How Sammons Financial Group Streamlined Marketing & Compliance Across Teams with Workzone

A Collaborative Culture, Elevated by Technology

Sammons Financial Group Companies, an employee-owned organization with offices in Sioux Falls, Fargo, Chicago, and Des Moines, offers a broad suite of financial services—life insurance, annuities, corporate markets and more. Gail Dixon, Manager of Production Design in the annuities marketing division, leads a team of graphic designers supporting diverse marketing needs across multiple locations.

Before Workzone, the company struggled with inefficient processes. “I’ve worked at companies that used Manila folders to route projects,” Gail recalled. “Things would get lost, and it was hard to track anything.” At Sammons, Workzone has been in place for more than 7 years—and for good reason.

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One Central Hub for Distributed Teams

With remote employees and multiple office locations, Sammons needed a solution that enabled centralized communication and transparency. Workzone’s ability to keep everyone aligned—regardless of geography—has been transformative.

The marketing team handles a high volume of projects: brochures, flyers, forms, emails, animations, and social media graphics. These assets must be routed for design, compliance, and stakeholder review—across business units with unique needs. Workzone’s flexibility made this complexity manageable.

“Being able to have everything in one place—where everybody can access it—makes a huge difference,” Gail said. “You can track changes, see who made what decision and why, even versions back. That visibility is invaluable.”

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Favorite Features That Make a Daily Impact

Features That Drive Efficiency, Visibility, and Collaboration

After seven years in Workzone, Gail and her team rely on a core set of features that keep their fast-paced marketing operation running smoothly—across departments, locations, and compliance requirements.

Streamlined Intake & Cross-Team Collaboration
Workzone’s request forms help manage incoming work from departments that don’t live in the platform every day. “We have people from all over submitting requests—form changes, attachments, notes—and we can assign everything directly from there. It’s made cross-department collaboration so much easier,” said Gail.

Faster, Centralized Feedback Loops
Workzone’s markup and commenting tools make it easy to collaborate without switching platforms.

“The new markup tool means you don’t have to download a PDF and use Acrobat,” said Gail. “People can make comments right in Workzone. It’s all tracked in one place, everyone has access to the same information, and we can even reference why something was changed two versions ago. That’s really important for collaboration.”

Visibility Into Team Output
Gail uses dashboards and reporting tools to track workload, measure output, and share insights with stakeholders—without needing to be a data analyst.“I can slice our work by project type, month, or business line. It’s easy to make charts and reports that show exactly how our time is being spent.”

Smarter Organization with Custom Tags
At the marketing team’s request, Workzone helped them implement custom project tags to keep workstreams organized by business unit. “Tagging projects by things like ‘A’ for annuities or ‘L’ for life has cleaned up our system and made it so much easier to navigate.”

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Evolving With the Team—Backed by Real Support

One of the things Gail values most about Workzone is that it doesn’t stand still. As Sammons Financial Group’s marketing needs have grown in volume and complexity, Workzone has kept pace—and often led the way.

“Our company has grown a lot over the years, and I think Workzone has grown with us,” she said. “They’re not just adding random features—they’re listening to what we need.”

This openness to collaboration isn’t limited to product tweaks. It extends to the way Workzone supports its users day-to-day.

“When we reach out to support, we get someone who actually knows what’s going on,” Gail said. “It’s not a call center across the ocean. It’s a real person who understands what might be at stake, and they help fix it—fast.”

Even when her team isn’t sure what the solution is, Workzone steps in to figure it out. “Sometimes we’ll go to them and say, ‘We want something to work like this, but we’re not sure how,’ and they help us build a solution. Or they point us to something we didn’t even know existed.”

In Gail’s words, it comes down to this:

“Workzone is collaborative, responsive, and always improving. That kind of partnership is hard to find.”

Whether it’s adding functionality, solving problems, or simply listening—Workzone doesn’t just support the Sammons team. It evolves with them.

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The Verdict? A Platform That Delivers

Gail’s advice to other financial services firms exploring project management solutions:

“Try it. Workzone has been the most collaborative, helpful, and adaptable platform I’ve used. They’ve grown with us.”

Workzone’s platform is tailor-made for project management for financial services—with the flexibility to handle compliance-heavy workflows, the structure to scale across teams and departments, and the support to help you optimize along the way.

Ready to bring clarity, speed, and structure to your marketing operations?Discover why Sammons Financial Group trusts Workzone to power their compliance-driven workflows.

Book your personalized demo today.