10PLAYS TO ACCELERATEINSURANCE SALES GROWTH

WINNING PLAYS FROM INSURANCE INDUSTRY EXPERTS

2Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

Meet the Experts

Michael D’Arelli—

EXECUTIVE DIRECTORAMERICAN AGENTS ALLIANCE

Brandt Minnich, CPCU—

VICE PRESIDENT OF MARKETINGMERCURY INSURANCE

Maury Hennessy—

EXECUTIVE RECRUITERTHE CARLISLE GROUP RECRUITING

Stuart Ganis—

DIRECTOR, BUSINESS DEVELOPMENTVELOCIFY

Tommy McDonald—

VICE PRESIDENTMARSHBERRY

Ryan McClintock—

CEOKANOPY INSURANCE

Adam Kerr—

TRAINING SUPERVISORPLYMOUTH ROCK ASSURANCE

William J. Hold, CRM, CISR—

VICE PRESIDENTTHE NATIONAL ALLIANCE OF INSUR-

ANCE EDUCATION & RESEARCH

David Williams—

AGENCY OWNERALLSTATE

Daniel Sanchez—

MARKETING MANAGERRELIANT GENERAL INSURANCE SERVICES

3Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

Game Time

It’s a whole new ballgame in today‘s insurance market when compared to only a few years ago. The pace of

business is accelerating and buyer expectations are changing. Today’s buyers expect near real-time response

to their inquiries, personalized choices and advice.

With football season underway we were inspired to call upon some of the best minds in our industry for

coaching advice to help insurance professionals stay in top shape. We’ve collected a playbook of their best

strategies for winning at the sales game to inspire you and your team to top performance.

Top Insurance Performers Share Tips from Their Winning Playbooks

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4Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

Michael D’Arelli@agentsallianceExecutive Director,American Agents Alliance

As an insurance agent or broker, what sort of value do you create for prospective insurance buyers? If you want to move away from the limitations of the price-driven sale, then you must create real value by accumulating knowledge and becoming the very best in your niche. Know your products inside out and sideways and never stop developing professionally. Make every effort to build relationships and become a trusted advisor instead of simply being a vendor filling orders for commoditized, price driven insurance.

With a solid foundation of knowledge to make you an expert, you can rework your sales approach. For example, approach prospects by asking, “What’s important about insurance to you?” Do not break the awkward silence after you ask the question, as they soul search for a minute trying to answer the question. Why? Because their answer will be very revealing; it will tell you what is important to them, what motivates them to purchase. If they say they need it by law, you’ll learn they likely don’t value coverage and could just as easily leave you tomorrow for any lower-priced online competition.

What sort of prospects do you want in your book? You need to determine if you prefer prospects that read the menu from right to left at the restaurant, or prospects that value the protection and counsel you are providing to ensure that their family and business are protected.

Create value to avoid the price-driven sale

Winning Play #1

5Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Winning Play #2

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The structured sales process

David Williams@AllstateAgency Owner,Allstate

No matter what the sport, knowing the current score at every point in the game is essential to winning because that knowledge informs the team’s strategy and next play. The same lessons apply to business.I’m a firm believer that understanding and knowing the score every day in your business is critical to success.

We track and measure critical parts of our business so that we can make a change the moment we see a negative trend and quickly turn it around. We also track and measure productivity of our team members -- not only as a tool to hold them accountable to a certain standard -- but also recognize the positive behaviors that are contributing to results.

By tracking calls per hour, average time on the phone, contact rates, and conversion rates we can measure productivity across all of our team members.

We also track and measure the exact return on investment (ROI) of each and every one of our marketing sources and know which source or lead provider is providing us the highest contact and conversion rates. If you want to increase your productivity and success, make sure you know the score in all aspects of the acquisition side of your business.

6Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Brandt Minnich, CPCU@MercuryInsVice President of Marketing,Mercury Insurance

Knowledgeable agencies and producers understand the need for a disciplined and consistent sales approach and exceptional execution to succeed in today’s environment. Lead your agency by requiring that the right processes are learned in basic sales training and ensure they are consistently being followed. Here are a few that should be part of every agent and producer’s tool box:

• Always ask for and obtain referrals. Reward customers for sending people to your agency.• Differentiate your agency by your diligent follow through. Follow up on unsold leads. Continue marketing

to potential customers. Don’t give up if they don’t buy day one.• Cross sell your existing book. This is a significant lead source right at your fingertips.• Measure your results. Hold your staff accountable to execute these processes daily. • Further develop skill sets. Use coaching tools like call recording and find teachable moments to help your

team grow.

Agencies that relentlessly follow these timeless principles grow, regardless of market dynamics.

Get back to basics

Winning Play #3

7Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Maury HennessyExecutive Recruiter,The Carlisle Group Recruiting

You’re a pro at managing your business and you can spot great sales talent during an interview. However, many sales people can talk a good game, but are they really producers who can grow your business profitably?

One sure way to determine if a producer is credible in what they say is to require them to provide you with documentation of their success. Every good sales producer knows his/her premium production to the penny. Ask them to share copies of their monthly premium goals and results (after they remove any client names and other confidential or proprietary information).

A true producer will be proud to show you their results and accomplishments including loss and retention ratios. In order to verify their income and production, require that they provide a copy of their W-2’s or 1099’s for the past two years, being sure to blackout any reference to their social security information.

Inspecting what you expect is one sure way to know you are hiring top talent.

Hire a high-performing producer

Winning Play #4

8Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Winning Play #5

WINNING PLAY #

Stuart Ganis@StuartGanisDirector, Business Development,Velocify

Building and developing a world-class sales process starts by studying the behaviors of your top producers and what they’re doing to drive sales success. Here are some best practices that when combined, increase revenue every time:

• Speed: Develop a strategy to contact prospects quicker than your competition. Research shows that conversion rates increase by 391% when leads are called in under a minute.

• Persistence: Be appropriately persistent so you’re maximizing every lead, but not wasting resources.• Consistency: Managing your process and ensuring that everyone in the agency is following it, is a key

component to your success.• Cross-Sell: Adding a component to sell additional lines of business will help you retain the business you

work so hard to acquire.• Referrals: The best way to get referrals is to ask for them. Make it a part of your process on every call.

Focusing on these core principles for your sales process will grow your book of business. Automating most of your sales process will guide your team and remove any guesswork, so you can focus on selling instead of managing the entire step-by-step processes.

Build a world-class sales process

9Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Tommy McDonaldVice President,MarshBerry

Agency leaders with mediocre sales performance who lack the ability to win profitable business typically have not built quality depth within their organization that institutionalizes the sales process. The agency then relies on strong relationship-based sales people without much stickiness to the agency’s value proposition.

Defining the firm’s differentiators, developing a process around these competitive advantages, and then building a team-based sales approach that can clearly articulate, sell and reinforce the value proposition is needed to overcome this challenge.

Throughout this process, agency leaders may come to the conclusion that they may not have the right players on the team. You need sales people that can sell more than $100,000 in new business production, service people that can execute client-facing service work and manage a relationship, and a quality internal process for executing on a clearly defined value-added service platform that proactively engages the insured.

Winning agencies build depth within their organization from the top to the bottom.

Identify differentiators to help outperform quality competition

Winning Play #6

10Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Daniel Sanchez@dsanchez1006Marketing Manager,Reliant General Insurance Services

As with any consumer-focused business, retaining insurance clients is essential in order to build a profitable book of business. Cross-selling a variety of valued products to every client will directly influence retention in your agency. They tell you they want Auto only…but they also need homeowners/renters coverage. They want commercial…but they need life & health coverage too. Don’t be an order-taker. Let them know you have other valuable insurance products that fit their “needs,” and quote every policy they need. Don’t forget that you’re the insurance professional they sought out. Sell them more than one insurance product and watch your renewal income grow!

