Insurance Carriers: Keeping Products Top-of-Mind for your Distribution Partners with Salesforce

Whether your products are going to market via agents, brokers, or IMOs, enabling your distribution partners through relationship-building and product visibility can be vital for sales success.

Our Salesforce Consulting team has helped many organizations like yours achieve these goals, and have found that there are four common needs that Insurance Carriers look to Salesforce to solve:

Get a clearer picture of the Distribution Partners who sell your products. 
Keep your products top of mind for the Distribution Partners who sell for you.
Quickly and easily answer sales and service-related questions for the Distribution Partners who sell for you.
Make business decisions based on accurate data

In our last blog, How to Know Your Distribution Partners & Improve Business Performance with Salesforce, we discussed the first and most common problem we hear, “I need a clearer picture of the agents who sell our products.” 

The second most common problem we hear is, “I need to keep my products top of mind for the agents who sell for us."

Once you have a “360-degree view” of those agents and their sales activity, Salesforce recommends enhancing your Salesforce setup with tools that allow you to use found data to keep your products top of mind:

• Marketing Automation Tool (i.e., Marketing Cloud, Pardot) By utilizing a tool like Marketing Cloud, your data can keep up with your fast-paced agents and customers using real-time insights and actionable analytics. With enhanced email marketing, journeys, and lead nurturing capabilities, it is easier than ever to create seamless customer experiences across every touchpoint. Automation can enable your communications with your distribution partners, and in turn allow them to streamline their campaigns and win deals.
  
• Mapping Tool (i.e., Salesforce Maps) Salesforce Maps gives your organization the opportunity to visualize data efficiently, build smart visit plans, accelerate revenue, and manage complex use cases across the regions where your distribution partners sell.

Implementing the Tools You Need

There are several benefits to having a Marketing Automation Tool like the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, but getting the tool implemented efficiently and configuring it to fit your unique needs can be a challenge. A Salesforce Consulting partner will have the knowledge and experience to find the perfect match between Salesforce tools and product configuration. After gaining a better understanding of your organization’s processes and unique functions, your Salesforce Consultant will be able to create a system that works how you work, while enabling growth and improving efficiencies.

Configuration to Drive Success

Once you have the tools, it can be overwhelming to get started with all the new features and feel confident that you are utilizing them most efficiently. Your Salesforce Partner can help build “customer journeys”, which are like sequences or workflows, and marketing campaigns that allow for automation throughout your sales cycle. The goal will be to find a combination of tools and custom configurations that enable your field teams to manage, sell to, and support your Distribution Partners, for example:

• Marketing Team 
  • Design Journeys based on production (re-engagement, top agents, etc.) 
  • Design Journeys based on incentive programs 
  • Design Journeys based on cross sell / up-sell opportunities 
• Field Sales team 
  • Outbound calls to keep products top-of-mind 
  • Wholesaler campaigns (“I see you have sold $x in product A, let me tell you about product B and why that would be good for your customers.”)
  • Master list of products sold (product representation in Salesforce) 

Find a rhythm that is right for you with the help of a Salesforce Consultant, then rinse & repeat.

Let’s make it happen!

With the help of a certified consultant, you will see opportunities to use Salesforce to empower your business and sales processes. A Salesforce Consulting team, like our experts here at Ascend Technologies, will seek to understand your business, how you work, and what you do. Our team will observe your challenges, goals, and objectives so that we can build the solutions and processes that best fit your organization. We will build campaigns to help you market your products to Distribution Partners based on production levels, incentive programs, and implement tools for field teams to manage, sell to, and support the Distribution Partner. Contact us today for a free starting consultation.