by Steve Anderson
When I started working with the agency where I am today, I began with nothing. I had lived in the Fort Worth area less than two years, and had not been actively selling during that time. I had no contacts and no book of business to bring with me. To build a book of business, I had to start from scratch. Even though I am not a great salesman, I built a $1.1 million book in less than 24 months, not because of any natural ability, but due to the marketing system I developed that provided me with a disciplined, organized approach to the selling process.
Successful selling takes more than natural talent. New technology is available so you too can put your marketing on autopilot. You can create a powerful new marketing system designed with one sole purpose in mind . . . to help you increase sales!
To understand how the system works, it is first necessary to understand the underlying philosophy which undergirds your current method of selling. You already have a sales system whether you realize it or not. Almost all selling efforts can be simplified into these steps:
Step 1: Identify a prospect and obtain a policy expiration date.
Step 2: Call 60 to 90 days before the expiration date to try to quote the coverage.
Step 3: If the prospect doesn't want you to quote this year, put them into a follow-up file to call next year at about the same time.
Step 4: If you do provide a proposal, try to close the sale. If you are not successful, put them back into your follow-up file to call again next year.
While this sales system can break down at any step, in most agencies the most common point of failure is in the follow-up activities required in steps three and four.
Why are the follow-up activities so important? Marketing research continues to confirm:
• 80% of all sales are made after five or more customer contacts.
• 48% of all producers give up after the initial sales call.
• 25% more give up after the second call.
• 12% more give up after the third call.
• 5% more give up after the fourth call.
Only 10% of all producers continue past this point. If this is true, it means the persistent 10% of all producers are making 80% of all sales.
While there are many reasons why producers do not follow up consistently with their prospects, the most common reasons are:
They don't like to. There are many producers who are great at prospecting, presenting and closing, but who don't like writing letters or making phone calls. These producers see this kind of follow-up activity as a waste of time, so they don't do it. They prefer to work with people who are willing to talk to them right now. They will worry about their other prospects when their expiration date gets closer.
They are too busy. Many producers are focused on short-term opportunities, and feel that they can't spend the time to cultivate long-term relationships with prospects. They move from crisis to crisis and their time is filled with the urgent problems of the day. The important long-term activity does not get done.
They are not well organized. Some producers allow things to simply "pile up," and have no system to remind them when it is time to get back in touch with someone. They may have a suspense or diary system, but they always seem to be days behind in handling the reminders they receive.
They leave the agency and no one else continues their efforts. When a new producer takes over, a transition is usually made with the "good" customers. Any prospects which the prior producer was cultivating, are frequently dropped. Sometimes, when the prior producer leaves the agency, he or she continues to cultivate the prospects, but for your competitor.
There is no formal plan. Most agencies have not developed a formal plan for how the marketing and sales activities will take place. They leave the details of how prospects are to be cultivated over the long term up to the producer to do, or not do, as the producer sees fit. If the agency does have a plan, it is not managed day by day to make sure it is being followed.
All of this means that:
• A few prospects are well cultivated, according to the individual producer's personal strategy.
• Most prospects are poorly cultivated, also according to the individual producer's strategy.
• Only a small percentage of the agency's prospects ever result in a sale or achieve their full income potential to the agency.
In an attempt to address this problem, many agencies have begun to use a computer system to retain client and prospect information. While this may help a few producers become more productive, it will not, by itself, achieve the desired results of increased sales. These systems are designed to gather customer, policy and accounting information, not to help you sell insurance.
Using your automated agency management system still leaves the following problems:
• Producers who don't like to write letters, still don't write letters.
• Producers who let things pile up, still let things pile up.
• When a producer leaves the agency, the new producer still loses continuity with the prospects. In many cases, the exiting producer may actually take the "contact database" with him.
• There is still no formal plan to be followed. Each producer is in control of his own prospects, in the way that he sees fit.
To achieve steady growth, your sales system must address each of the problems I have listed here by meeting the following three objectives:
1. The agency must have a formal plan. Agency management (that's you!) must be able to design a plan for how, when, and where prospect (and customer) follow-up is to occur.
2. Your sales system must automatically manage the activities pertaining to each prospect. With such a system in place, you are assured that nothing and no one "falls through the cracks."
