Calendly. Being able to schedule and remove the back and forth of emails is fantastic.
Zak: Do you have a favorite TV show?
Chris: If I have the TV on, it’s sports. The primary thing my wife and I did watch is “The Crown.”
Zak: Do you have a go-to lunch during the workday?
Chris: Sadly, I mostly make my own lunch. Typically, it’s rocking leftovers—something I can warm up quickly.
Zak: Is a hot dog a sandwich?
Chris: Although it does seem to meet the criteria of two pieces of bread with meat in between, I consider hot dogs their own category. You know you have a Chicago dog that’s different than what you’d get at The Varsity in Atlanta. So I feel like there’s a whole category of food for hot dogs.
Looking for your next step? Check out Formstack’s partner program for consultants, agencies, and tech partners.
