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Six ways a Sales Engagement Platform boosts Insurance Sales Productivity

Not all insurance prospects become paying customers. But if your team can’t close a deal, it shouldn’t be because they were too buried in some mundane task to respond or follow up.

Ideally, everything your teams do should boost sales productivity. However, because of time-consuming compliance requirements, paperwork, and emails, your sales teams might achieve a lot less. And the resources you had invested in lead generation would be wasted.

Which is why you need a Sales Engagement Platform (SEP). Sales productivity will shoot up and customer service and customer satisfaction will improve, thanks to smart automation and information organization technology.

Challenges in Insurance Industry

In order to fully understand how you can boost sales productivity, you need to first understand what makes selling insurance unique.

Customers require lots of education before they buy insurance. You need to explain what a policy covers and what it doesn’t, and clarify all the if’s and but’s. Few industries require customer education to this extent.

Another challenge is the compliance requirements. Even in business-friendly geographies, insurance remains under a close watch of the regulator. Your sales teams are under pressure to follow the guidelines and remain compliant.

Then there’s paperwork. From pitching to explaining the terms of the insurance and from signing up to filing claim charges, there’s enough paperwork to drive your salespersons crazy.

Finally, internal processes often tie down your sales teams. They require the sales teams to manually enter call details, reminders, notes, events and more into an inefficient, dated system. So while you try to boost sales productivity for insurance brokers or for your own teams, your processes become serious handicaps and hold back growth.

A great Sales Engagement Platform (SEP) would be your answer.

Benefits of Sales Engagement Platform

SEP, short for Sales Engagement Platform, is an immensely powerful system that helps your teams nurture leads, engage prospects, and convert (or upsell) them. Among the many benefits of SEP for insurance agencies, we will briefly discuss a few of them.

A SEP  significantly contributes to providing a positive customer experience. That’s because the SEP software stores every small insight about the customer and enables your sales team to provide timely responses to customer requests.

Additionally, a SEP is your best bet for data security. You can fully rely on your SEP to have the right data privacy mechanism in place to remain compliant with strict regulations like the CCPA and the GDPR.

Finally, a SEP increases sales productivity for insurance agents by carefully managing and making available relevant information. Its efficient lead tracking system tells managers the status of each lead.

How Insurance SEP can boost sales productivity

In the insurance world, where even a small benefit matters, a powerful SEP creates massive advantages for your sales teams.

Here are 6 ways how:

  1. A SEP enables you to build, maintain and enrich relationships
    Graphic 1

    Old sales tactics like pressure selling no longer work; customer relationship is the new selling

    A sales engagement platform is designed precisely to build relationships. It collects, organizes, manages and feeds your team customer information in a way that your teams can respond better and faster.

    For instance, it will pull records from your earlier communications with the prospect and tell you where to pick up the thread from. It will prompt you to share the resources the prospect had requested.

    When you deliver relevant information to your prospects in time, a follow-up doesn’t sound like you’re only thinking of how to sell more insurance. Instead, your follow-up comes across as a way of telling your prospects you’re thinking of them and you’re keen to help them make better decisions.

  2. A SEP helps you remain efficient and consistent

    Graphic 2

    When using legacy systems, your sales teams may store their contacts in one place, basic customer info in another and documents in a third. So when it’s time to serve or woo prospects, your teams have to access multiple data-storage systems. Mix-ups and slips happen and your business suffers.

    A SEP is a highly sophisticated, integrated software. Because it holds all information in one single place, there’s practically no chance your teams will miss or overlook any important information they’d need while handling service requests, converting, or upselling.

    Improving team efficiency is one of the major features of insurance SEP. Sales productivity, however, needs more: You want the customer experience to remain consistent, independent of team-members’ availability.

    Let’s say a prospect calls in and the sales person they have been talking to earlier is currently unavailable. What do you do?

    The good news is someone else on the team can take over immediately. With just a few clicks, the CRM will give the stand-in all the information they need to promptly and efficiently serve the prospect. The result: an extremely satisfying experience for the prospect.

  3.  SEP tells you how your prospects are moving along the funnel

     

    Sales productivity for insurance agents and professionals cannot be achieved unless the manager is aware of where leads stand.

