The very fact that insurance sales is intensely competitive shows it has a great potential. And as an insurance carrier or a wholesaler that relies on brokers in order to grow, your organization should ask yourself a question: What are we doing to help our brokers to solve their sales problems?

Selling insurance isn’t what it used to be. The tools and terms of insurance broker engagement have changed. How people find a broker has changed. Customer expectations have changed and naturally brokers have adapted to the changes.

That‘s exactly why we’ve put together this Broker Engagement Playbook for 2021, where we talk about how brokers can better deal with these changes.

We’ve broken down this Playbook into 5 areas. Within each area, we’ve identified the key challenge and discussed how you can overcome that challenge, improve engagement and boost sales.

Let’s start at the beginning!

1. Improve how your brokers onboard customers

Key Challenge: You sell a number of products and operate in many states. Your priorities and risk appetites for different products are also different. Are your brokers onboarding customers efficiently everywhere?

Here’s what to do: A positive onboarding experience is the first step to your combined success. The faster and easier the onboarding, the better value your customers, RMs, and agents derive.

A sales accelerator tool for insurers can do a lot of heavy lifting. For instance, you don’t need to waste time in order to fulfill customer KYC (Know Your Customer) requirements; the tool will do it for you. Populating various important customer details? No problem, the sales tool will auto populate that as well.

By onboarding your customers in a smooth, frictionless manner, you generate a better customer experience and help agents scale faster.

2. Make data storage and retrieval empowering

Key Challenge: Every sale generates more data. That data should generate insights that you can use to reach and serve more customers. How do you make storing and retrieving data more efficient?

Here’s what to do: An intelligent sales accelerator tool will automate information capturing and sharing. That frees your agents to pursue business growth, because they should be spending time nurturing leads and closing sales, not entering data.

Siloed data is another major challenge your RMs and their teams face. They waste time looking for data from multiple locations. A sales accelerator platform that stores data centrally solves this problem and empowers them to achieve more.

For instance, agents can analyse customer profiles to identify existing customers with inadequate insurance cover. They can automate sending emails on anniversaries or insurance renewal dates. Basically, it raises wholesaler productivity.

3. Help understand customer behavior

Key Challenge: An increasing number of people are embracing digital. Consumers have seen the convenience and speed of online transactions and they are keen to see the same experience everywhere. How are you helping your agents decipher and meet new-age consumer expectations?

Here’s what to do: Consumers have seen the convenience and speed of online transactions and they are keen to experience it everywhere. How are you helping your agents decipher and meet new-age customer expectations?

For instance, every time an insurance is due for renewal, customer loyalty is put to severe tests. That’s because it’s the time customers hunt around for better offers. Train your brokers to use your sales accelerator platform for timely follow-ups and information on premium financing.

Your sales accelerator platform can feed deep insights coupled with timely nudges. That will help agents prioritize leads, improve predicability, and improve conversion, almost like uncovering a magic formula.

4.Turn your analytics into your trump card

Key Challenge: Customers want your brokers to make targeted offers. The insurance carrier’s success, and wholesaler engagement and success depend on whether brokers can customize offers. How will your brokers deliver on that?

Here’s what to do: The answer lies in the deeper insights, something that legacy systems can’t generate.

Demand more from your sales accelerator platform in order to empower your brokers. Smart tools can, for instance, use data-backed insights for intelligent lead allocation and make the sales process more efficient.

Also, granting your brokers access to your analytics can help them identify and capitalize upon upsell or cross-sell opportunities. Besides, the platform will ‘learn’ from the best performing RMs and distribute that learning among the rest of the team, substantially improving their performance.
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5. Ensure continued broker engagement

Key Challenge: The sales strategies that worked yesterday may no longer work today. Insurance professionals must constantly learn new things. How will you ensure your brokers remain relevant over time?

Here’s what to do: Even after onboarding and coaching your insurance agents, you will need regular, continued engagement for efficient wholesaler distribution. You can channel lead management by mapping the right leads to the right RMs and optimize efforts.

As a larger organization, you will have access to smarter technology tools. The tool will analyze what opportunities have worked for which agents in the past and guide them contextually. Additionally, you can use this understanding to muscle up your role as a motivator and encourage your agents to chase bigger targets or a wider basket of products.

Smart tools can make processes efficient, build strong ties with brokers and do the heavy lifting to increase broker wallet share.

A closing word on broker engagement

It’s a no-brainer that we’ll continue seeing turbulence and disruption for a while. However, this is also an opportunity to increase the safety of your customers. Use data from your sales accelerator platform to learn if they have inadequate or missing insurance protection. Then you can suggest to them appropriate insurance cover. And your brokers will play a vital role in achieving this and also in unlocking Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). .

Insurance brokers battle some unique challenges: for instance, insurance is a product that’s not bought, it’s sold. Seek to build lasting, more sustainable relationships with your brokers and squeeze more out of technology to make this relationship work. It’s important to never lose sight of the fact that this relationship will only be as strong as the extent to which you contribute to your broker’s success.

Empathy, coaching, and humanising the use of technology will remain the three cornerstones of the Broker Engagement Model for not only 2021 but well into the future. Carriers and wholesales that prepare themselves to this end will find their journey fulfilling and successful.