3. The letters and reports for all producers are automatically produced by the computer, without any effort by the individual producers.
The producer then has three responsibilities:
• To sign the letters so they can be mailed;
• To make phone calls listed in the follow-up reports; and
• To communicate with the system operator the future course of events that should be taken for each prospect by selecting from the options presented to them.
The heart of the marketing system
The integrated marketing action plan (IMAP) is the heart of a marketing system. The IMAP defines each individual step that is part of the overall marketing plan. These steps follow the plan and move the prospect throughout the sales cycle for each prospect situation. The IMAP is automatically processed daily by the system, assuring that each prospect is handled according to plan.
Creating a computer aided marketing system means more than just using your computer to send sales letters to prospects. It requires a new way of thinking about the sales and marketing process.
Let's now look at the specifics of how you can create such a system for your agency.
In any marketing system there are four possible ways for a customer or prospect to respond to each contact a producer makes. These are: yes, no, wait or no response, and unavailable.
Let's look at each more closely.
Yes
Your prospect wants to take the next step with you. This response will initiate a positive action from your system. The prospect wants to proceed to the next step in the marketing plan and may be ready for a face to face appointment with a producer. Or you may want to send a thank you letter. If all steps have been completed and the prospect has purchased, the next action will be a "success" to tell the system that it scored a hit.
No
This response is a definite "no" from the prospect and should initiate a negative action from the system. The prospect wants no further information from you about this marketing campaign. The next action will be to "stop" any further steps at this time.
Be careful about accepting a "no" from one of your prospects. If the prospect is qualified and you want to do business with them, put them on a long-term contact series so your name will be in front of them in a polite and non-obtrusive way over the next several months. You will be surprised how many of these "no's" will come back to you when they have a problem they think you can help them with.
Wait or no response
This response may happen one of two ways. First, there has been an actual contact with the customer, by phone or in person, and they have indicated some level of interest but are not ready to move forward. The next action should be entered as usual for the particular marketing plan being used, but a specified number of days to wait before proceeding will also be entered. Second, and a more likely scenario, the prospect does not respond at all to your contact (probably a letter). The system would know there has been no response and automatically take the next step as you have outlined.
The "no response" is the same as a "wait." The system will wait the maximum number of days specified in your plan and then proceed with the next action step (probably another letter or a phone call). This will keep your agency's name in front of the prospect on a regular basis.
Eventually, the name recognition factor will have its effect. The prospect will come to respect your agency for its persistence and commitment to good customer relations.
Unavailable
This response will probably be the result of a death, divorce, the prospect moving to another address, a telephone disconnection, etc. Depending on the circumstances, the most likely action for this type of response is to cease marketing to this person.
Combining these various action steps based on how your sales system works in your agency will create your marketing system. Since every action has only four possible responses, and the system will automatically take the next step for you, it will be impossible for a prospect to fall through the cracks. Once your prospect has been started on a marketing campaign, he will either end up as a new client of yours or you will know he is not a high quality prospect and you can stop trying to sell to him.
An "autopilot" marketing system is self-administering, that is, the system always knows what the next step is for each and every prospect in your marketing database for the particular marketing campaign you are running. The system will proceed with the specific steps you have designated with a minimum of effort on your part or on the part of your agency personnel.
Your system will automatically take care of everything in between so you can spend your time selling—not marketing!
Once a marketing plan is defined and several campaigns run, marketing reports will help you analyze which plans are most successful. Since each action can have an associated cost, it is possible for the computer to tell you exactly how much it costs to generate each new customer!
Designing the flow
Before your clients can be targeted for a particular marketing plan, the plan itself must be conceived and set up. You must decide what series of actions you wish to take place in marketing your particular product to a group of selected prospects.
A good place to begin is to write down the steps you would take if you were going to contact each prospect individually. Perhaps you would begin with a letter of introduction about your agency, followed by another letter explaining the particular coverage(s) you are trying to sell. Next, you may wish to follow up with a phone call to try to set up an appointment. If you are successful in getting the business, you will probably want to send a thank you letter.
Once you have the basic plan outlined, you are ready to take your sales actions and create your integrated marketing action plan.
