Tag Archives: sales

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Creating Marketing Systems

Every agency should be seeking ways to manage the marketing and sales activities within their organization. Following are some of my thoughts about what makes up a full prospect and client experience management system. These are some of the components that I see as necessary to adequately manage marketing activities for both new business and existing clients.

Customer experience management

Prospect Database: This is the basic level of contact and activity information on prospects. It is the first place to start and most agency management systems do an adequate job of allowing you to maintain this information.

Campaign Management: Campaigns allow you to create an automatic process that will put the producer’s name in front of a prospect consistently over time. Most prospects are not ready to buy on their first contact with your agency. This is not a new concept. As I was developing a new book of business in the early 90s, I used a campaign management process to mail a letter (it was the 90s!) every month or so to my prospects so I could stay in touch. I wrote a lot of business because I was slowly building trust and a relationship.

Marketing Automation: This is a broad term that identifies the ability for an agency to create a process that will gain a prospect’s attention, capture their information, and automatically follow up with the information they requested. Whenever you fill out a form on a website with your contact information so that you can receive information, you are participating in a marketing automation process. This type of marketing system will help fix the biggest marketing problem I see in agencies—follow-up failure. Follow-up failure is the reason most agency owners think Internet-generated leads don’t work.

Effectively managing the marketing/sales process is key to the long-term health of every agency.

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Opportunity Management: Every agency sales manager should be able to tell, at any point during the year, if a producer is on track to make their production goals. Also known as pipeline management, information is gathered (by a producer or someone else) on the status of existing prospects, how likely they are to become a client, and the amount of revenue generated. This information allows everyone to know if a producer has enough prospects in the pipeline to achieve their production goals.

There are many different marketing platforms that agencies are using to try and help manage their prospecting and client account rounding process.

There is no agency management system that I am aware of that manages these steps well. This has been a frustration of mine for years. And, it’s unrealistic to expect your agency will have the marketing functionality you need in those systems unless the vendors provide an open and well-documented API (Application Programming Interface).

Vendors hold your data hostage. You should be able to “plug in” any third-party platform you think will work best. Salesforce.com is good example of what will happen when a company opens up their platform to any third-party developer at no cost.

Finding ways to effectively manage all aspects of the marketing and sales process—for both prospects and current clients—is a key to the long-term health of every agency.

How do you handle your marketing/sales process?

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Is the Sales Funnel Obsolete?

“Youtility is massively useful information, provided for free, that creates long-term trust and kinship between your company and your customers.”—Youtility: Why Smart Marketing is about Help Not Hype by Jay Baer

From my very first days in the insurance industry when I began to learn how to sell insurance products, I was taught the marketing and sales funnel.

The sales funnel was a visual representation of the steps that you needed to lead a prospect through in order to get them to the point where you could close the sale. Once they made a buying decision, you learned how to make them an advocate of your agency. Suspect, prospect, customer, client, advocate—that was the process.

And it worked.

I used the sales funnel—or marketing ladder—to visualize the marketing and sales process. I have been a big fan of this type of thinking. In 1990 when I began to sell commercial insurance as a new producer at an agency in Texas, it was a core part of the marketing process I used to build my book. I believed in it so much that I began using it when I taught agents about marketing campaign management and marketing automation. I even wrote a series of articles for Rough Notes that is still available today.

Many insurance sales trainers continue to rely on the sales and marketing funnel as a key component of their sales process training.

But I suspect sales funnel thinking has been obsolete for a number of years; the industry just hasn’t come to accept and embrace this change. I believe the sales and marketing process has changed more dramatically in the last five years than in the previous 30.

Buying patterns have also changed drastically. The Internet allows consumers to begin their search for product information without us knowing they are a prospect. This change in information access may have broken the sales funnel as we know it. The big question is whether or not a sales funnel is still a viable model for the sales and marketing process.

The sales funnel relies on the theory that someone comes into the top of the funnel and sales fall out the bottom. But is that really true in today’s world? It seems to me that a large percentage of today’s consumers follow an erratic path of engagement with businesses that sometimes results in a purchase.

Jay Baer, in his book Youtility, states that “technology adoption has profoundly altered how consumers interact with information and with businesses.” He goes on to say: “In 2011 the Corporate Executive Board surveyed 1,900 B2B customers to uncover insights about purchasing behavior and found that customers will contact a sales rep only after independently completing 60% of the purchasing decision process.”

As I mentioned above, the first time I was truly responsible for creating sales was in 1990. Back then, the whole sales funnel was controlled by the sales person. You’d cold call somebody and manage the sales process all the way through the funnel. As the sales person, I had all the information the prospect wanted, including pricing and discount options. I controlled the sales process.

If Baer and others are correct—marketing by providing “massively useful information” is now key to helping hidden prospects find you and learn more about you and the products and services you offer. Useful marketing builds trust, and trust fosters relationships.

Today, successful sales is more about self-service marketing than ever before. To find and attract the invisible prospect you need to be able to be very helpful. And your prospect may not start at the top of your sales funnel. By the time you find out they are a prospect for your services they may have already gone through multiple marketing steps. They did the research on their own.

