Agency to Agency…
An interview with NASPA Board Member Steve Kramer,
Kramer Insurance Agency, Langhorne, PA.
Length of time on Partner XE: 1 year
Question: How do you use Partner XE to market your business?
CROSS-SELL
You want multiple policies per client because the higher your ratio is per household the higher your retention rate becomes. The Search features within Partner can be used to identify where you are missing out on client business so you can actively cross-sell to them. For example, you can run a sort of clients with auto, but not home coverage and then actively begin pursing their home policies as well. It works the same with commercial lines too. Do they have a business policy, but not commercial auto? Market accordingly.
WIN BACK LOST ACCOUNTS
The other thing we do is when a client becomes inactive… if they left us for one reason or another we do a “win back” campaign. We can run a search in Partner XE to identify these folks, we already have their basic information in the system, so we will go back and call them and say “hey, how can we win back your business.”
RENEW & RETAIN
We use the Partner XE Scheduling tools to set reminders… to keep what we need to do and on what day. Client renewals for example, if a renewal is coming up on the third of February we are calling him on the third of January so we are ahead of the game, not behind.
We also do quarterly contacts with our clients. We schedule in Partner when to call them or when it’s time to reconnect – the system keeps us on a schedule.
The NOTES feature really helps us with customer service. When a client calls in the first thing we are getting into the habit of doing is opening the notes to the last conversation. It helps you from a marketing standpoint. If you have that history in front of you and know that client better when you are talking to them it gives you a more professional position working with the client.
GET NEW BUSINESS
We do a lot of email marketing. We send out an average of 30,000 targeted emails per month. One specific campaign we do is to used car auto dealer. We have six or seven different solutions for them, from liability insurance to odometer insurance. We design the emails and the advertising on a one year campaign, hitting them hard in the beginning then spreading it out over time so that the client isn’t getting hammered with an email every day and getting annoyed. We find that it takes three to four sometimes even six months until we get a bite. We are chumming the waters and waiting for the fish to bite.
We probably get six auto dealers a month calling and out of those six we will close four of them.
We cannot do bulk emails directly out of the Partner XE system (yet… that’s one thing I’d love to see happen!) but we can export our prospect lists out of XE and then import them into our emailing system. Once they come back as leads it is all tracked in Partner XE.
