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MARKETING Building "sales muscle" The Hartford's new game plan powers sales reps and agents to peak performance By Elisabeth Boone, CPCU If you were almost 200 years old, staying in peak condition probably wouldn’t be at the top of your list. But if you were a Fortune 100 property/casualty insurer that’s been in the game for almost two centuries, you’d understand the critical need for each part of your organization to perform at peak efficiency. That’s exactly how The Hartford Financial Services Group sees its challenge as it approaches its bicentennial in 2010. Dana Drago, executive vice president of sales and distribution for The Hartford’s property and casualty operations, believes it’s essential to develop a strong “sales muscle” to match her company’s underwriting and claims abilities. Drago, who joined The Hartford in 2004 after 24 years with Bank of America, is spearheading an initiative to create greater sales effectiveness within the company’s personal and commercial insurance distribution system. Since she came on board, Drago and her team have instituted an aggressive, results-driven plan aimed at building more efficient processes, providing field sales representatives more tools and training opportunities, and developing ways for sales reps to spend more time on their primary objective: working with agents to build their business. The plan developed by Drago and her team is called Sales Excellence. In an exclusive interview with Rough Notes, Drago provided details of the plan and explained how it’s re-energizing The Hartford’s sales organization. First, a bit of background. Throughout her banking career, Drago held key positions in sales, underwriting, marketing, and strategy across multiple segments. In 2000 she became head of a division with responsibility for two million small business customers and $3.5 billion in revenue. “Insurance is part of the financial services industry,” Drago says. “There are a lot of differences, as I learned from day one. However, both insurance and banking serve the same customers: individuals, small business owners, and middle market clients. So I understand their needs well, which helps in providing agents the right products and services to meet those needs.” Drago’s skills and experience made her a perfect match for a major property/casualty company that was eager to take its sales operation to the next level. Among Drago’s many impressive credentials is a Black Belt in Six Sigma. Although it would be no surprise to learn that Drago had achieved this highest honor in martial arts, Six Sigma is another kind of strategy. “It’s about truly understanding who your customers are, what they want, and making sure that you deliver it. It’s a process to help you make improvements, deliver the right solutions, and meet changing needs,” Drago explains. Drago offers an example of how an insurer like The Hartford can use Six Sigma to improve a process. “Say we’re appointing new agents, and it’s taking too long to get a relationship up and running. It’s frustrating for them and for us. We use the Six Sigma approach to identify any steps in the new appointment process that do not add value. We ask: ‘How do we streamline the process so an agent can be offering our products to customers in one week rather than one month?’” Six Sigma, Drago notes, “is about improving efficiencies while also improving quality.” Success drivers Based on her conversations with field representatives, Drago says, she believes there are four factors that drive an insurer’s sales success. “First is spending more time with agents, listening to them, and understanding their needs. Second is delivering solutions that help them grow. Third, whatever we say we’re going to do, we must do it well every time.” Finally, she says, “We can’t focus just on making it work well in the sales organization—it has to work well everywhere in the company, because we’re all in it together. “If we have great salespeople but are lacking in our underwriting or claims process or don’t have a strong service organization that can respond to customers’ needs and questions, that’s what people will remember. All of these factors must be connected in what we call Linked Excellence,” Drago says. “Every group has to deliver for the customer.” What’s in the tool kit? The Sales Excellence program developed by Drago and her team has several key elements, each of which is critical to the success of the overall plan and to the results achieved by the individual field sales representative. “These are the tools that make it happen,” she says with a smile. Sales Playbook is a blueprint of best practices, operating routines, and specific sales plays. “We conducted over 300 interviews with all of our sales reps and sales underwriters, finding out from them what the best practices are and what gets in their way—all of which was aimed at making Sales Excellence a real-world solution ‘built by the field, for the field,’” Drago explains. “From the input we gathered in those interviews, we were able to tell our field people: ‘This is what our best people do, so this is your game plan for success.’” The Sales Playbook, she continues, “tells reps how to do book consolidations, how to be successful with a new appointment, and how to reach CSRs by understanding what’s important to them and delivering on it.” The Playbook, she adds, is a powerful tool for new sales reps, particularly those who come from outside the insurance industry. “It’s a living, breathing resource that we continually update based on what our best people are doing.” Sales Solution Team provides support for non-sales activities like administrative tasks, pre-call preparation, and the new agent appointment process. “In an organization the size of The Hartford, a field sales rep or underwriter is the face of the company to its agents and often is the primary point person for getting answers to many of their questions or concerns,” Drago comments. “In fact, we found that our sales reps were spending at least five hours a week doing things like this—hours