This year continued a trend of technology’s growing influence in the insurance market and all industries at large. We saw a shift where more clients embraced agency software and integrated it into their regular systems and processes. This growing interest and influence prompted our Partner Platform and SIS teams to ramp up our tech focus, including several blog posts on this highly relevant topic.
Essential Insurance Prospecting Software for Your Agency
You need new customers to stay in business. It’s a truth all agency owners know, and one that plagues many. Identifying and closing leads seems like a never-ending struggle.
Often, these same struggling owners aren’t investing in insurance prospecting software. Therein lies ones of their issues. Insurance and sales technology has exploded over the last decade, and anyone that hasn’t adopted these technologies will be left behind.
What are these essential insurance prospecting tools? We’ve outlined a few must-haves below.
Check out our best prospecting blogs in our post on “6 Key Blogs for Insurance Prospecting”
Marketing Automation
Effective marketing is integral to sales, and marketing automation is critical in modern marketing. With marketing automation, you can set up campaigns to target different audience segments, schedule messaging to deliver at critical points in the buyer’s journey, and gain volumes of valuable data. You can use this data to personalize outreach, yielding higher response and conversion rates.
Customer Relationship Management Tool (CRM)
If you’re in sales, you need a customer relationship management tool (CRM). CRMs are designed with sales in mind, created to track and nurture leads. Marketing automation and CRM tools need to be connected, sharing data, and working together to qualify and convert leads. CRMs are your centralized place for all prospecting activity, showing you where you stand with each individual prospect and overall. This full picture can tell you what methods are working, which need improvement, and what you can expect from leads in similar segments.
Read more on the nuances of prospecting as an independent agency here
Mobile Management System Access
We’ve all got our smartphones in our pocket, and successful agents need their agency management system there, too. Sales happen on-the-go, so you need to be able to get the info necessary to close a deal no matter where you are when you need it. Mobile management system access allows you to look up contact info and view and take notes on interactions among other pertinent actions.
Integrated Text and Email
The more information you have on interactions with each contact, the better. When texting and email messaging are integrated with your management system, you increase that data gathering. Integrated texting and email guarantee every message you send links to that contact without any extra work on your end.
Get tips on how to find prospecting opportunities in unexpected places
Proposal Creator
This one may seem disconnected from prospecting, but a proposal creator, in fact, hits right at your prospecting goal: making the sale. With a proposal creator, you can quickly create multiple options for a potential client and move through the underwriting process faster. When it comes to making your pitch, time is of the essence, so the quicker you can get a proposal into a prospect’s hands, the better.
A Partner in Your Corner
Our goal at SIS is to equip our Partner Platform agencies with the tools they need to bring in more business. That’s why we’ve integrated all these prospecting elements into our robust Partner Platform agency management tool.
Each of these capabilities came right from our Partner agencies, through interactions with our community at our National User Conference, Regional Learnings, and User Groups as part of our Partner Agents community.
Find out more about this vibrant community at partneragents.com. And, see how Partner Platform can help your agency grow by requesting a demo today.
Partner XE User Community Conference Recap
The 2019 Partner Community National Conference held May 9th-10th in Columbus, Ohio was a memorable event on many levels, including celebrating 10 years since the current leadership team acquired SIS and launched the Partner XE management system, precursor to the Partner Platform.
Collaboration and Innovation from Industry Leaders and Experts
I have many wonderful memories reflecting on the journey of the last decade, including the progress made to the Partner XE agency management system and the growth of the Partner Community. During our National User Conference, we celebrated all these accomplishments, but the main focus of the event was on continual improvement around serving our Partner clients today and into the future.
At the conference, attendees heard from industry influencers like Steve Anderson, Mary Eisenhart Belka of Eisenhart Consulting, Brad Ruben of Archway Computing, and Carey Wallace of Ohio Insurance Agents (OIA). We also held several panel discussions on perpetuation, group sessions on targeted topics like accounting and client engagement, as well as a unique presentation on leadership by John Rue from Built to Lead.
See what else we’ve been up to this year with a look at our 2019 Regional Learnings
Attendees hear a welcome address from SIS CEO, Alex Deak
Inspiration and Connection in the New Partner Platform
And if that wasn’t enough, over 30 learning sessions were standing room only, focused on helping Partner clients learn and grow. While the learning was going on, we introduced the new Partner Platform: a response to our Partner clients looking for a system that does great agency management as well as integrates more effective client retention and new business capabilities.
The fully integrated Partner Platform system includes great policy and financial management in Partner XE, simple and integrated sales and marketing capabilities in Partner XL, and innovative client self-service options in Partner Connect. The combination of all three delivers a seamless experience that stretches from prospect to renewal and covers everything in between.
