The quarter is about to close and your team is at risk of missing its sales targets—now what? As the adage goes, “Do what you’ve always done and you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.” It’s time to get smarter about closing sales.
The days when P&C professionals competed on the strength of their actuarial pricing models, their ability to provide a quote quickly, and handle claims are gone. For P&C professionals, the focus has shifted from products and prices to customer experience and expertise. Here are 3 ways for P&C firms to maximize their sales goals in today’s shifting landscape. They also can be applied to any smart sales strategy, regardless of industry.
1. Focus on what matters
Consumers have easy access to insurance products and information from multiple carriers, and no longer need a P&C professional to navigate carriers or explain terms. But with access to so much generalized information, some customers have a growing appetite for more tailored, personalized products.
This translates into a demand for specialized expertise from insurance advisors. They’re turning to professionals for advice on tailoring insurance packages for their personal needs, or for industry-specific advice on small commercial policies. As the P&C associate’s role changes, embracing technologies like artificial intelligence, data analytics, and the cloud is key to outpacing the competition.
Successful P&C professionals leverage multichannel marketing while increasing their scale and operational efficiency. But if marketing isn’t your strong suit, look for a partner that will manage marketing analytics, digital marketing, and multichannel sales solutions for you while you focus on meeting the customer’s needs.
2. Get the full picture
Most companies have massive databases of historical sales data, but few firms are effectively mining the intelligence hidden in those databases. What’s more, with so many resources from sales applications and online tracking tools to CRM systems and other databases, P&C professionals should have a comprehensive 360-degree understanding of their customer base.
An experienced data analytics partner can make sure you’re utilizing relevant data from multiple sources to get a multilayered understanding of prospects, trends, and the competition. For instance, a partner can uncover high-probability, frequently overlooked sales opportunities with analytics that measure likelihood to switch, next insurance product to recommend, and other insights.
3. Uncover insights hiding in plain sight
Understanding your clients helps you predict their behaviors in order to allocate resources accordingly and deliver the right information. For example, we helped a car rental company grow revenue and create trusted relationships with a lucrative customer group (small business customers) by balancing advanced data analytics with a supportive human touch. We used advanced data propensity modeling to prioritize small business customers most likely to spend more, based on insight from more than 20,000 internal and external data points.
Examples of the data gathered include SEO ranking, web traffic, advertising budget and spend, social media activity, funding information, revenue, employee size, technology use, and news and events. This allowed associates to focus on the right customers who have the most growth potential, not just current revenue.
On the people side, a welcome team of associates reached out by phone within 48 hours to new accounts to thank them for joining, explained the benefits of their membership, and encouraged the first rental within 30 days. After 90 days, customers were moved to an SMB account management team, where associates checked in with customers quarterly with advice and offers, based on customer preferences.
The client has seen steady revenue growth since the partnership began. Small business revenue grew year over year in a market that has traditionally seen revenue erosion. What’s more, the welcome team activated 27 percent of new customers within 30 days, the highest new small business customer activation rate in the company’s history.
Adapt to succeed
Research and our own experience working with clients show that to be successful, businesses need both data insights and human expertise. Companies are using big data and advanced analytics to understand customer demand at an unprecedented level of accuracy and granularity. Armed with these insights, P&C professionals can identify the right sales targets and establish more meaningful customer relationships. In other words, focusing on what P&C professionals are best at—helping customers feel safe.
