Agents Rev Up Engines To Become Sales Machines
Bad habits and a hardening insurance market can conspire against independent agents to make selling difficult, but sales counselors say they feel that good customer relationships and aggressive marketing is the answer to improve business.
"While independent agents have a history of good salesmanship, they are bad at marketing," according to Michael Jans, president of Vancouver, Wash.-based Insurance Profit Systems, Inc.
"What did work doesnt anymore," he added. "Agents who continue with bad habits of the past will not survive. Cold-call prospecting and waiting for the phone to ring no longer works. Agents need to be aggressive. They need to drive prospects to them and learn to spend their time with hot prospects."
In the eyes of Insurance Profit Systems, the way to get agents to improve their sales is by concentrating on marketing to seed the field, said Mr. Jans. IPS' service, which boasts more than 3,000 subscription members, does this through a business coaching system dedicated to property-casualty agents.
Part of its service is the "Quantum Club," where 250 member agents meet throughout the United States and Canada to review their best and worst marketing habits. Mr. Jans explained that members can exclude their "leading competitors" from the club to feel secure in discussing their marketing strategy successes and failures.
Agents should practice a marketing strategy that takes the initiative and "moves the market to them and makes sales," Mr. Jans explained. Part of the strategy involves continuous "nurturing" of clients throughout the year to get the maximum number of policies an agent can from their clients. In the end, agents should look to turn their clients into "raving fans" of the agency, he said.
Individual agents need to make sure they are doing the primary job they expect to be doing–marketing to clients, Mr. Jans said.
To identify the administrative duties that keep agents from adequately devoting themselves to sales is one of the first tasks that Insurance Profit Systems helps with. The next step is finding how to delegate those tasks, freeing up the producer's time for more productive uses, such as marketing, he said.
A leading instructor in selling techniques, Russ Granger, president of Insurance Learning Systems in Parsippany, N.J., is helping agents discover the art of selling. At this year's Independent Insurance Agents of Americas 2001 InfoXchange in Honolulu in October, Mr. Granger will share some of his secrets to help improve an agents selling prowess.
Mr. Granger observed that agents must understand that selling is all about persuasion. "Agents think to get to people they need to take the logical approach," Mr. Granger said. "There is nothing further from the truth."
In his latest sales program, "The Power of Personal Persuasion," agents are taught that they need to come to understand that the way to get a prospective client to buy insurance is through persuading them they need it.
Building excitement, motivation, and understanding the interpersonal process in selling are the keys to successful sales, Mr. Granger noted.
For young agents new to the selling world, who have grown up on technology, the challenge is to understand that technology by itself does not make sales, he said.
The agent who sits down with a prospect and assumes that showing detailed statistics from a laptop will make the sale "are dead wrong," warns Mr. Granger. While data and laptop presentations can help, it is the "psychological approach" that ultimately makes the sale, he said.
Agents need to learn "a whole concept of skillsto find the trigger to make this sale," said Mr. Granger. Such skills include communication–both in asking the right questions and being a good listener. It is also important to learn closing skills–knowing how to ask the prospect for the sale action.
"Sixty-three percent of all sales interaction ends without a request for action," according to Mr. Granger.
As the atmosphere around selling insurance products begins to change, those agents who have kept in touch with the markets and their customers will find selling a lot easier, observed George Nordhaus, chairman of Insurance Marketing and Management Services in Los Angeles. The company has provided marketing and information services to the insurance industry for the past 30 years.
Long-term relationships are key, not only for finding coverage, but also in making sure clients understand the changing insurance market, Mr. Nordhaus said.
To deliver better products and services for their clients, agents need to cultivate new services and expertise such as risk management, according to Mr. Nordhaus.
If the agent lacks such specialized knowledge, knowing where to find the experts who can supply these value-added skills is essential. Having the ability to take advantage of these other fields to help mitigate escalating premium costs will increase the agents value to the customer and preserve the sale, he observed.
IMMS owns a majority interest in "Group 500," a property-casualty insurance marketing affinity group targeted at middle-market business. Agency and brokerage members gain access to niche programs, alternative markets and other "value-added" services.
"Personal relationships, education, understanding the market and communication–those are the things that are important to the customer," according to Mr. Nordhaus.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, September 17, 2001. Copyright 2001 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.
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