6 steps to selling the seller.

Despite the proliferation of online buying, the need for a trusted salesperson for high-consideration products and services is still with us and becoming even greater than ever. In the face of media barrages from the likes of GEICO and Progressive, this may seem counterintuitive.

But 78% of the time, even auto insurance, which is well understood and almost a commodity, is sold by a real, flesh-and-blood agent.¹ And brokers for health insurance report that the number of calls they receive has quadrupled since the health reform bill was enacted last March.²

If your products require the value that only an agent, broker or other advisor can add, there’s opportunity in nurturing them – and peril in casting a blind eye to their needs. Below are six steps to cultivating sales intermediaries to your advantage. The key to each is embedding them with metrics to know at which stage you’re succeeding and where improvements need to be made.

• Announce and inform. Whether you’re recruiting new salespeople or reacquainting the ones you have, get their attention through an impactful proposition delivered by email. While “opens” and “click-throughs” can be measured as an indicator of success, the overall goal here is to secure a meeting.For campaigns to intermediaries, we’ve experienced opens of more than 30% and click-through rates exceeding 10% of the original number of emails sent. Opens and click-throughs depend on a variety of factors including the quality of your list and the strength of your offer. These statistics offer some guidance:
  

  Sample Email Open and Click Rates
  Industry	Open rates (%)	Click rates (%)
  Business & Finance	15.5	2.8
  Insurance	20.9	3.0
  Medical, Dental & Healthcare	13.8	2.6
  Health & Fitness	20.1	3.1
  Marketing & Advertising	18.8	4.1

  Source: MailChimp®, The Rocket Science Group, 2010

• Persuade. Whether face-to-face or remote, captivate your prospects with a presentation that highlights your value proposition and competitive advantage. Your best presentation is a conversation that reveals what’s in it for them. It leads them to the self-evident conclusion that they need to try your product or sign a selling agreement.
• Help them succeed. Often the best way to build your business is to help them build theirs. After the products and services that you offer and the commissions you pay, your most sought-after value-add can be programs and ideas that they can use with their customers. These can come in the form of turnkey seminar kits, publications and educational tools. Provide a welcome tour on your dedicated producer site to make them easy to access and use.
• Retain. Ongoing success means repeat sales. Once your investment in capturing an intermediary is covered, maximize it by offering new ideas for practice building — particularly to your best performers and high potentials. In your next sales season, set a plan to move your B-tier producers up to the A-Team. Elevating tiers can be highly profitable. A company we know is looking to increase sales 13% just by elevating their Cs to Bs.
• Try incentives. Incentives get noticed, and get results. Whether they are of high marquee value at a nominal cost or a sweepstakes, they can give you the boost you need to improve click-through rates, land meetings or increase product usage. When all other factors were constant, we experienced an 8x increase in sales appointment setting through the use of nominal incentives.
• Incite your own salespeople. Your sales force is your customer too. A critically important one. If they’re going to fascinate and captivate the people they’re selling to, they need to be invigorated as well. Next time you kick off a sales campaign, start by energizing them.

How do you cultivate the people who sell your product or service? We want to hear from you.

¹ JGC Group, March 2010

² Getting a Guide for the Jungle of Individual Health Policies, The New York Times, September 10, 2010