MethodPlan with John Chandler: Revolutionary Retirement Plan Advisory Software Built on Salesforce

THE INTERVIEW

The White Space Opportunity in Financial Services Cloud

The financial services industry has long been waiting for a comprehensive retirement plan advisory solution built natively on Salesforce. That wait is officially over. In this Coffee Dreamin podcast episode, John Chandler, co-founder of MethodPlan, revealed how his company created the first data model in Salesforce specifically designed for managing retirement plans—filling a critical white space in Financial Services Cloud.

While Salesforce's Financial Services Cloud offers robust solutions for wealth management, brokerage, and insurance, retirement plans have remained conspicuously absent from the platform. This gap left Registered Investment Advisors (RIAs), broker dealers, and investment advisors struggling with siloed solutions that were difficult to integrate and inefficient to manage.

"Financial Services Cloud is a great product and there are so many different lines of business in financial services," Chandler explains. "Retirement plans is white space in financial services right now. They have wealth management, they have a brokerage product, an insurance product, but no one's ever built retirement plans before."

MethodPlan changes this equation entirely by providing the first purpose-built Salesforce solution for retirement plan advisors.

From Advisory Business to Software Innovation

John Chandler's journey to creating MethodPlan began with 15 years of hands-on experience running a retirement plan-only advisory business. So with MethodPlan, this wasn't a case of technologists building software for an industry they didn't understand—it was industry veterans solving problems they experienced daily.

The Genesis of Method Plan

The turning point came when Chandler and his team kept asking themselves: "Why is it so hard? Why does the work take so much time?"

Five to six years ago, they went searching for existing solutions and found nothing suitable in the market. Rather than accepting this limitation, they decided to build their own Salesforce org from scratch.

The results were transformative:

• Documented every process in managing a retirement plan advisory business

• Cut operational overhead by approximately 30%

• Created proprietary intellectual property for CRM optimization

• Positioned the advisory business for successful exit during the M&A wave

After selling the advisory business, Chandler took all the CRM-related intellectual property and founded MethodPlan as a standalone software company.

Why Salesforce? Strategic Platform Selection

When evaluating platforms for MethodPlan, the choice of Salesforce wasn't just convenient—it was strategic. Chandler identified several critical factors that made Salesforce the only viable option:

Market Dominance in Financial Services

"Salesforce is really the dominant CRM in the space," Chandler notes. While wealth-specific solutions exist for smaller, wealth-only businesses, larger aggregators managing multiple lines of business—wealth management, employee benefits, retirement plans, life insurance, and property & casualty—overwhelmingly use Salesforce.

Data Centralization

"Salesforce is where the data is." In the retirement plan space, advisors typically use siloed solutions that are difficult to integrate. By building on Salesforce, MethodPlan ensures that retirement plan data lives alongside all other client information in a unified platform.

Sales Cloud Foundation

MethodPlan is built to work with either Sales Cloud or Financial Services Cloud, though it's not FSC-dependent. This flexibility allows organizations to implement MethodPlan regardless of their current Salesforce configuration while maintaining compatibility with Sales Cloud as the foundation.

The Agent Force Advantage: High-Quality Structured Data

In an era where every software company is rushing to add AI capabilities, MethodPlan's approach stands out for its focus on the foundational element that makes AI truly effective: high-quality structured data.

The Missing Piece in AI Implementation

"The reason we're not seeing more productivity-focused solutions on Agent Force is low quality data," Chandler emphasizes. Meeting summary tools add value by extracting information from conversations, but most CRMs lack the structured data necessary for AI to deliver truly transformative productivity gains.

MethodPlan's Data Structuring Approach

MethodPlan solves this challenge through several innovative data management strategies:

Time-Versioned Data Model:

• Maintains past, current, and future versions of retirement plans

• Preserves historical data without overwriting

• Enables longitudinal analysis and trend tracking

• Prevents the common CRM problem of data override

Comprehensive Process Documentation:

• Defines clear onboarding workflows

• Establishes standardized client definitions

• Creates relationships to custom plan objects

• Structures all data around established processes

Granular Data Capture:

• Versions plan design agreements

• Tracks fees associated with agreements

• Schedules reviews and RFP timelines

• Links investment products to specific retirement plans

Real-World Agent Force Applications

This structured data foundation enables powerful AI use cases that deliver immediate value:

Client Value Demonstration: Plan advisors can now ask Agent Force: "What have we done for this client this year?" and receive comprehensive, accurate summaries drawing on the complete structured dataset within Salesforce.

