6 Key Success Factors That Every Business Can Adopt
Selling to a businesses and individuals presents a huge market opportunity. But, this potentially lucrative market can be challenging and highly competitive. So how do you stand out from the crowd, grow and build a profitable business?
We have interviewed successful sales people to identify their ‘secrets of success’.
Many of these power sellers use sales automation tools, like JeffreyAI (a smart engagement platform we developed for businesses) to streamline repeat processes and free up their time to build better relationships, negotiate more favourable terms and, in some cases, free up more time to relax with friends and family.
From our research, we have identified 6 key success factors that every business can adopt. Most are obvious and probably you already have in place, some are great ideas that can set you apart from your competitors and a few can be game changers – such as implementing and automating the administrative processes required to sell more insurance, day in day out.
Get these steps in place and you’ll be able to grow your business by up to 250%, whilst spending less time selling.
The 6 key success factors that every business can adopt are:
These are the clients that are easy to deal with, they are profitable and come back to renew each year. They tell their friends about you and you get referral business. Describe their persona such as their interests, job profile, buying habits and as much information as you can.
Also describe the Clients you don’t want. They’re the switchers, the penny pinchers, the perpetually dissatisfied complainers. The ones that you keep for a year then never see again.
Figure out how you will qualify your prospective clients to separate the “Best Fit Client” from the “Bad Fit Client”. To discover whether you have a potential goldmine prospect or a likely money pit, ask open ended questions. How many brokers have they used over the years? How often have they switched policy? How important is price in their decision? Listen and learn from their answers.
Helpful Hints
By creating your ideal customer profile, you’ll narrow your focus and waste less time on the Clients that hurt your business. Time is precious so spend more time finding the Clients that will be good for business.
Using a cloud based platform such as JeffreyAI, means you can keep your Prospect and Clients in one place. You can keep contact information up to date and add useful information to help build solid relationships. For each contact, JeffreyAI keeps track of calls, reminders, inbound and outbound emails, meetings and all of the essential information necessary to keep a communication audit trail.
People buy from people they trust. That statement probably applies more to insurance than to most other professions. Insurance can be complex for clients to understand, continuously evolving and requires expert help in order to select the right policy for the client.
Becoming the Client’s Number One Trusted Advisor will ensure you retain a loyal client base, enjoy referral business and grow your share of your client’s spend on insurance.
Helpful Hints
Share useful information regularly with Clients. Make it relevant and timely. Don’t bamboozle your clients with complicated technical information. Segment your prospects by interest or by profile. Set reminders and alerts. Don’t simply shout about your business or sell the latest product. Help to educate and inform your clients.
JeffreyAI enables users to set up regular email communications to prospects and clients. You can send messages including documents to hundreds or even thousands of contacts and they will receive a personalised message.
Simply by being visible and building a reputation for being a trusted source of information, you will build a high calibre network of prospects and clients. Whether your client base is national, local or you operate in a specific niche market, asking happy clients for a referral is a trait shared by the most successful people in the sector.
Networking takes time and commitment. It does require keeping in touch on an ongoing basis. Inevitably you will you be referred onto prospects that will never convert or don’t fit your ideal client profile. You will spend time filtering out the wheat from the chaff. That can be time consuming and needs persistence.
One secret of the leading sales people – automate the admin. By spending more time speaking to prospects and less time working on administrative processes, you will inevitably create more profitable relationships and grow your income.
Helpful Hints
Invest time to set up processes using a smart CRM tool. With JeffreyAI, you can store your documents and share them with prospects and clients automatically. For example, JeffreyAI works like a personal assistant and can respond to inbound email enquiries 24×7 by sending personalized responses.
JeffreyAI can release you from the manual burden of keeping in touch with cold leads or warming up prospective clients by automatically scheduling emails, requesting meetings and setting reminders for you to make a call. Clever sales automation tools like JeffreyAI can track the effectiveness of each communication, highlight the best frequency of emails or even identify the best time of day to send an email and as a result convert more deals.
