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Agency Marketing Technology Submission management Effectively managing the submission process increases the probablility of success By Steve Anderso One of the unique aspects of the insurance industry is that every agent must make two distinct sales presentations in order to successfully write a new account. The first presentation is to the company underwriter. Only after “selling” the underwriter on the account is a producer able to make a presentation to the prospect/customer. Many times it isn’t possible to succeed at making both sales. Either the underwriter doesn’t like the business or the business doesn’t like the coverage and/or the price. It is a very frustrating aspect of this business. Over the last few months, this series of columns has described some of the elements necessary for a successful marketing system. This fourth article in the series focuses on managing the submission process. Good submission management means that the agency can create effective submissions, deliver them quickly and easily to the underwriter, track the status of the submission at different carriers, and track the final results of the submission. Creating submissions The first step is to present your company underwriter with the information needed to make an informed decision. Treat your submission as a proposal to the underwriter. You should spend as much time putting the submission together as you do putting together the final proposal to your client. Your submission creates a first impression of the account with the underwriter. If it doesn’t include all the information the underwriter needs, in an easy to read format so he or she can get a picture of the business quickly, the underwriter will either put it at the bottom of the stack or decline it outright. We provide several types of summary information on our submissions, which have proven to be very helpful. They include: Description of operations: Use this to really sell the account to your underwriter. This description should include the basics about the business—what the business actually does, who the management is, what process they use, as well as what your impression is about the business. Also describe your opportunity with this business. Are the prospects dissatisfied with their current agent? Have you uncovered coverage gaps that the underwriter needs to know about in order to create a more complete proposal? Risk survey questionnaire: This is a useful and effective tool to “round out” the information you provide an underwriter. Several tools are available to provide you with questions tailored to the type of business. This detailed information, on those accounts where it makes sense, will definitely move your submission to the top of the stack. Loss summary exhibit: Another vital piece of information every underwriter needs is the account’s loss history. A simple spreadsheet template can provide you with a format for a multi-year loss summary. The advantage of using spreadsheet software to create this summary is that you (or your CSRs) don’t have to perform all of the calculations. The template is set up to perform them automatically. You simply have to enter the premium and losses for each year. All of the totals and percentages are completed for you. Other information: It may make sense to include a number of other pieces of information to help the underwriter make a favorable decision. In some instances, it would be helpful to include the exact location of the prospect’s operation. Mapping software can be useful here. Several Web sites now make it easy to enter an address and map the specific location. These sites also may include satellite photos of the area. With this picture of the location, the underwriter does not have to guess at where the property is located and what the surrounding area looks like. Delivering submissions The days of using Federal Express to send your submission to an underwriter essentially are gone. The standard practice today is to create an electronic version of the submission and attach it to an e-mail that is delivered to the underwriter. Problems with this process remain. Because some carriers limit the size of e-mail attachments, your submission may not be delivered in the form you thought it would be. In addition, you may not be notified that your e-mail was not delivered successfully. If this is a problem with a carrier, you may need to set up a follow-up system to verify that the underwriter actually did receive your document. Some document management vendors have created an effective solution to the e-mail attachment problem. With these systems the agency creates the submission and uploads it to a Web site folder for the prospect. They then send an e-mail to the underwriter(s) with an embedded link that takes the underwriter to the correct Web site page where he or she can download the full submission. This bypasses the e-mail size limitation and at the same time provides the agency with information on when the underwriter actually downloaded the submission. Tracking the submission There are two parts to tracking submissions. The first part is knowing where your submission is in the carrier’s workflow. While some management systems provide a process for tracking submissions, many agencies use a simple Word document or Excel spreadsheet that lists every carrier to whom they have sent the submission. Agency personnel then go in and update the file whenever anyone talks with the underwriter about the account. This seems to work well and is an easy visual indication for what is happening on the account. The second part of submission tracking is being able to keep detailed results for the carriers the agency represents. Many times a carrier field representative will come into the office and complain that the agency is submitting business to the carrier but they are not being successful in actually writing the business. If the agency is tracking the final results of all submissions, they will be able to know (and share with the carrier) exactly what the results have been. This is good information both for the agency and for the carrier. For example, if the agency has not been as successful with a carrier, they will be able to tell the carrier how much of the business the agency wrote with other carriers and be able to tell them the price difference. This will help the carrier adjust its pricing if necessary. Effectively managing the overall submission process will help maximize agency resources and provide the information that management needs to be successful. * The author |
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