To insurance agents, time is capital. To successful insurance agents, time is never enough.
On a busy day, an insurance agent may spend a few hours on the phone. The nature of the calls may vary from a simple enquiry to complicated requests. There are also probably hundreds of emails that need to be answered before the end of the day. As far as insurance agents are concerned, time is always a scarcity.
Insurance producers can look at other avenues to help them become more productive. One of the greatly untapped resources is sales assistants. Your insurance sales assistant is someone you can depend on to help you grow your business.
The role of sales assistant today involves a lot more than just answering phones and mailing correspondence, the job scope is very much expanded to meet the dynamic business needs and higher expectation of the customers.
Insurance sales assistants should not be confined to performing administrative functions but to step up to shoulder more responsibilities. Their ability to take on new and complex duties helps them acquire new skills and makes them appreciate them job much better.
An effective sales assistant can help an agent build profitable business by performing the following functions:
(a) Follow up
Sales assistants can help you compile and keep track of the clients' latest information such as weddings, divorces, child births, deaths, etc. Such information can translate into sales opportunities.
Serving as another pair of your eyes or ears, your sales assistant helps to make sure the information you have is accurate and most up-to-date. He or she can also be another pair of your arms or legs to juggle a number of tasks that may otherwise disrupt your concentration on sales generating activities.
(b) Paperwork
To insurance agents, sales happen in the field. The more they spend time meeting up with their customers, the more sales they generate. Sales assistants free up insurance agents' time so that the agents are not bogged down with mountains of paperwork.
It is an opportunity cost to you when the time you could have spent on prospecting and meeting up with your customers is used in sorting information or input account data. Your sales assistant can take these tasks off your plate.
(c) Better customer service
Sales assistants are the first contact point with the customers in the event you are not available to attend to customers' requests or complaints from the customers. With the help of sales assistants, your customers get prompt advice and services and this enhances your service quality.
An organized sales assistant is an integral part in your insurance business. While you are in the field working hard to bring in business, your sales assistant makes sure your customers' service needs are met. Your role and that of your sales assistant are mutually complementary and interdependent.
(d) Sales tools support
Sales assistants can also, with the advice from insurance agents, conduct research, develop prospecting materials and create sales presentation. This is a win-win arrangement where the sales assistants pick up new skills when working on the assignment and you perfect your sales presentation scripts.
With proper delegation, sales assistants will not view a new task an additional burden but an opportunity to better themselves. On the other hand, you can focus your energy to do things that you have been professionally trained to do such as preparing complicated estate planning or retirement planning for your clients.
(d) Improve persistency
Generally an insurance company sends policyholders reminder notice to inform them that their premium payments are due. A sales assistant can call the customers on personal level and this helps promote better business relations with the customers that lead to better persistency.
Sales assistants may be the first ones to receive complaints from customers. Having the first hand information regarding the customers' concerns, they are the first line of defense to defuse customers' complaints. You need good persistency to have profitable business.
Finally, competent sales assistants are valuable assets to your business. Their efforts and contributions should be appropriately recognized and rewarded. They should also be encouraged to go for professional development in correspondence with business or industrial changes. Investing in your sales assistants is investing in your business.
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