Financial Services: Case Study
Business Challenge
This leading Retail Property and Casualty insurance team was facing very aggressive growth goals in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges: a shrinking market, changing consumer and market dynamics, negative growth, lower profits, expense pressure, staff readiness issues, operational challenges, a more conservative approach to interpreting regulatory requirements, and competitors outpacing them with regard to direct to consumer communication, pricing sophistication and digital marketing.
It needed to motivate its sales team and sales leaders to remain positive and focused -- and differentiated -- in order to expand business into new areas while waiting for the company to resolve what could have been crippling product challenges in its core business lines.
Solution
Working with what the client knew was a limited budget, we created a curriculum designed to support the client's change initiative that began with a consulting engagement to guide the executive team and mid-level managers through the change process by first understanding and gaining consensus around the team's Business Goals and Ojectives, the Challenges the team needed to address in order to achieve those Goals and Objectives, and the Strategic Initiatives underway or under consideration to address those Challenges. Once agreement was reached in those areas, we facilitated discussion across the leadership team to outline Roles and Responsibilities for the sales team, front line managers, mid-level managers and executive leadership.
Two waves of training were then delivered:
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Selling with Insights for all salespeople and sales managers essential in preparing a very tenured sales team to change how it engaged with agents, enabling them to more effectively leverage industry knowledge, better understand the agents' businesses and add more value for agents, differentiating themselves beyond products and services in order to expand existing relationships and increase sales results
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Developmental Coaching for all sales managers to reinforce the sales training
Sales managers, supported by the internal Learning and Development team, were also armed with reinforcement tools to recap and strengthen the Sellling with Insights skills across the team in a series of modules extending several months beyond the training.
Executive leadership was involved and visible throughout the engagement, kicking off and participating in all training sessions, while clearly communicating belief in the team's ability and celebrating sucesses. We also partnered with the inside insight development team to support them in developing insights that reinforced what was addressed in the Selling with Insights training.
Business Impact
Immediately following the training, salespeople left feeling energized and hopeful, believing in their ability to apply the concepts introduced to genuinely add value for agents and help agents grow their businesses, in turn, increasing the sales team's own sales results. Within three months of the training, cross-selling efforts have increased by 10%, overall sales are on track to achieve the targeted 5% growth while maintaining strong profit margins, and the company has already received a 200% return on its investment in training.