It takes a significant amount of time, effort, and resources to secure and onboard an agent before they sell anything. Many carriers have had experiences in which an agent sells one opportunity and then never sells another product. How does a company avoid this loss of ROI? And how can a carrier take an agent to the next level to become (and stay) productive? 

Extend and grow your relationship with agents

Even when recruiting experienced insurance professionals, there is a lot to learn about your unique products and business processes. In addition to Trailhead, which can provide your agents with access to digestible content about your product offerings and help them learn to begin to write business for you, it is important to coach — not simply educate — agents. The majority of training can be easily lost within a week. This is why it is essential to establish mentoring for new agents and offer shadowing with established agents.

Additionally, establish training and coaching tutorials throughout the sales journey to extend learning on products, services, and skills. Automate suggestions based on data mined from agent interactions, provide metrics on key success and improvement factors; based on metrics, suggest training references and refreshers.

Be sure to celebrate wins and successes, as well as to cultivate and promote gamification and incentive programs — keeping focus on current programs through data and messaging available in Salesforce. Create new agent SPIF programs to help drive towards new hire targets; these don’t all have to be tied directly to a production goal. Incentivize agents to meet targets where additional corporate focus is needed and track individual and corporate progress.

Invest in processes and technology to make agents’ jobs easier 

Selling can be challenging enough without having to navigate various complex systems that are unclear and don’t talk to one another. Set up technologies that are easy to use, provide up-to-date information, and can be used from any device. Minimize clicks and swipes with easy-to-navigate UI, ensure technology setup is optimized for all mobile devices, and enable calendar and email simplification integration. How?

CalendarAnything, a Salesforce scheduling app, makes it easy to sync and filter calendars and create views. You can simplify meeting coordination with a drag-and-drop scheduler to pull in contacts to the calendar, automatically create appointments, and send email invites to contact. You can also utilize the workflow to automatically create tasks and next steps for defined processes to simplify agent actions. A few examples:

• New product launch 
• Policy renewal
• Client follow-up reminder
• Birthdays and anniversaries
• Weather notifications: send emails on behalf of the agent with additional information about weather-related events

You may consider incorporating specific functions that help make agents successful, such as:

• Lead disbursement and visibility into commissions. Aligning leads distributed to the most effective agents based on multiple criteria, as well as analytics on cross/upsell opportunities and insight into commissions.
• Electronic opportunity intake and status throughout underwriting. Visibility to scoring and underwriting (i.e., pizza tracker); notifications to the agent when something is stuck via text, push notification, etc.
• 360-degree view of agent’s book that is linked to PAS for client/policy detail.

It’s time to see more ROI on agents. Need more advice on leveraging Salesforce to help attract, hire, and help your agents succeed?