Why I Built Simitar

By Andrew Bartels

I want to tell you why I built Simitar.

Simitar is an intelligent voice agent for Salesforce, built around the way insurance producers actually work.

A producer can pick up a phone from anywhere, call Simitar and have a conversation. They can ask questions, find information and take action. Simitar can create and update records, add notes, create follow-ups and tasks, and interact with Salesforce within that individual producer’s existing permissions.

It goes well beyond simply transcribing a conversation into a field. In many ways, it functions like a personal assistant that understands Salesforce, knows your business and is available whenever you need it.

There’s no new application for the producer to learn and no complicated interface. You simply make a phone call and have a conversation.

If you’re an agency owner who has invested significantly in Salesforce, you probably already understand why this matters.

Because the value of Salesforce isn’t really Salesforce.

The value is the information inside it.

You can build the best CRM in the world, but if the information about your customers, relationships and opportunities never makes it into the system, you’re never going to realize the full value of that investment.

I’ve been trying to solve that problem for almost twenty years.

One of my mentors in the insurance industry built an agency from selling policies out of the trunk of his car into a large, multi-state brokerage.

He once told me something I’ve never forgotten:

“When I started the agency, I knew everything that was going on.”

He knew every customer, every opportunity and every problem. Then the agency grew, he added producers, and suddenly he couldn’t know everything anymore.

That mattered because he had something incredibly valuable: experience. He knew the markets, the carriers and the people. He understood risk. There was a good chance he could help a producer with the right carrier, a similar risk or a useful relationship.

But first, he had to know what was happening.

That’s a problem I’ve spent much of my career thinking about.

As an agency grows, knowledge becomes distributed across the organization.

It’s in producers’ heads. In emails and notebooks. In conversations over lunch. In what somebody learned walking through a customer’s manufacturing facility.

Far too much of it never becomes institutional knowledge.

Eventually, at that agency, we implemented Salesforce.

We built an incredible system. In fact, the last time I attended Dreamforce as a customer, I spoke five times about what we’d built.

I believed in Salesforce then, and I believe in it today.

But despite everything we built, there was one problem we could never completely solve:

Getting enough information into it.

Producers are relationship people. They’re insurance professionals. Their job is to understand their customers, their businesses and their exposures and help those customers manage risk.

Yet we were asking them to stop what they were doing, open the CRM and enter information.

When they didn’t, we called it an adoption problem.

I think it was a friction problem.

We spent years reducing clicks, improving screens and building better workflows. It helped, but we were still asking the producer to adapt to the technology.

Generative AI gave us the opportunity to turn that around.

What if Salesforce could adapt to the way the producer already works?

That idea became Simitar.

Imagine you’ve just walked out of a customer meeting. You get into your car and call Simitar:

“I just met with ABC Manufacturing. They’re opening another facility. Their workers’ comp costs are becoming a concern. Jim mentioned they’re adding about 40 employees. Update the account and opportunity, add a note about the new facility and remind me to call Jim Tuesday.”

Simitar understands what needs to happen and takes the appropriate actions in Salesforce.

The next morning, before you walk back into ABC Manufacturing, you can call again:

“Bring me up to speed on ABC. What’s going on with the account? What have we promised them? What do I need to know before I walk in?”

And you have a conversation.

That’s when Salesforce starts becoming what I always believed it could be.

For the agency owner, more of the information that makes Salesforce valuable is now being captured.

You get better information about customers, opportunities and relationships. And you can begin turning individual knowledge into institutional knowledge.

That matters because insurance is still a relationship business.

Important conversations happen over lunch, on golf courses, walking through manufacturing plants, sitting across the table from customers or in the parking lot afterward.

Some of the most valuable context about a customer comes from those moments. Too often, it never makes it into the CRM.

Simitar gives producers a simple way to capture it as part of the way they already work.

I’ve wanted to build something like this for twenty years.

The problem isn’t new. The technology that can finally solve it is.

For twenty years, we’ve asked producers to work for the CRM.

I think it’s time the CRM started working for the producer.

And when that happens, agency owners can finally begin realizing more of the value of the Salesforce investment they’ve already made.

That’s why I built Simitar.