    An insurance SEP brings efficiency to your pipeline management. Your SEP will tell you exactly what stage of conversion each prospect is.

    But that is less than half the story.

    The SEP will have pipeline metrics on what kind of support will each prospect most benefit from at a particular stage. For example, a prospect who is comparing two insurance schemes will find a quick summary very helpful at that point in time. Once they’re past that stage, they’ll need some other resources.

    At a strategic level, you can learn about the factors that likely affect your prospects’ decisions and notice the pattern. That will help you improve pitches and boost your sales productivity.

  4. A SEP keeps you updated about the customer

    Successful sales professionals know very well the importance of every additional detail about prospects. While selling insurance, you can use such information to suggest alternatives that better meet your prospect’s needs.

    Let’s say your SEP tells you that your prospect Katie earned an amazing promotion in her company. With this change, her financial status changes too.

    Earlier, she was checking insurance options purely on the basis of the small investment premium she could afford. She was a budget-driven prospect.

    Now that her financial status has improved considerably, she will first look at the benefits and features of an insurance plan. The news of her promotion tells you she’s now a benefits-driven prospect.

    This single change can massively improve your chances of converting Katie into a customer. Earlier, you were trying to convert her on the basis of low-cost plans. Now her perspective has changed and you stand a much higher chance of getting her business by talking about features of an insurance plan.

    This is just one of the many examples of how insurance SEP can boost sales productivity.

  5. A SEP makes sharing of information within teams a breeze
    Graphic 3

    When marketing, sales and customer support teams work in silos, there’s a lot of duplication of effort and information gaps. Repeated or missing information leads to frustrated customers and poor experiences. And this negatively impacts the quality and amount of selling your teams can do.

    Sales leaders often miss the importance of integrated and shared information when they worry about how to boost sales productivity. For insurance SEP, sharing information with the right people at the right time is natural.

    Imagine this: Amy, a customer, sends a request for add-on insurance, say overseas coverage. She’s leaving tonight and she doesn’t have much time. What if the salesperson she had bought from is on a family holiday and currently unavailable?

    Your SEP becomes a life-saver here! Your teams know the client, share the same insights about the client and have access to the relevant information they need. Before long, you have the client’s approval and the paperwork to go ahead with the overseas coverage.

  6. A SEP automates tasks that can be automated

    We saved one of the best benefits of SEP for the last: diligent, smart automation of processes. Workflow automation makes your sales teams free to pursue more productive activities, like upselling or customer support.Automation is multi-faceted with the new-generation insurance SEP. Sales productivity rises when you enable your salespersons to spend less time on dull, repeated tasks.You’ll also see improved customer satisfaction because your teams are able to respond faster and more accurately to service requests. And don’t forget that customer satisfaction has a direct bearing on how well your teams can sell!Sending emails, sharing statutory information, setting up reminders for your own teams, or simply greeting a customer on their anniversary, your insurance SEP software can take care of all this and more. This will keep your sales teams available for more meaningful, more growth-oriented tasks.Modern day SEPs provide you mobile flexibility. Your teams don’t have to flip open their laptops to fill in details every time they’ve met a customer. Their mobile devices will do a lot of it by itself because it is in sync with the central SEPs. Mobile SEP is here and kicking.

Conclusion

A SEP can help you build strong customer relationships, ensure you remain efficient and consistent and let you keep track of leads. It will also keep you fully updated on what kind of changes are happening at the prospect’s end, make sharing of relevant information across teams easier and automate as many tasks as possible.

As a result, a SEP is not an option anymore in the modern world of insurance selling, it’s imperative. What matters, therefore, is the kind of SEP you choose. The right SEP will inject efficiency in your systems, help you delight customers and grant you the ability to stay on top of the game. Most importantly, it puts to rest your worries about how insurance SEP can boost sales productivity.

At Vymo, we understand the challenges you face and that’s why we’ve built a solution that helps you provide exceptional customer experience and build a strong engagement with your customers. Our Sales Engagement Platform for insurance lets you easily do all of the above and more.

Why not get in touch with us to learn more on how we can help increase insurance sales and drive growth?

 

Sucheth Shetty

unnamed e1680731438746

Seasoned digital marketer. Love to help companies scale up digitally.

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