The cutthroat competition within the insurance industry has made sales unnecessarily complicated. Not only insurance sales agents have to push the sales cart but they also perform several non-revenue generating tasks. This includes recording all their activities, producing performance reports, creating sales collateral, and analyzing data.
To meet their sales goals and complete all their errands, many sales agents arrive early and stay late at the office. Despite the long hours, they still suffer. But what’s worse than that is even with the busy sales force, insurance agencies have become less productive.
Take a look at the findings of Docurated’s State of the Sales Productivity Report that has revealed some unflattering details:
Salespeople spend only 32% of their time selling and pitching to potential customers.
While 20% of their working hours spent on admin tasks like updating CRM for agencies, generating reports, and searching for content to include in their sales presentation.
This means if you are running a 500-person company it leads to $25 million in lost revenue opportunities and a waste of over $2.5M in annual salary costs. Yet, insurance agencies are blind to these invisible costs. Nevertheless, they face the challenge of empowering their sales force to spend more time selling.
Below are three ways insurance companies can enable their sales team to make more sales in less time.
| Also Read: On-Premises vs. Cloud CRM: Which is Right for You? |
Make Prospecting Effortless
For years, entry-level sales agents are doing the same mindless tasks over and over again: Copy-paste the same content in another email. It’s a familiar story. All they have been doing is swapping in first names and business names to make it feel more personalized. They do this somewhere between 50 to 300 times a day.
Of course, it shows their grit and commitment but despite the low cost of labour and deploying an army of junior salespeople to prospect is inefficient. Instead, all of this can and should be automated. Once the salesperson hits ‘go’ the outbound email marketing campaign should run itself until it gets a meaningful response.
Or you can simply switch to a CRM for agencies that let you create and embed web contact forms without writing a single line of code. These web-to-lead-forms will capture leads directly into your customer relationship management software without even pursuing someone. Now, this actually works like 80-20 rule (80% result with 20% effort).
Allow your sales agents to take advantage of the CRM system for the agency to make prospecting painless and effortless. That way, your salespeople will be able to concentrate on the harder parts of the sales process, guiding clients to close the deal.
Measure Team Productivity
To shave hours off of your sales team’s work week, you need to be aware of their habits. A viable solution is to make use of technology and get accurate objective activity data on your team’s behaviour. But the study shows that every week salespeople waste eight hours of their work on non-productive activities like CRM management and data entry.
Though it reflects that tech is the cause of the problem, it is also the solution. For instance, Funnel CRM allow its users to automate manual work. The intelligent CRM for agencies automatically fetches customer information from the web contact forms to create their profiles. It’s a task that otherwise would have been tedious to perform manually.
Furthermore, Funnel CRM can come in handy for salespeople who don’t want their work-related messages to get mixed with their private messages. Since it properly labels each lead by their stage in the sales process: new, negotiation, won or lost. Knowing all your work inquiries have a special place to reside in the CRM will help your sales force to better manage their time.
| Also Read: Oracle Database Administrator Roles And Responsibilities |
Get Email Open and Click Details
On calls, it’s much easier for salespeople to recognize if the potential customers are interested or reluctant. Over emails, getting a gist of a prospect’s sentiment is way more challenging. To measure how engaging your latest email burst was, track email opens and clicks.
Experts are of the view that email trackers or CRM for agencies with email tracking capabilities can greatly shave hours off of your sales team work week. This can prove quite useful, since many works within their inboxes or CRMs for the large part of their day.
Following up with hot leads and prospects is a time-consuming process, but with a smart solution, salespeople can instantly determine where to best focus their efforts. Email trackers will allow your sales team to see the status of sent emails like when they are opened.
Wondering, how this can prove beneficial for salespeople? Well, if sales agents see their email is viewed shortly after pressing the send button its worth their time to pick up the phone right away because this is very likely to be a ‘hot lead’ that requires their immediate attention.
With email tracking, they will be able to better manage their time and send a personalized follow-up to engage potential clients. Plus, it will allow you to identify and mark the unresponsive contacts as dead leads so you stop pursuing them.
We hope all these time-saving strategies will enable your sales reps to make the most of their extra work hours and win more clients.