they could be spending on building business with their agents. The Sales Solution Team is a group of people behind the scenes who serve as a back room to handle problems and provide information and support to our sales reps. “Their success is based on the field people’s success,” Drago explains. “They are motivated, caring people who really want to wow our sales reps.” The reaction from the field sounded a lot like “wow” to Drago. “When we rolled this program out early in 2005, we got a great reaction from our sales reps,” she recalls. “One of them said, ‘Now you’re enabling us to do what we need—spend time with our agents so they can deliver!’” Smart Cards offers a common set of metrics with individualized diagnostic tools and forecasting capabilities that provide real-time data on current status, allowing field staff to adjust their strategies to meet their goals. “Being an insurance company, we have lots of reports,” Drago says. “We can slice and dice information hundreds of ways. Now we’ve consolidated all that data in one place where an individual rep, sales manager, or RVP can find out exactly how things stack up against personal goals or the goals of agents, and what they can do about it.” For example, Drago says, “There’s a diagnostic tool that can tell if we’re not approving enough submissions in one agency, or if we don’t have enough flow coming in from another. Here are the issues, and here are the options for resolving them. Smart Cards tell you where you are, why you’re there, and what you can do about it.” Realignment of Territories to create geographic efficiency and promote more sales calls and visits. “We looked at how many agents our sales reps had in their territories and made adjustments where necessary so that the reps could spend more time with their agents,” Drago says. “In realigning territories, we always focus on helping our reps maintain strong relationships with their agents.” Use of Strategic Research to better understand what is important to agents and the clients they serve. “We studied a large body of research from industry trade organizations, and we conducted our own studies among about 2,000 principals, producers, and CSRs to find out what’s really important to them by segment in working with one carrier versus another,” Drago explains. “Then we had the participants evaluate how well we performed in those areas. “In many cases we were better than our competitors,” she recalls. “But in general, agents told us that we all had a lot of room for improvement. Those agent responses formed the basis for the plans we built out for the next two years in terms of what we focused on for personal lines, small commercial, and middle market business.” The challenge of change No matter how old, how large, or how successful, an organization that takes the initiative to implement change is bound to confront challenges. “Two things present challenges,” Drago says. “One is just change generally.” With Sales Excellence, she notes, “There’s tremendous buy-in, but it’s still a change. And anytime you’re trying to make changes that affect 1,500 people, it doesn’t just happen in one day. So the second challenge is time. We’re a great underwriting company now, but that didn’t happen overnight. Similarly, it will take some time as we focus on developing our sales muscle.” Introducing Sales Excellence, Drago remarks, wasn’t simply a matter of sending e-mails out to field people. “We visited each of our 30 offices across the country, and at each office we spent four days going through the entire change process, which we call an ‘install.’” This definitely wasn’t a one-way exercise, she emphasizes. “We listened and took away their ideas, while giving back the support they needed so they could spend more time with their agents,” Drago explains. “Most people say that sales is an art,” Drago observes. “I believe sales is a discipline, and it’s a process. The art comes in with the individual’s personality. If you don’t have the right process and the right discipline, you’re not going to have the sales results you want.” Sharpening the saw The kind of top-down, fundamental change represented by Drago’s Sales Excellence initiative is, she believes, essential for insurers that compete in today’s market. “Over the years, there has been significant consolidation in the property/casualty market, and the strongest carriers are getting stronger,” she observes. “With the market softening, the competition is keen, especially in personal lines where products are becoming increasingly commoditized. “That means agents and their CSRs want to offer solutions that are focused on more than just price,” Drago remarks. “They want to sell value and service; they want a better understanding of what a company can provide. Our challenge is to show them what is unique about our products and services.” At The Hartford, Drago says, “What this all adds up to is Sales Excellence. As a company, we’re focused on product innovation, speed to market, having the best talent, providing superior claims handling, and spending more visible time with our customers—the independent agents. The people who translate those values into something the agent remembers are our sales reps and sales underwriters. So Sales Excellence is more important in a softer market, because it’s tougher than a hard market.” What do agents—the company’s valued partners—think about Sales Excellence? Drago recounts some comments made to her by agents at a recent meeting in Phoenix. “They said, ‘Something’s changed in the last few years. You seem more committed than ever; you spend more time with us—it just feels different. We feel like we’re more important to you.’” And perhaps the highest praise of all came from an agent who was talking about his sales rep, Drago says. “He told me: ‘Your rep understands our business better than we do.’ “The bottom line comes down to execution,” Drago declares. “If we don’t deliver well for our agents every day, nothing matters. That’s what Sales Excellence is all about.” * For more information: |
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