Historical Analysis: The time-versioned data model allows advisors to ask: "How has this client's plan changed over the past five years?" providing deep insights that would take hours to compile manually.

Predictive Planning: By structuring future-state data alongside current and historical information, Method Plan enables proactive planning and forecasting that goes far beyond traditional CRM capabilities.

Lessons from the Trenches: Building a Salesforce ISV

Chandler's journey from advisory business owner to ISV founder provides valuable insights for anyone building on the Salesforce platform.

Meticulous Process Mapping

"We were meticulous in going through and going through our build," Chandler recalls. The team didn't just document what they did—they questioned why they did it that way and what downstream implications each decision would have.

This approach required:

• Mapping every step of the advisory process

• Identifying every data point along the workflow

• Understanding cause-and-effect relationships in data structure

• Validating assumptions through multiple iterations

The False Start Reality

MethodPlan's current version isn't the first attempt. The team experienced "many, many challenging false starts" before arriving at their current architecture.

Key lesson from early failures: Don't focus on flashy end-state features before establishing foundational data structures. Their first attempt at agreement creation focused on populating forms—a visible, tangible output—without first solving the versioning and data relationship challenges that make such features sustainable.

"We found one step of a process that, oh yeah, this is great, but what we didn't think about was versioning," Chandler explains. "We didn't have a foundational data set to say, well, who is an active customer that this needs to be assigned to?"

Market Validation Through Peer Collaboration

Rather than building in isolation, Chandler and his team continuously engaged with industry peers to validate their approach.

Benefits of this collaborative approach:

• Solved problems that actually existed, not just perceived problems

• Validated solutions against real-world use cases

• Built relationships that later became customer and partnership opportunities

• Avoided competitive mindset in favor of collaborative improvement

"The plan business is unique in that there's some of us that specialized in it," Chandler notes. "There was never that sense of there's not enough business that we needed to not have a good collaborative relationship."

The Salesforce Ohana Effect

This collaborative approach mirrors the broader Salesforce ecosystem culture. The Salesforce Ohana—a Hawaiian term meaning family—represents the community of professionals who freely share knowledge and help one another succeed.

Chandler's experience demonstrates that this culture extends beyond implementation partners and developers to ISVs serving niche markets. The willingness to share challenges and solutions creates a rising tide that lifts all boats.

The Build vs. Buy Decision: Cost-Benefit Analysis

For large RIAs and broker dealers considering whether to build their own Salesforce retirement plan solution or implement Method Plan, the financial calculus is straightforward.

Self-Build Cost Reality

Conservative estimates for self-build:

• Large RIAs (1,000+ users): North of $1 million

• Likely multiple seven figures for comprehensive solution

• Years of development time and iterations

• Ongoing maintenance and enhancement costs

• Risk of failed implementation (statistically common for CRM projects)

MethodPlan Value Proposition

By implementing MethodPlan, organizations gain:

• Proven foundational data model refined over years

• Standard processes used across the industry

• Flexibility to add unique business processes on top

• Immediate access to Agent Force capabilities

• Ongoing platform enhancements and updates

• Reduced implementation risk

The Gap Selling Principle: As illustrated in the classic sales methodology, the question isn't just what MethodPlan costs—it's what you save by not spending multiple seven figures on a self-build that may ultimately fail.

Technical Architecture and Implementation

MethodPlan's technical approach balances standardization with customization, providing a foundation that works for the entire industry while allowing individual organizations to differentiate.

