Increasing revenue is a key to having a successful agency, and there are only two ways to increase sales. You either have to increase your closing ratio or increase the number of deals you work on. The best way to increase your closing ratio is with sales training; the best way to increase the number of deals you work on is with technology that helps you manage relationships with a larger number of prospects.

You see, successful selling takes more than just natural talent. The reason for my success as a producer was not my skill and ability as a salesman; it was because I was able to create a selling system that provided me with a disciplined, organized approach to building relationships with a larger number of prospects than I could have on my own.

You already have a sales system whether you realize it or not. To understand how you can use technology to support the sales process, it’s helpful to understand the underlying philosophy in your current method of selling. Almost all selling efforts can be simplified into these steps:

Step 1: Identify a prospect and obtain a policy expiration date.

Step 2: Contact prospects 90 to 120 days before their expiration date to try and work on their accounts.

Step 3: If they don’t want you to quote this year, put them into a follow-up file and call next year at about the same time.

Step 4: If you provide a proposal, try and close the sale. If you are unsuccessful and you want to write the business, put them back into your follow-up file and call again next year.
While this sales system can break down at any step, in many agencies the most common point of failure is in the follow-up activities required in steps three and four. It is hard to consistently follow up with a large number of prospects when using a manual system. If a producer is responsible for the follow-up activities, 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, and 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 computer systems to retain client and prospect information. While this may help a few producers become more productive, it will not, by itself, achieve increased sales. These systems are designed to gather customer, policy, and accounting information, not to help you sell insurance.

An effective sales system must automatically manage all contact activities for each prospect. With such a system in place, you are assured that nothing and no individual prospect "falls through the cracks." The follow-up activities for each contact (letters, e-mails, phone calls, etc.) for all producers are automatically produced by the system, without any effort by the individual producers. The producer then has three responsibilities: Sign the letters so they can be mailed; make phone calls listed in the follow-up reports; and update the system operator about the future course of events that should be taken for each prospect by selecting from the options presented to them.

I want to be clear. Creating a computer-aided marketing system means more than just using your computer to send prospects sales letters. It requires a new way of thinking about the sales and marketing process. Let’s look at the specifics of how you can create such a system for your agency. In any marketing system there are three possible ways to respond to each contact with a customer or prospect.

1. 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."

2. No: 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.

3. Wait or No Response: This response may happen in 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 should also be entered. Second, and a more likely scenario, the prospect does not respond to your contact (probably a letter) at all. The system would know there has been no response and automatically take the next step as you have outlined.

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.

Combining these various action steps based on how your agency wants to operate its sales system will create your marketing system. Since every action has only three 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 or you will know he is not a high quality prospect and you can stop wasting your time and money trying to sell to him. This type of system will automatically take care of relationship building activities with prospects so you can spend your time talking face-to-face with prospects who are ready to listen.

Before your clients can be targeted with a particular marketing plan, the plan itself must be conceived and established. You must decide what series of actions you wish to occur when marketing your particular

product to a group of selected prospects. As an example, Table 1 shows a simple plan for contacting a new prospect.
Before you call on one of these prospects, send a series of three short letters, five days apart, to create some basic familiarity with your agency, the products and services offered, and the producer who will be contacting them. Five days after the last letter, your producer should receive a report indicating what has transpired, and that it is time to contact the prospect.

Now you may be wondering what happens after the producer makes the phone call. Well, as you can see in Table 1, on Event 22 the contact is scheduled to appear on a Management Exception Report, and to reappear on that report every five days. This report tells agency management that the producer has not told the computer what to do next with this contact.

After the producer makes his initial follow-up call, he will check one of the follow-up actions listed on the report. This will cause the Management Exception Report to be bypassed. If the contact record is not updated within the five-day timeframe allowed, the Management Exception Report will be printed, notifying the sales manger that this producer is slipping behind on this prospect.
This is just a small sample of what can be done with a campaign management system. To develop this simple example into a full working marketing system, you can add several more modules that would handle new contacts, requests for referrals, people you met at trade shows, people who call you, after an appointment, after a new sale, client maintenance to increase your retention, and the list goes on and on!

The key to the success of this type of system is the flexibility available in the individual marketing modules. Each module needs to be built for your agency, for the way you want to do business. Everything in the system should be able to be changed to conform to the way you want it done!

This type of system can literally process 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.

Successful selling does take more than natural talent. A campaign management system will provide you with a disciplined, organized approach to selling. Increasing the number of prospects you work with will lead to increased revenue, and technology can help. In future issues of TAARReport we will be looking at specific tools that will help you increase your revenue.