Know Your Sales Funnel

For any business trying to align back-office cost to serve with distributor or agent profitability, sales data is critical to creating new a new more productive service model. Moreover, many carriers have yet to recognize and value that without insight into activity on new third-party distribution platforms, they are literally “flying blind” and keeping their fingers crossed in the drive to hit this year’s sales numbers.

Unfortunately, most organizations are only now beginning the journey when it comes to sales data insight and analytics.

Scope and Depth

So where to start?

What different dimensions of sales data are critical for insurance carriers and distributors alike, given deeper insight can influence sales funnel yield, better servicing, and competitive advantage?

One way to look at the landscape is between “scope” and “depth.”

The life and annuity sector should be focusing on a scope of data insight that extends well beyond the internal operation. For instance, insurance carriers and distributors should be looking to stretch their scope across the following frame:

• Activity within the internal sales operation, such as sales desk analytics.
• Activity of external customers within the footprint, such as producer activity.
• External activity taking place on third-party platforms, such as product quoting data, peer set competitive analytics, proposal, and customer insight.
• Point-of-sale insight, which can better inform product positioning, training and higher conversion rates

Simply put, life and annuity organizations should look to extend their collection of data well beyond what happens within their own organizational domain. Indeed, over the next five years, perhaps the most critical and valuable data will be aggregated from what is happening on third-party platforms and what is happening at the point of sale with the consumer.

If an organization can’t understand why it is winning and losing at the “point of the sales decision,” then it cannot drive higher sales yield in the funnel.

Second, carriers and distributors should also be looking at “depth.”

This means collecting data insight across the entire pre-sales engagement lifecycle, including but not limited to the following areas:

• Accessible, compliant third-party sources for lead data augmentation.
• Agency profiling and trend analysis — to understand opportunity and penetration.
• Prospecting activity of consumers and producers — such as content engagement.
• Wholesaler activity — to improve closing rates and operational productivity.
• Sales desk performance and illustration analytics.
• Application-to-in-force data insight — to “close the loop.”

Life and annuity organizations that build their data analytics program with a broader vision of scope and depth will be best positioned for outsized returns in the coming decade.

Malcolm Forbes stated, “the best vision is insight.”

Without leveraging both internal and external sales data insight, the life and annuity sector has little hope of driving sales transformation in the digital age.

(Image: Shutterstock)

Matt Essick is the chief marketing officer at Ensight, a sales and data acceleration technology company that serves insurers and national distributors.