Charlie Conron has spent at least 10 years officially, and more years unofficially before that, studying the sales processes followed by financial services representatives in Canada.
In the beginning, his firm, Life Design Analysis Inc. (LDA) was firmly focused on illustrations, with a mandate to make insurance easy for consumers to understand and to provide information that would help them to make better decisions.
Today, LDA is an all-encompassing, advisor-focused business that also allows quoting, comparison and in-force policy management.
This vantage point has given the president and founder of LDA a unique view of what business advisors and insurance representatives do with their clients. In turn, LDA has allowed firms to transform offices, much like the office of his stepfather back in 2012. (Not very long ago, filing cabinets took up ample room in dusty offices and client files were kept in manila envelopes.)
Ten years, however, is not a lot of time in the grand scheme of things to effect that amount of change. Conron says speed and scale are two of the biggest elements impacting insurance advisory businesses today.
“We need to increase the scale at which we serve customers,” he says, referring specifically to mid-tier customers and their service providers. “Advisors need to adopt technology to make it easier for consumers who are either on the fence or who don’t have the motivation to make it through a traditional sales approach,” he says.
The question, then, is what is an advisor to do in the face of such change? Conron offers a number of helpful and insightful suggestions.
- Have patience.
First, he says implementation takes time and advisors need to have patience with technological developments in their practices. “Give it the time,” he says. “Some of these technology tools, when we’re making changes, they’re going to feel uncomfortable.”
- Don’t be afraid to evolve.
Not only are consumer expectations always evolving as clients touch and make contact with other technologies and conveniences, but regulatory obligations are also always changing.
“Technology is needed to scale up to keep up with these processes while still focusing on what’s important, which is serving clients and making sales,” he says. “The customer has evolved. Advisors need to evolve their sales practices, one, to keep up, and also to meet customers on their level.”
- Evaluate sales practices.
How advisors can ultimately drive their decision-making and sales pursuits, based on the information available, will depend on a thorough evaluation of their end-to-end sales practices.
- Map it out.
Do some brainstorming and map out those processes. “It’s a great exercise to draw the flowchart out and say, ‘these are the steps in my sales process,’” Conron says.
Look for pain points, he adds. “Are there systems out there that can take away three or four of them, recognizing that no one system might do everything?”
He says advisors almost universally find they could benefit from having a global view of their business with the ability to segment by needs, sales concepts, term renewal periods or other metrics. At the enterprise level, too, it can be helpful to know if every agent is doing a needs analysis, for example.
“Something like that can be a challenge for an organization. Are we upholding our compliance requirements?” he asks. Similarly, if a company or an individual is only presenting one product type as a solution to all clients, this can also be uncovered in reporting.
Conron encourages those evaluating their processes to keep it simple, seek a process that is familiar, and then evolve it, make it more accessible and look for ways to make that simple process faster.
“If you think about what an advisor would have done before technology, they would’ve drawn that illustration on a napkin,” he says. “Keep a record of it so that the advisor later, if they have to go back and prove why a recommendation was made, they will always have some system of record or some source of truth to refer to.”
- Check your mindset.
Conron says advisors will often think of a new piece of technology almost as a panacea, rather than part of a greater ontology.
Ontology: A set of concepts and categories in a subject area or domain that shows their properties and the relations between them.
Source: Google, Oxford Languages.
Instead, think of and evaluate each technology based on its own merits, keeping in mind that any change will require work on the advisor’s part. “We’ve built the tools to really help, but again, they do take advisor behaviour to change,” Conron says.
Also, not every technology is going to meet every single need in one package. Despite this, Conron encourages those evaluating what’s available to think about how each piece fits into the bigger picture. “Build that ontology for yourself,” he says.
- Adopt best-of-breed technologies.
In addition to adopting the best technologies you can, Conron says don’t be afraid to reach out and get help.
Moreover, start small – with one piece of technology or one process or one bit of functionality. Master it, build it into your ontology as Conron puts it, and then build on that starting point.
“You don’t necessarily have to overhaul the business, but can you use technology to gain more efficiency, increase sales or increase compliance?” he asks. “Can you move the needle? Because it will impact the business.”
- Partner where you can.
“There’s a lot of information that can be gleaned when you’re organized with your information,” he says, adding that distributors in particular who partner to deliver technology can yield some powerful results.
- Commit to tech processes, use them and believe in the process.
Technology adoption, whether you do it yourself or hire someone to help, is an approach advisors need to commit to and believe in because there is effort that goes into collecting data, but also into organizing and maintaining it.
“Once this in inherent in our processes, it becomes very easy, but again, it’s challenging from the start.”
Conron encourages those on this journey to adopt processes and have a clear vision, not just about the data they want to collect, but also what they’d like it to do for them. “That’s the advisor who will succeed.”
Managing data is a process of collection, classification and continuation, he adds. One of the big challenges advisors face is managing and updating latent data, a problem that is solved for larger, enterprise clients where that data is pulled from carriers monthly and classified for sales or service.
- Focus on top opportunities.
In-force policy data is some of the most useful information at an advisor’s fingertips. Conron says the global view of an advisor’s block of business is often cited as being the most valuable part of LDA’s offering, while the visualization elements – charts and quoting – make insurance fun. “It makes it easy for consumers.”
A strong customer relationship manager (CRM) is also valuable to help business owners in navigating nuances of the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL). (Bonus tip: Not to be a downer, but study up on implied consent.)
“You have all of this data at your hands. If we can organize it, we can build processes (and services) around this that make it easier for regular people to see the value in these products,” he says.
- Advocate for yourself.
LDA comes with a free trial, as do other systems. If you require resources or are experiencing pain points in your business, be vocal.
“Advisors can advocate more for themselves with their MGAs. A lot of these advisors struggle, maybe with that latency issue I talked about. Going to your MGA and expressing that you have this issue – a lot of times carriers need to hear this,” Conron says. “A lot of advisors’ frustrations are interdependent with carrier limitations,” he adds.
“Raising this issue with your MGA, with distributors, really helps a lot of solutions come to light.”
This Advisor Coach article was first published in the March 2023 edition of the Insurance Journal.