So, if the sales and marketing funnel is obsolete, what analogy works for the sales process today? Is it:

  • A neural network?
    A connection of neurons that work together to form the nervous system.
  • The Web?
    Massively hyperlinked pieces of information. (This is a reason your website is so important in today’s sales environment.)
  • The same funnel but a different progression?
    Customers now dictate how fast they descend to the final purchase decision. They often do so without assistance from your agency, making inbound marketing key.

The sales game has changed a lot. What do you think? Has the sales process fundamentally changed?

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Sell More by Not Selling

Your prospects and customers are bombarded with hundreds, if not thousands, of advertising messages every day. It wasn’t that long ago that you had to watch TV commercials because there was no other option. Today, Karen and I complain about having to watch “live” TV because we aren’t able to skip through the commercials.

Doug Kessler on Content Marketing

The connected consumer is able to ignore your marketing messages better than any consumer in the past. Getting attention—whether online, using direct mail, or meeting someone at a networking event—is harder today than it ever has been.

I am convinced that the way to grow your agency and market the products and services you offer in this new environment is to do less selling. People continue to want information. They just will not put up with being “sold.”

In this new environment, it is becoming apparent that people who educate and inform their prospects and clients are more successful. They highlight their expertise with videos, content-rich websites, social streams, blogs, ebooks, special reports, and images. This is called content marketing.

Doug Kessler on Content Marketing

Content marketing means creating and sharing valuable free content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell; in other words, you’re educating people so they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.

While copywriting techniques are often applied to content created for marketing purposes, we’re not talking about advertising in the traditional sense. In contrast to “interruption” marketing such as television commercials or direct mail, content marketing involves delivering requested information with independent value that creates trust, credibility, and authority for the business that provides that value.

Insurance agents play a key role in protecting a client’s financial future. Trust is a key factor in their buying decision. You have the power to elevate yourself on the Web to a position of trust and authority. You can interact and participate in conversations that other people begin on social platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, chat rooms, and forums.

The primary goal is to obtain their permission to deliver content via email or other media over time. Repeated and regular exposure builds a relevant relationship that provides multiple opportunities for conversion, rather than a “one-shot” all-or-nothing sales approach.

The key is to focus on buyers’ needs, not your own ego. Stop trying to sell your products and services. Don’t rely on interruption techniques. Instead, you should seek to deliver the right information to the right buyers at the right time when they are most receptive.

Content drives the Internet, and consumers are looking for information that solves a problem, not for immediate sales pitches. The trust, credibility, and authority that content marketing creates knocks down sales resistance, while providing a baseline introduction to the benefits of a particular product or service. Agencies can gain credibility and loyalty with consumers through content, and smart marketers think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audiences.

Don’t simply push product or low price. Teach people something. Share your expertise. It is counter-intuitive: You sell more when you stop selling.

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The New Sales Manager

Recently I had a conversation with Will Richard, an education consultant for The Society of CIC. We were discussing what agents need to do in order to be effective marketers. It seems that many agencies are having a hard time understanding how to best use the Internet as a marketing tool.

During our conversation, Will made a comment that got me thinking. He said that he believes the role of the traditional sales manager is going to change. For most successful agencies, a major success factor is a focus on sales. Some agencies even go so far as to hire a sales manager. In the past, sales managers have been responsible for motivating producers to sell more.

Enter the Internet. People today commonly use it to research and purchase insurance—a fact that will influence the new roles of the sales manager and producer.

“The new sales manager will be an effective Internet marketer and marketing system,” said Will. He went on to explain that the successful agency of the future will not rely simply on motivating producers to meet more people and sell more insurance. Traditional networking techniques that have worked well for many years are giving way to new techniques that don’t require face-to-face interaction.

This is especially true for small commercial accounts.

Selling vs. marketing
I teach a class called “Advanced Internet Marketing Techniques,” so I’ve spent quite a bit of time researching, learning, and then teaching other agents how the Internet can be an extremely effective marketing tool. The problem is that most agencies are not good marketers. They sell well, but they don’t know how to market.

Marketing is the process of identifying—out of the masses of people—those with whom you can create an interest in your product and service. The new sales manager will be a master at marketing so that prospects will flow into an agency.

The marketing skills you need to be successful aren’t hard to come by if you take the time to learn. As with anything, there are techniques and processes that work well—and others that used to work well but are no longer relevant.

I can count on one hand the number of agencies I feel are effective at marketing. This select group of agencies spends a tremendous amount of time learning, experimenting and testing, implementing—and then modifying and starting all over again.

Creating a stream of new prospects who are interested in your products and services will be a key to surviving and thriving in the current economic situation. Hiring more producers may be an outdated strategy. An additional strategy must be to work at learning how to market—and the Internet must be a key part of your plan.

I see great opportunities for agencies that are willing to embrace this trend, spend time learning about it, and then implement what is learned.