Core Standard Processes

MethodPlan identified and built the standard process that every RIA, broker dealer, and corporate retirement plan advisor uses:

• Client prospecting and qualification

• Proposal generation and presentation

• Agreement creation and execution

• Ongoing plan management and reviews

• Investment monitoring and rebalancing

• Compliance and regulatory reporting

Customization Layer

"We stopped when it stopped being what we all do as advisors," Chandler explains. At implementation, organizations configure their unique business processes on top of this solid foundation.

This approach delivers:

• Faster time to value (months vs. years)

• Lower implementation risk

• Proven data model from day one

• Ability to differentiate without rebuilding core functionality

Integration Capabilities

Built natively on Salesforce, MethodPlan inherits the platform's extensive integration ecosystem:

• Connect to custodians and record keepers

• Integrate with performance reporting tools

• Link to compliance and regulatory systems

• Sync with document management platforms

The Future of Retirement Plan Advisory

Method Plan's first Agent Force implementation—summarizing client work and demonstrating advisor value—represents just the beginning of AI applications in retirement plan advisory.

Upcoming AI Opportunities

With the structured data foundation in place, future AI capabilities could include:

• Automated compliance monitoring and alerts

• Predictive analytics for plan health and participant outcomes

• Intelligent fee benchmarking and optimization recommendations

• Proactive identification of plan improvement opportunities

• Natural language querying of complex plan data

• Automated RFP response generation

Industry Transformation

As retirement plan advisors adopt MethodPlan and leverage its Agent Force capabilities, the competitive landscape will shift. Advisors with access to AI-powered insights and automation will be able to:

• Manage larger books of business more efficiently

• Provide higher-touch service to clients

• Demonstrate value more effectively

• Identify revenue growth opportunities proactively

• Reduce compliance risk through systematic monitoring

Implementation and Onboarding

Organizations interested in MethodPlan can find the solution through two primary channels:

Direct: Visit methodplan.com for information, demos, and implementation consultation.

Salesforce AppExchange: Search for Method Plan on the AppExchange marketplace to view ratings, reviews, and detailed product information.

Typical Implementation Timeline

While specific timelines vary based on organizational complexity, MethodPlan implementations are measured in months, not years, due to the pre-built data model and standard processes.

Key Takeaways for Financial Services Technology Leaders

John Chandler's journey from retirement plan advisor to Salesforce ISV founder offers several critical lessons:

For Advisory Firms:

• Document your processes thoroughly before building or buying technology

• Understand the true cost of self-build vs. proven solutions

• Prioritize data structure and quality over flashy features

• Consider how AI capabilities require foundational data architecture

For Salesforce Partners and ISVs:

• Deep industry expertise combined with platform knowledge creates powerful solutions

• Market validation through peer collaboration reduces risk

• Focus on sustainable data models before building surface-level features

• The Salesforce ecosystem rewards specialization and collaboration

For Technology Buyers:

• Evaluate the data foundation, not just the user interface

• Consider long-term total cost of ownership, not just upfront costs

• Assess how solutions enable future capabilities like AI

• Look for proven solutions in niche markets rather than trying to adapt general tools

The Broader Implications

MethodPlan's success in filling the retirement plan white space in Financial Services Cloud demonstrates an important principle: even in mature ecosystems like Salesforce, significant opportunities remain for specialized, industry-specific solutions.

The retirement plan advisory market—with its complex regulatory requirements, unique data structures, and specialized workflows—required a purpose-built solution created by practitioners who understood the industry from the inside. This pattern likely exists in other financial services niches and adjacent industries.

Conclusion: The Power of Specialized Solutions

John Chandler and MethodPlan prove that the most transformative software solutions often come from practitioners who experience problems firsthand, take time to understand root causes, and build comprehensive solutions rather than quick fixes.

By creating the first Salesforce data model for retirement plan management, MethodPlan has done more than fill a product gap—they've established a new standard for how retirement plan advisors can leverage technology to deliver better outcomes for their clients while running more efficient, profitable businesses.

As AI capabilities through Agentforce and other Salesforce innovations continue to evolve, MethodPlan's foundation of high-quality structured data positions early adopters to gain significant competitive advantages in an industry that has long been underserved by technology solutions.