Agency Sales Culture Must Come Before Agency Technology
Before you can apply great technology to help drive sales at an independent insurance agency, you need to have an embedded sales culture.
You cant just sit around talking about a sales culture. You need to demonstrate it, and actions speak louder than words. Our philosophy is built upon relationship selling. One of the partners in our agency is the epitome of a relationship seller. And he often goes out on appointments with our seasoned (as well as not-so-seasoned) agents to "show them how its done."
As an agency owner, its imperative that you get your producers and CSRs to buy into your sales philosophy, whatever it may be specifically. Once that is done, you need to show them that the "system" works. You will never get them to jump through the proverbial hoops if you are unable or unwilling to show them that it works.
One way to demonstrate that the system works is to fill a critical role: that of "sales center coordinator." The SSC is responsible for:
Tracking producers and seeing that the information gets passed on and into the agency management system;
Ordering D&B reports;
Coordinating all mailings (newsletters, cards, promotional items);
Processing all returnskeeps mailing info current on agency management system;
Agent of record letters;
Requesting loss runs; and
Adding or updating form letters.
Our agency also provides each of our agents with a procedures manual. This way they know what is expected from them right from the start. Our sales center coordinator goes through the manual with them, one page at a time, to be sure they understand what it is they are supposed to be doing.
We also provide our agents with a computer and e-mail. The old-fashioned philosophy of "an agent doesnt know how, nor does he or she want to use the computer" is no longer valid, at least not at our agency.
Our agency management system is used for most of our marketing efforts. All prospects are keyed into the system: It tracks last contact, form of contact, industry, etc. Pictures of the prospect's property are stored for use in proposals and other correspondence. An image of their business card is also stored. That comes in handy if we need to get an agency-of-record letter (we can write the letter with their business card as letterhead).
We can pull a variety of reports off the systemall of which help us to determine the next step. But keep in mind we do this actively; we follow up with our agents. They have to provide information about their appointments, and without that the system wouldn't have good information.
Speaking of getting information into the system, were experimenting with taking our agency management system on the road. An agent can download information from our main system into his or her pocket PC and take it with him to the client. The agent then can enter information into that pocket PC, come back and upload that info into the main system.
The easier we make it for an agent to pass on information, the better and more accurate the information will be.
Debra Zambrana (dzambrana@gatewayins.com) is vice president and COO of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.-based Gateway Insurance Agency, LLC, and a member of the Applied Systems Client Network (ASCnet), the user group of Applied Systems agency management technology.
Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, September 8, 2003. Copyright 2003 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.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.