We’ve worked with over a thousand agencies in the past ten years, and if we’ve learned one thing, it’s that no two independent agencies are the same. That’s why we tailor the SIS Partner Platform experience for each client, getting to know their specific needs, and crafting a Platform to serve them and their customers in the best way possible.
Through the years, we’ve heard from many of our Partner agencies about their SIS Partner Platform experience. Here are a few of our most recent responses from those in the Partner Platform family.
Referrals are the gold standard of business. Nielsen found prospects are four times more likely to buy when referred by a friend – that’s a stat you want to get behind. But how do you adjust your insurance marketing strategies to hit at the 49 percent of consumers who say friends and family are their top brand awareness sources?
See some winning insurance marketing strategies in our post on “How Insurance Agents Get Clients”
Making Referrals Part of Your Insurance Marketing Strategies
We won’t pretend getting referrals is easy; it takes time and effort to cultivate the customer relationships that lead to referrals. However, there are some methods you can employ to streamline the process.
Are you asking the right questions in your prospecting? Find out in our post on the top five questions to ask
Get quick steps for retaining customers and gaining referrals on our blog
Get Essential Referral Tools with Partner Platform
We know the power of retaining customers and gaining referrals, which is why we equipped Partner Platform to help agency owners do just that. With a built-in Marketing Automation Manager to track and schedule engagement, integrated texting and email to capture every conversation, and Producer Results Manager CRM to manage and target sales pipeline, our Partner Platform agencies have retention and referral on lockdown.
See what else Partner Platform has to offer your agency – read what our clients have to say and contact us to schedule a demo today.
Selling is essential to growing your agency. A critical element to sales is understanding how prospective customers think and act. In our experience with Partner Platform agencies, many don’t have the best tools to follow how a prospect moves to a client in the “buyer’s journey.” This fairly predictable path has some critical points where you can either move or lose a potential customer.
We’ve thought about the buyer’s journey a lot here at SIS as we introduce new Partner Platform elements to help agencies succeed at each stage. With the help of our parent company, sales as a service provider NuGrowth Solutions, we’ve matched Partner Platform elements with the buyer’s journey in the table below.
Use this resource to inform your agency on how to leverage Partner Platform to move prospects from one stage to the next
Following the Buyer’s Journey with Partner Platform
| Stage | Description | Partner Platform Tool |
| Unengaged | Just a name on a list. This prospect hasn’t engaged with any element of your marketing or sales outreach. | Partner Connect, Marketing Automation Manager |
| Marketing Engaged | Prospects who engaged with some marketing content. These individuals need their interest nurtured to gain more data for sales scoring. | Marketing Automation Manager |
| Marketing Qualified | Those showing strong marketing engagement and are ready to move on to sales outreach. | Marketing Automation Manager, Producer Results Manager |
| Sales Engaged | Prospect who are in touch with your sales team and being actively nurtured for conversion. | Producer Results Manager |
| Active Opportunity | Someone who expressed interest in buying and are engaged at some level in the sales process. | Producer Results Manager, Proposal Creator |
| Customer | Customers need attention, too! Once they’re on-board, customers should be re-engaged regularly and monitored for cross-sell and referral opportunities. | Partner Connect (Client Portal, Agency Mobile App), Marketing Automation Manager |
An All-in-One Sales, Marketing, and Agency Management Tool
Beyond these sales and marketing specific capabilities, each stage in the buyer’s journey also benefits from Partner Platform’s integrated email and custom workflows to make data entry simple.
It’s hard to believe one system could have all these capabilities, but Partner Platform truly does cover agency needs across the sales, marketing, and agency management spectrum.
Find out more about each of our Partner Platform enhancements below – all integrated with our cloud-based, intuitive management system.
Contact us today via this simple form or at 800.747.7005, Option 6.
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.
Customer service is getting speedier and more personalized across industries. From banks to grocery stores, people expect to get their needs met almost immediately.
An Aspect Software report found 73% of customers want to solve their product or service issues on their own. And, 60% of customers prefer an automated self-service website or mobile app to get the job done.
These same customers are your customers. If you don’t have the insurance tech needed to match these growing expectations, you’ll be counted out. So, what tech do you need to keep up?
Read more on what customers want and how to choose the best insurance tech
Top Self-Service Insurance Tech for the Independent Agency
We’ve seen a lot change over our decades of service to independent agencies, but the recent jump in self-service tech is a whole new ballgame. We’re here to stay on top of these advances and equip our Partner agencies with the tools they need to serve their customers better. Below are the top self-service tools we’ve identified and our recent posts detailing the benefits and importance of each.
Increasing Your Customer Connection with Partner Connect
Our Partner agencies are on the cutting edge of customer self-service with tools like integrated texting, marketing automation, and email integration, and we’re stepping things up with our latest Partner Platform addition, Partner Connect.
Partner Connect is a multi-level offering that includes a custom client self-service portal, agency mobile app, and branded website designed for customer convenience, agency availability, and brand promotion.
Read more about Partner Connect here and get in touch with an SIS team member today to find out more.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to change many elements of our lives. For businesses, it created a quickening effect on plans to increase tech use and move to digital. With those changes, many agencies turned to their insurance websites as hubs for their business, whether or not their site was optimized to take on that level of responsibility.
As your agency evaluates how to shift to the “new normal,” consider these insurance website statistics and what they mean for your agency.
Your agency management system is among the most critical pieces of technology you use for your insurance software. Every day you rely on your agency management system to create certificates, write new business, and process claims, among other essential functions.
With such a valuable piece of technology, you want more than just a vendor or provider for your agency management system. You need a partner – a partner who focuses on long-term, mutual success. That’s what we are for our Partner Platform agencies – someone in the trenches with them and working for them to make their business run smoother.
We continue to explore the story behind our insurance agency software partners. In this post, we talked with independent insurance veteran Cheryl Koch. Cheryl founded Agency Management Resource Group to help independent agencies “achieve their goals and dreams.” With that motivation in common, we work with Cheryl and her team to educate and equip agencies for success.
When she was introduced to the Partner Platform team, Cheryl Koch saw an opportunity. Equipped with a wealth of training content for independent agencies, she knew she had just what so many Partner Platform agencies needed: personalized education. After holding our first “Ultimate Producer School” with Cheryl and her team, it was clear her expertise was the perfect fit.
I spoke with Cheryl to hear about her wealth of experience in the industry and how she connected with the Partner Platform community.