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Agency Marketing Technology Results management Organizing information to assess results By Steve Anderson This series of columns has covered the key components necessary for an agency to create a successful marketing system. The components described so far have included prospect management, opportunity management, campaign management, and submission management. This article will describe the importance of results management. Results management allows you to organize the information gathered from each of the other components so that you can gather the knowledge you need to make changes to your marketing system and make sure that it continues to create a steady stream of prospects for your sales staff. Each of the previously described components ultimately will not be as successful as it could be without the ability to track the results produced. There are several areas within the system where results should be tracked. These include marketing results, producer results, and carrier results. Marketing results The only way for an agency to determine if its marketing is working is to track the results of each marketing activity. And by “working,” we mean generating revenue for the agency. For starters, when an individual or business contacts the agency for information about its services, the agency needs to ask where they learned about the agency. If the agency is sending out letters, you need to create a way to track if someone contacts the agency as a result of that letter. This is actually easier than it sounds. One simple way is to offer a piece of information or a “special report” as part of the incentive for them to contact the agency. If someone asks for that special report, you will be able to tie that individual to the particular promotion. This information then needs to be tracked as part of the file for that prospect. This is often called a source code, and when it is entered into the database as part of the information you track on a prospect, a report can be generated that will tell you which prospects responded to which marketing promotion. Identifying a trend where a higher number of prospects respond to a certain promotion will indicate that you need to run that promotion again because it’s the most successful. As you gather source information for all prospects who come to the agency throughout the year, you will begin to know with a higher degree of certainty what marketing activities are working and, more important, what is not working. You can then direct your marketing dollars to those activities that generate the most prospects for the agency. Tracking the results of every marketing activity that you undertake will take the guesswork out of the marketing process. One of the biggest mistakes agencies make in the marketing process is tiring of their marketing campaigns before the prospects do. Agency owners become bored with sending out the same marketing message over and over. They assume, incorrectly most of the time, that if they’re bored with the marketing message then their prospects must be bored also. Tracking the results from each message that is sent out will provide them with the information they need in order to know whether that marketing activity should be continued. Producer results The next area that must be tracked is the performance of the agency’s outside sales staff. In many of the agencies we visit, we find that producers are not managed very well. Producers almost always have sales goals that are established at the end of the previous year. What is rarely done is to determine how many prospects a producer will need throughout the year in order to meet the sales goal. We also seldom see the agency tracking the progress being made by the producer throughout the year. If a producer’s activities are being tracked accurately throughout the year, agency management should be able to produce a report at any point in time that will inform them of the progress being made by the producer. This snapshot report would show the producer’s year-to-date close ratio, the appointment-to-proposal ratio, the number of referrals received, the results of those referrals, and how many prospects the producer has in his or her pipeline. This report will also provide the sales manager a projection of where a producer will stand at the end of the year, based on his or her year-to-date performance and the number of prospects in the pipeline. If the producer falls behind, corrective steps can be taken immediately. Business partner results The last column’s discussion of submission management emphasized the importance of tracking the results of the submission you make on behalf of a prospect to a company. An important part of managing an agency is to manage the agency’s relationship with the various insurance companies it represents, as well as other markets you may use to place business. Many times a carrier field representative will come into the office and complain that the agency is submitting business to the carrier but is not successful in actually writing the business. If the agency is consistently tracking the final results of all submissions, it will know (and be able to share with the carrier) exactly what the results have been. This is good information for both the agency and the carrier. For example, if the agency has not been as successful with one carrier as with others, it will be able to tell that carrier how much of the business the agency wrote with other carriers and will be able to disclose the price difference. This will help the carrier adjust its pricing if necessary. An agency whose five components of a marketing system work well together will inevitably be successful in producing new business as well as retaining existing clients. Remember, nothing happens until a sale is made. And a producer can’t make a sale until he or she can sit face-to-face with a prospect who is “ready to buy.” A successful marketing system will provide a steady stream of prospects who are “ready to buy.” * The author |
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