Bulk up your team’s expertise for improved business performance

Winning Play #7

11Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Winning Play #8

WINNING PLAY #

Ryan McClintockCEO,Kanopy Insurance

In the past, most insurance agencies grew their business by finding ways to bring warm prospects into the agency for an easy going face-to-face sit down with an agent. An agent who is accustomed to those warm inbound opportunities will almost always fail when working outbound opportunities. It’s a totally different sales dynamic. It’s important to know the difference and hire accordingly. One way to succeed is to hire hunters, not gatherers. A hunter is not afraid of rejection or picking up the phone and understands more no’s lead to more yes’s. Gatherers don’t typically have the “fight” within them to put in the work and tenacity required to work online leads. Hunters on the other hand have the innate intangibles that will make an outbound call center successful.

The right talent can help you become an outbound prospecting success story

12Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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Adam Kerr@PlymouthRockTraining Supervisor,Plymouth Rock Assurance

Take the long term viewWhen investing in leads, you should have a pre-determined plan of how you will measure performance. One of the aspects of that plan is how long you are going to wait until you label a campaign profitable or unprofitable. Different lead types will have much different development times. For example, if you are engaging in a branding campaign and advertising one central phone number, it will take a long time to measure the success or failure of that program. The same is true of internet or other purchased leads. Sales teams may have a lot of great activity on those leads, but they may not close those leads for days, weeks or months. If you don’t give a marketing campaign enough time to develop and mature, you’ll miss out on campaigns that yield a positive return on investment (ROI). By taking a long-term approach to measuring your return on marketing investment, you are going to accelerate your insurance sales growth by identifying effective marketing investments.

Winning Play #9

13Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

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William J. Hold, CRM, CISR@WjholdSCICVice PresidentThe National Alliance for Insurance Education & Research

Winning Play #10

Sell from a point of knowledgeYou wouldn’t let a well-meaning third-grader perform your root canal. Why, then, would you entrust the well-being of your family or business to an insurance salesperson who is clueless about how to protect your interests? Competent salespeople understand their clients’ situations and know how to protect them with insurance and risk management strategies.

Studies show that selling from a point of knowledge can, in fact, double your sales production. Selling from a point of knowledge is an effective game plan to add value to your service. When selling on price alone, you can’t build the trust you need to accelerate your sales growth.

14Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

Winning Play #

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INSURANCE PLAYBOOK

Coaches Corner

Velocify IntelligentSales Automation

Lead ScoringFunnel Insights

Lead DistributionSales ActivityPrioritization

IntegratedSales Dialer

Lead De-Dupe

Lead Capture

AutomatedGuided Selling

Name@NameTitle, Company

WINNING PLAY #

We want to thank our distinguished experts for sharing so many inspiring strategies to help insurance professionals succeed. These ideas are sure to energize your team’s performance as you build your business for tomorrow. Though many of these ideas can be implemented without a big technology outlay, achieving scale and sales process efficiency is much easier with the support of the right software. Using technology efficiently frees up your team’s time to pursue the winning plays recommended here. At Velocify, we provide technology that helps insurance professionals keep pace with the speed of opportunity and increase revenue by driving rapid lead response, increased selling discipline, improved productivity, and actionable selling insights.

What’s your winning game plan?

15Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

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Email: sales@velocify.com

Web: velocify.com

Blog: velocify.com/blog

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16Winning Plays for the Insurance Industry

velocify.comVelocify is a market-leading provider of cloud-based intelligent sales software, designed for high-velocity sales environments. Velocify

helps sales teams keep pace with the speed of opportunity and increase revenue by driving rapid lead response, increased selling

discipline, improved productivity, and actionable selling insights. The company has helped more than 1,500 companies across a variety of

industries improve customer acquisition practices and sales performance. Velocify was recently recognized as one of the fastest growing

companies in North America by Deloitte and a Best Place to Work by the Los Angeles Business Journal. For more information, please visit

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