There are a number of different modules that make up a complete system. The purpose of these modules is to automate and centralize all of the marketing activities. This allows your producers to spend more time in front of prospects, while your system is making sure relationships are cultivated and no prospect falls through the cracks.
You begin developing your integrated marketing action plan by creating an individual module. This is a plan which defines the steps that are to be taken, and when they are to occur for a specific type of follow-up activity. Let's look at what one module would look like.
New prospects module
This will be a portion of a scenario for handling new prospects. In this example, we will address prospects which meet the following conditions:
• We have never had contact with them before.
• We do not have a specific referral to them.
• They have not contacted us.
Before we call on one of these prospects, we will send a series of three short letters, five days apart, to create some basic familiarity with our agency, with our products and services, and with the producer who will be calling them. Five days after the last letter, we want our producer to receive a report indicating what has transpired, and that it is time to contact the prospect. (See accompanying table.)
Once we have created this module, we must write the letters and create the report format that go with it. From then on, any time we start a new prospect on Event #l, the system will print our first letter on Day #1, our second letter on Day #6, our third letter on Day #11, and on Day #16 a report will be printed for the producer instructing him to call the prospect.
But what happens after the producer makes the phone call? Referring again to the table, on Day #21 we are scheduled for this contact to appear on a management exception report, and to reappear on a report every 7 days. This report tells agency management that the producer has not told the computer what to do next with this contact.
Ideally, the producer contacts the prospect, and then makes a decision regarding the appropriate course of action to be taken. To accomplish this, we will create four alternative responses the prospect can make to the producer's initial phone call.
Response 1
The prospect says he is interested in a meeting with the producer, and the producer sets a specific appointment. Now we want to immediately send a letter confirming the appointment, and then create another producer action report which reminds the producer of the appointment.
Response 2
The prospect is not willing to see us now, but is interested in talking to the producer at some point in the future.
Now, we wish to send a thank you letter, telling him we will be back in touch in the future. When the future time comes, we want to send a letter reminding the prospect that we will be calling him, based upon our prior conversation.
Response 3
The prospect is not interested, and is emphatic that he never will be.
Here we send a letter thanking him for his time, and ask for referrals. What have you got to lose?
Response 4
The prospect is not taking our calls, or returning them.
Here we send a letter saying that we've been unable to reach him as we promised; we understand he's been busy, and ask him to please expect our call or to call us if it's more convenient. After that, we prepare a producer action report to tell the producer it's time to make another call.
Once the producer makes his initial follow-up call, he will check one of the boxes on his action report which will be used by the system operator to update the computer system. This will cause the management exception report to be by-passed. If the contact record is not updated within the 5 day time frame allowed, the management exception report will be printed, notifying the sales manager that this producer is falling behind on this prospect.
This is just a small sample of what can be done with a system like this one. To expand this simple example into a full integrated marketing action plan, we can add several more modules that would handle:
• new contacts;
• requests for referrals;
• names of people we met at trade shows;
• names of people who call us;
• after an appointment;
• after a new sale; and
• client maintenance to increase our retention.
The key to the success of this type of system is the flexibility available in the individual modules. Each module is built for your agency, for the way you want to do business. There should be nothing in the system that can't be changed to conform with the way you want it done!
Once a prospect is placed on your plan, the system will automatically manage the process and prevent your prospect from ever falling through the cracks.
This type of system can process literally thousands of prospects, all at different points in your marketing plans, all getting different letters from different producers each and every day—automatically! And when a producer begins to slip behind, a management exception report is generated to bring it to your attention; all according to your plan.
Summary
Successful selling does take more than natural talent. A marketing system, such as what I have described here, will provide you with a disciplined, organized approach to selling. With this you will outperform the greatest producer who doesn't understand this process.
This marketing system is what is responsible for my personal success story. It is market tested and proven successful. It will give you a place to start so you can put your marketing on autopilot.
The author
Steve Anderson has been a licensed insurance agent for more than 25 years and is executive editor of The Automated Agency Report. He helps agents maximize productivity and profits using practical technology. He can be reached at (615) 599-0085; e-mails are welcome at Steve@SteveAnderson.com; or visit his Web site at www.SteveAnderson.com.