SaleSource Marketing Success for Agents

Jim Rose, sales consultant to Automated Selling Process LLC, puts it quite simply when asked about how agents go about their business.

“What sells is the relationship,” Rose said.

While personal contact in the insurance business is still of the utmost importance, agents can only be in one place at a time. As agents try more and more to be so many things to so many clients, time is of the essence.

Therefore, it would make sense for agents to have their hands on the latest product to help make their sales successful. That is where Milwaukee-based Automated Selling Process LLC comes into play.

Schuppler continued, “It is a corporation designed to enhance the selling process and customer relations for agents and any other type of business that has a sales force,” David Schuppler, company president, said. The company’s brand name for its product is SaleSource.

“In the old days, it was so people-intensive, that if you had somebody on vacation, you lost track of where you were in the campaign. With SaleSource, it is a no-brainer — the computer keeps track of it.” As Rose notes, “The program is designed to sell the agent.”

The software product creates and maintains relationships through consistent, timely and personalized contact through pre-planned strategies, including several ready-to-use campaigns, including: Commercial, Workers’ Compensation, Life, Health, Long Term Care, Keep in Touch, Cross Marketing, Lost Client and Thanks for New Business.

“Once an agent purchases the product, which is five or six discs, including the leads the agent wants to go after, they’re installed for him or her and within an hour, we’ve got them up and running and producing the letters, and so on to begin that process,” Schuppler commented. The number of letters per campaign has always been an issue.

“We found that sending three letters out was the right amount,” Rose said. “One to two don’t work well, and four to five were too expensive.”

Are some agents intimidated by the Internet?

According to Schuppler, the current software is written in an older platform.

“However, we are in the process of upgrading to a new platform, and Word ’97, 2000, and XP. Another option will be HTML. Within three to six months we hope to be there,” Schuppler said. “You’ve got some segment of agents out there who are not comfortable with the Internet. We’re going to satisfy that segment and then for those who want to have SaleSource on the Internet, that’s going to be available for that portion of the market, also.”

Schuppler, who started in the insurance business in 1963, said that company research indicates that today there is probably 40 percent of agents who are not comfortable with the Internet in a hosting environment — A.S.P., Application Service Provider. “Part of it is that they didn’t want to release their data which is understandable.”

Schuppler pointed out that a recent study showed that it “takes more than five contacts to make a sale, however, 48 percent of all sales people give up after the first contact and 90 percent quit after the fourth attempt, just a step or two away from the sale. Those 10 percent who go on to make the extra effort and contacts are making 80 percent of the sales.”

In putting the software system together, Schuppler said agent input was very important.

“I’ll give you two terms that come across resoundingly — you’ve got to make it simple and its got to work. Part of the problem over the years is that the sales plans were just too complex; programs were not self-administrative; the system designed was too complicated — when programmers put together software like this, they make it a programmer’s dream but a salesperson’s nightmare; and the fourth is management can’t measure results. We’ve addressed all those issues.”

Scott Jones, president of California-based IMACO Insurance Services, commented that the product “allows for us to market to and stay in contact with a large group of people.”

“It is a non-invasive approach to marketing and it puts our name in front of people consistently without being over aggressively. I think people like the idea we’re consistently in touch with them and I think it helps separate us from the crowd.”

When asked how the company has grown and where it is headed, Schuppler noted that, “Clearly, you’ve got a shrinking agency market out there because of the acquisitions, but that is an opportunity for us.

Where you have agencies that were two, three, four people that are combining with larger agencies, they need a sales center, which is what SaleSource is, a marketing tool to generate new business even in a hard market.”

As for competition for the SaleSource product, Schuppler noted that there is only one other company that he knows of that is involved in this market segment.

“We’ve got features in the system that people really have difficulty replicating,” Schuppler added.

For Jones and his office, the product has been a real benefit.

“In addition to marketing, we use it to do mid-term letters and track renewals. It’s our primary source of renewal tracking.”

“We’ve been able to reach a much larger database of prospects than we could have done previously. With any kind of manual system, there’s no way we could do what we do.”

For more information on SaleSource, call (414) 258-5996.