Insurance sales teams live in a world of speed and precision. Their success depends on delivering accurate, personalized quotes instantly – not days later, after wrangling with spreadsheets and back-office approvals.
But here’s the problem:
- Excel is essential, but disconnected. Sales teams rely on it for calculations, but it’s siloed from their Salesforce CRM, where deals are managed.
- Version control chaos. Different reps use different spreadsheet versions, leading to pricing discrepancies, compliance risks, and lost credibility.
- Custom integrations are challenging. Salesforce doesn’t play well with Excel out of the box, and building a bridge between them requires time, money, and IT resources.
- Missed opportunities pile up. If a sales rep can’t generate an accurate quote in real time, potential customers walk away.
As John Brisco, CEO of Coherent, explains, the real issue isn’t that insurance sales teams are using Excel – it's that they don’t have a seamless way to integrate it with Salesforce.
“For [insurance] sales teams, time is literally money. They can't afford to spend it on learning new solutions or processes. We believe in enhancing the productivity of existing tools, like Excel, so that everything a salesperson needs is readily available. This includes up-to-date, highly targeted offers with accurate pricing. Additionally, by embedding modern services throughout the organization, we ensure that sales teams have rapid access to necessary information, including special offers and promotions.”
This inefficiency – sales teams juggling between Excel models and Salesforce, struggling to get real-time pricing – leads to wasted time, lost revenue, and frustrated customers.
The solution isn't to replace Excel; it's to connect it seamlessly to Salesforce.
Coherent Spark + Salesforce = A Frictionless Sales Workflow
Salesforce is built to embrace APIs. But that doesn’t mean integrating Excel-based pricing models is easy. Even for a sales rep who knows Salesforce inside and out would find it challenging to manually implement existing Excel-based calculations into Salesforce-compatible code. Why? Because Excel was never designed to natively connect with Salesforce.
That’s where Coherent Spark changes the equation.
Rather than forcing sales teams to abandon Excel – or spend months building custom integrations – Spark transforms Excel models into APIs that work instantly inside Salesforce.
This means sales teams can generate real-time, compliant, and personalized quotes – directly within Salesforce. No switching between systems. No waiting on IT. No missed deals.
How It Works
Spark transforms Excel-based logic into fully managed RESTful APIs, making it easy to integrate Excel-based calculations into Salesforce – without custom development or complex coding.
- No development bottlenecks: Spark’s pre-built code snippets and templates let teams implement integrations quickly – without relying on IT resources.
- Real-time data synchronization: Spark ensures Salesforce always has the most up-to-date pricing, actuarial logic, and business rules from Excel models.
- Built to scale: As pricing models change, updates can be deployed centrally, eliminating the need for manual reconfigurations.
- Simple consumption: Teams only need to call Spark’s API inside Salesforce – there's no need to manage hosting or infrastructure updates.
How a Retirement Services Provider Transformed Sales with Spark
Let’s take a real-world example:
A leading retirement services provider struggled with a slow, manual quoting process. Sales advisors relied on Excel for pricing calculations, but with no direct integration into Salesforce. Generating a retirement plan quote required extensive back-office support.
This led to:
- Quote generation took days, not minutes.
- Sales reps lost deals because they couldn’t respond fast enough.
- IT teams spent time manually updating pricing logic instead of focusing on innovation.
By integrating Coherent Spark with Salesforce, they:
- Converted Excel-based pricing logic into accessible APIs
- Enabled real-time quote generation within Salesforce
- Reduced quote turnaround from days to minutes
- Small-market retirement plan revenue increased by 60%
By eliminating manual processing and version control issues, they freed up IT resources to focus on more strategic initiatives – like expanding automation across the business.
The Future of Insurance Sales Requires Real-Time Quoting
The insurance industry is undergoing a major shift toward speed and personalization. Customers now expect instant, tailored experiences, and sales teams must keep up delivering real-time, accurate quotes to stay competitive. But with pricing models locked in Excel and Salesforce as the system of record for customer interactions, insurers face inefficiencies that slow deals and create friction between teams.
Coherent Spark transforms how insurance sales teams work – allowing them to quote faster, more accurately, and without friction. Instead of jumping between tools or waiting for IT, reps can generate real-time quotes inside Salesforce – powered by the same Excel models they trust.
For IT teams, Spark eliminates the resourcing required for custom integrations and ongoing manual updates, ensuring pricing logic is always accurate and easy to scale.
As insurers move toward hyper-personalization and real-time customer engagement, the ability to deliver tailored quotes instantly will set market leaders apart.
Coherent Spark makes this possible today – helping insurers work smarter, sell faster, and provide the seamless experiences customers now expect.