Complying with industry regulation while sharing the right marketing documentation demands meticulous housekeeping. Ensuring documents are accurate and up to date is essential to effective insurance sales, and therefore having a centralized store of your marketing documents, product literature, forms and other generic materials will save significant time, reduce errors and avoid the risk of sharing incorrect information with clients.
Even with small insurance firms, managing shared folders and documents presents a significant and unnecessary risk. Maintaining the filing structure, checking the version of the documents and monitoring which documents have been sent to which client contact consumes significant time. And that’s time away from winning and servicing Clients.
Helpful Hints
Setting up a simple cloud based repository for your essential documents is critical to effective communication with clients. A single place to store and share documents with colleagues, partners and clients will eliminate errors, reduce administration and convert more prospects into clients faster.
That’s where JeffreyAI can help. Where-ever you and your colleagues work, each authorized user can upload, manage and share documents in just a few clicks. Whether you’re in the office, on the road or onsite with clients, you’ll always have the right information at your fingertips. Make more sales presentations, respond faster to clients and proactively keep in touch – JeffreyAI is your sales assistant that takes care of the sales administration and frees you up to be more effective.
JeffreyAI’s online audit trail means you can quickly see what information has been shared with clients, so you work more effectively with your colleagues and can move quickly if there’s a sudden departure or staff absence.
How much time do you spend looking for contact phone numbers, emails and addresses? How much time would you free up if communicating with clients were only a click away? Speaking to those insurance super sellers, they rely on easy to use tools that automate simple tasks like making calls.
They remove blockages on their time and the everyday tasks of phoning clients can be a game changer. If you consider how many calls you make each day and how much time you waste finding phone numbers, making the call, then recording the outcome of the call including follow up tasks, you can quickly appreciate just what a time drain it can be.
Helpful Hints
Free up hours of your time each week by making calls to clients in just one click. With JeffreyAI, your client’s phone number and other contact details are not only held centrally so your team can access this information, but best of all, a call is a click away.
By automating calls, you also can focus more on the quality of the call than the quantity. You’ll be able to focus your attention on the client with all of their information on the screen in front of you. You can check every communication with the client, instantly share documents and set follow ups in minutes.
JeffreyAI releases you from burdensome tasks to spend more time winning more business.
It’s well known that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. So keeping track of the numbers is vital in order to improve your performance. That’s where manual tools like shared folders, Excel and email simply aren’t up to the job. These tools are easy to use but simply don’t allow you to track how you are performing. Without this information, it is impossible to know how to most effectively use your time to deliver the results you need.
Without a central view of your teams performance, there is no easy way to see who are your star performers and who is not pulling their weight.
The impact of this absence of information can impact your business in multiple ways. Firstly, some of your team will need some help to hit their numbers. This could mean they simply need some encouragement, guidance or specialist training or it could identify the team member who can’t keep up. Equally, the super stars in your team can be recognized and rewarded, perhaps sharing their own top tips. Having access to real time performance data creates the team ethic that delivers superior sales performance.
Helpful Hints
With JeffreyAI, your team’s performance is visible 24×7 and in real time. Whilst you may all be working remotely, having a clear view of how everyone is working is a game changer. It will make everyone accountable and incentivize the right behaviours that will deliver significant growth in revenues and profits.
A clear visual dashboard showing how every aspect of your sales and marketing will change how you operate forever. Keep an eye on the number of calls that convert to sales, how many emails result in new client wins and who in your team is performing best will really drive positive change for you and your team.
JeffreyAI will not only save you time, it will help enable you to be a more effective team.
About Carbon and Finch
Carbon and Finch provides software development for Microsoft Dynamics, C# and .Net. Carbon & Finch deliver high-quality, complex solutions for enterprises using Microsoft technologies across the globe. We have a proven record of accomplishment for delivering complex solutions across a wide range of industry sectors across the globe.
With delivery capacity covering a wide range of Microsoft-based technologies, including Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, Microsoft SQL Server, Windows Azure and Cloud-Based Services, our consulting team possesses a breadth of domain knowledge and experience associated with some of the highest quality skills and capabilities in the ERP industry today.
