Tele- Marketing in Zimbabwe an Insurance viewpoint: Striking a balance.
By Hillary Mtandwa
A common misconception around tele-marketing is that it is there to replace the traditional way of selling insurance which is through brokers and agents. This misconception is far from the truth, on actual the two approaches to selling complement each other. It is the job of the astute marketer to ensure that there is an unbroken chain within the sales function that identifies leads, screen leads, makes a sales peach and closes the sale.
The second misconception is that you can identify a lead, screen and qualify leads, make a sale peach and close a sale over the phone all the time, of which this is not the case as most insurance products are complex and require a form of personal selling through Agents or brokers. The steps identified from identifying a lead to closing the sale are the steps of the Selling process. The selling process can be done more efficiently through the old adage of division of work and coordinating the selling functions efforts.
The tele-marketing team and the Agents or brokers should strive to coordinate their efforts and divide the work as this will ensure that the selling process is achieved more efficiently. The first two steps of identifying the sales lead and screening plus qualifying the lead is the job of the tele-marketer, the tele-marketer equipped with email, phones, social media, internet can break through the enormous clutter of prospective client data to screen and qualify the leads quicker. This shortens the screening time and leads to time efficiencies. Once the leads have been qualified the third step in the selling process is qualifying the lead, this task is a shared task with the preliminary sales peach done by the tele-marketer over the phone, however the more conclusive secondary sales peach for most insurance products will require personal interaction face to face done by the agent or broker. The Final step closing the sale will involve closing the sale and here the actual exchange will be done of money in exchange for product.
In short the tele-marketers job is to focus or direct the efforts of agents or brokers to reduce wasted efforts and increase the success rate of sales peaches that result in actual sales. The tele-marketer and the agent or broker should complement each other’s efforts. In essence it is the Sales Managers job to strike a balance between the two. Hillary Mtandwa is with First Mutual Holdings Limited
