The Life Insurance Industry employs nearly 22.5 lakh (2.25 million) people in India, of which 2.5 lakh are direct employees, and an additional 20 lakh are freelance agents. However, the productivity of the agents is extremely low with an average agent selling 2 policies a year. This low productivity is caused by various factors such as
- Complex and evolving products which the agents/advisors find hard to master quickly
- Low availability of updated product literature that can be shared easily
- Poor mobile networks making it difficult to access mentors for difficult situations
The risk of false promises (e.g. features that have been discontinued or misunderstood by the agent), or of selling a mismatched policy to a customer is high. This was especially true in the years 2001-2008, when the industry grew fast and regulation was light. Because of the missteps made by the industry, trust between insurance sellers and buyers (for whom it is a significant investment) becomes low. The industry followed (and largely still does) a commission-based model that has attracted a lot of people such as housewives, retirees and part-timers hoping to make additional income, rather than young, ambitious people who would make selling insurance a full-time job. They lack adequate training in sales skills such as lead generation, nurturing customers and educating them, understanding their situation and pitching the right policy, generating leads, closing deals, getting references etc. Further lack of on-field support leaves them further handicapped.
One of the failsafes followed by agents is to market to those with whom they have social capital - their friends and relatives. These are ‘low-hanging fruits’ for them because the buyer has an emotional attachment to the seller, and thus does not ask too many questions, and trusts their word. The cost of misrepresenting the product is also not high,as the customer is more forgiving. However, such sales only garner a low ticket size, because the buyer is doing it out of emotional compulsion and is willing only to invest the minimum necessary to keep the agent happy. It may lead to a situation where the buyer is not being adequately insured for their circumstances; while the seller is still unable to meet targets since their natural network is exhausted. The ability to upsell also disappears, because the seller’s social capital is exhausted. This we describe as the ‘Selfie Policy Syndrome’.
Once the seller approaches buyers outside their natural circle, their productivity plummets. They have no social capital left, they are unprepared for a relationship that is purely transactional and often unprepared to answer questions posed by resistant buyers. In the Indian insurance market, penetration is as low as 3% due to low awareness among customers.
Sales enablement helps the advisors break-free of this stranglehold. It does so in the following ways:
- Delivering training in ‘byte-sized portions’ portions, which can be accessed from home, rather than through classroom lectures or through long-format content.
- Role-plays that prepare the advisors for various situations and questions.
- Continuous monitoring of each sales call and integration with the CRM, allowing managers to intervene and advise the agents from time to time.
- Easy to customize sales content that can be shared with customers with their needs in focus.
- Training for asking for references and following up on those.
The platform an organization chooses, needs to be suitable for the vast majority of insurance agents who are part-timers and work from home. Through a combination of soft-skills training and product information, which can be learned at their own pace, insurance agents can promote themselves to subject matter experts and finally as trusted advisors. This helps them break free of the ‘selfie policy syndrome’, and be able to handle cold calls as well as leads provided to them by marketing channels.
Sharpsell.ai equips sales reps with personalized content to engage with customers and customized presentations to share with customers as per their needs. All the content is accessible through a single source - the sharpsell platform. Companies using Sharpsell.ai have seen an increase in sales productivity with higher number of products sold, higher ticket size, increased visibility on prospecting, reduced content creation cost, reduced time to first sale, reduced costs of training, and uncovering insights on product feedback.
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
zdxfhgfg
- sdnslk,xdv
- SDlknjsdv
- SDvlknj
- sdgdf v