Find out more about the Partner Community at partnetagents.com
Anticipation of the Innovation to Come
Thank you to all Partner clients and speakers who made the trip from all over the country to celebrate, collaborate, and innovate with us. We continue to receive an overwhelming volume of positive feedback, with attendees saying they look forward to returning next year, with more colleagues in toe.
We look forward to continuing the momentum in the Partner Community with more regional learning events, connecting, collaborating, and innovating the Partner Platform and growing the Partner Community for years to come.
Find out more about our community and the Partner Platform at sisparterplatform.com.
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Hiring for the Future: Adapting Strategies to Gain New Talent
The insurance industry has changed over the past 20 years. Paper files and phone calls have given way to digital processes, email, texting, and more. Your insurance support team’s needs have changed, too – or so we hope.
The average insurance agent is 59 years old and only a few years off from retirement. To keep your team fresh, you need to bring in younger agents. Soon enough you’ll have no choice – Millennials and Generation Z will account for 58 percent of the workforce by 2029. You need to “get with the program” to attract and keep young talent – but how?
How to Attract Young Hires….
Technology usage is the first thing new hires will notice. Members of the young workforce are used to using tech for business and leisure. They’ll expect you to provide more than a laptop and cell phone; they’ll look for paperless processes, modern communication and collaboration tools, and opportunities to get work done virtually.
Read more on going paperless – why your customers want it and how to get started
Young hires expect information to be found and shared easily through a centralized location. Leverage your agency management system to bridge the processing gap. Tap into your system’s ability to store files, capture emails, and add tasks among other capabilities. And, make texting part of your communication strategy, both internally and externally. This is an area where young hires will be savvy – they’ll expect to use texting for communicating with their team, lead generation, and closing deals.
The best thing you can do to attract and keep young talent is to embrace virtual work systems. Sales hinges on creating and growing relationships, so a virtual sales team may seem counterintuitive. However, as a virtual team your agents can connect more efficiently. Virtual work allows them to connect from anywhere, making it easier to bring meetings to clients and get work done while they wait. In less than ten years, it’s estimated 73 percent of businesses teams will have remote workers. Offering virtual work opportunities is not just smart; it’s inevitable.
Get more resources on how to make your agency virtual, yet personal
…And How to Keep Them
Getting Millennials and Gen Z to apply is only the first hurdle. Once you have a quality candidate in the door, how do you get them to say yes for years to come?
Start by updating your interview process. The work has changed, the workforce has changed, so how you interview needs to change, too. Focus more on how candidates work in a team and their ability to understand and leverage technology. Be sure to talk about how you’re team-focus and tech-adaptive, too. And, focus more on culture. One author found millennials were willing to take an over $7K pay cut to gain a better workplace culture. Now that’s leverage.
You’ll also need to update your onboarding. The first few months in any new position are challenging, so the smoother you can make the ride, the better. Culture again plays a key role. Be intentional about introducing new hires to team members, setting aside time to outline the processes and tools used within each environment.
Provide training + mentorship. Pair new hires up with someone to walk with them through training, serving as a guide to answer questions along the way. This pairing provides a double benefit to you: new hires feel connected, and veterans get a refresher on your tools and processes. Assuming they have a positive experience, new hires can later pay-it-forward to the next fresh team member.
Don’t forget about your long-term employees – help them transition to new tech and processes, too
Helping Your Team Grow
Growing your team is about more than adding new people to your staff contact list, it’s about listening and providing people what they need to improve. Meet up regularly with old and new team members, both individually and as a group. This simple act shows you care – and that goes a long way.
We know how important it is to listen and connect because that’s what we do at SIS: listen and learn to mutually grow. Through our workgroups, Regional Learnings, and forums, we focus on staying in touch with our Partner Platform community. Like any community, when our clients grow, we do, too.
Find out more about the Partner community– read our client stories and connect with us at 800.747.7005, Option 6 or
Recent Articles
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Prospecting in any industry takes a combination of the right “stuff” (technology, data, people) and the right execution (systems and processes). Though it may be tempting, purchasing the best insurance prospecting software isn’t a solution on its own; you and your team need to understand how to leverage it.
We’ve worked with countless agencies to help them get their insurance prospecting software to work with and for them. Here are some common pitfalls we see in agencies struggling to put their software to work.
What is the Future of Insurance Software?
The year 2020 was unique in many ways, one of which was how the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the use of technology across industries. This was just the beginning. We continue to see insurance software emerge as a decisive factor among agencies. Many...