Major Life Insurance Company Hones In On Priority Target Market, And Best Practices To Capture Their Business
Introduction
Ty Vukelich was the Marketing Manager for State Farm® Life and Health Insurance. In this role, he was responsible for the marketing of life and health insurance for the entire company.
Situation
The Life Company realized that, in households who carried State Farm® Auto or Home policies, we were missing opportunities to sell life insurance. This was a costly gap, and led to a project to examine why this was happening and how to fix it. Having an existing relationship with a household and being known and trusted, it would seem logical this could lead to an increase in our household penetration.
A team was put together to examine this issue and create a strategy to close the gap. Jim was hired as team leader and was responsible for planning and directing the work of eight “core” team members and fifteen subject matter specialists from across the State Farm organization. I was responsible for driving certain aspects of the project, the relevant results, and presenting to leadership. Below are some of the issues we set out to tackle:
- Looking at our current book of business, to identify current policyholders who don’t have Life, and lay out strategies and tactics for capturing those sales.
- Determining which segments of our current customers were most likely to need and buy life insurance. Of those, how to prioritize the segments, and identify our greatest opportunities for life insurance.
- Training new agents for more successful sales careers. We had a lot of new life insurance agents coming into the company. We weren’t doing as well as we could at training them to succeed. There were gaps in our processes and procedures. We needed to create processes that could help new agents get up to speed quickly and generate high potential sales opportunities that could lead to a successful sale.
- Determining which customers should be our highest priority. We were not clear enough about which customers our agents ought to be focused on. Market segmentation needed to be improved so that agents were delivering the right message, to the right audience at the right time.
- Creating a strategy around key events in the lives of our existing policyholders. We weren’t taking good enough advantage of key life events such as getting married, having a child or buying a new home—which drive need for life insurance.
- Gaining clarity on key market segments and value propositions. Once clear on the key market segments, we needed to create compelling and unique value propositions for each.
Solution
One of the most important things Jim did with team members was to identify the size of the missed opportunity. We needed to know what we were losing out on with our current approach. Once we realized what we were missing, we developed strategies to capture those opportunities. The essential activities included:
- We set the stage for executive buy-in by building a team of top-performing managers to execute the work. Each member of the team had earned credibility with the top executive of his or her organization, whether that was product development, sales, marketing, agency relations, training or finance.
- We met with groups of representative customers to explore their attitudes and understanding of life insurance. We wanted to understand their decision to own Life insurance or not, and the reasons they chose State Farm Life over other providers.
- We also met with State Farm agents and their office employees. These conversations were aimed at understanding the marketing and sales best practices for selling life insurance.
- Over the next several months, we developed marketing strategies and tools that would improve agent success. The focus was also on identifying and capturing the business of State Farm customers most likely to be in need of life insurance.
- After the segmentation was completed, we identified “young families” as a high priority segment. We then developed a comprehensive plan for targeting “young family” prospects. We developed key strategies, prototype tools, and actions that would lead to success.
- Then, we created marketing initiatives that would generate “young family” leads for agents.
- We also wanted to explore agent segmentation. Some agents were more likely to sell life insurance than others. We needed to know who they were, why they were more likely to sell life, and what motivated them.
- We believed that some business was lost by not asking about life insurance, and by not staying in touch with current policyholders. Selling Life policies then became a result of “chance”, and competitor agents were beating us out of the sale.
Jim played a huge role in helping us identify the individual pieces of the project and the issues for agents. He drove this process in a way that was very collaborative. It was a team effort. We never had the sense that he was telling us what to do. It was always in the context of, “Let’s figure this out together.” He’s very easy to work with and it truly felt like a team effort.
Results
We wrapped this project up in 2007. Shortly after, I was promoted into another role, and left the company soon after. Unfortunately, I wasn’t around to see the implementation. Here are some of the results that were being implemented when I left.
- The company honed in on young families as the highest priority segment likely to need life insurance and created strategies to capture their business.
- We segmented the marketplace, from both an agent and prospective policyholder standpoint. We identified target demographics.
- We created key value propositions—compelling statements of the unique benefits of owning a State Farm life insurance policy. We worked out how to express those value propositions in our marketing communications.
- We put focus on key life events to ensure that we were in front of policyholders with our story when they were most likely to consider life policies.
- We implemented major internal process improvements that made it easier for agents to write a life insurance policy. With many new agents coming onboard, education was huge. We laid out the steps for them, making it as turnkey as possible.
- We put together Stay In Touch best practices for our agents. We laid out tactics for both agent and corporate, and established our marketing means, timing and methods. We did not want to be forgotten when it was time for a policyholder to consider life insurance.
- An obvious yet critical step was to train agents to ask about life insurance needs. If you just ask, you open the door to more sales opportunities. We provided this cross-selling training.
Jim is extremely process oriented and takes a very methodical approach. He approaches a pile of information, looks into it and sees things no one else does. He doesn’t jump to conclusions, or assume he knows the answers.
Jim is very easy to work with. He does not feel the need to be in the spotlight or to take all of the credit, but he continually allowed me to shine. He works hard, quietly and consistently moving things forward. I really appreciated that about him.” Ty Vukelich
Where To Next?
Now you’ve read a case study of one of Jim Wilson’s clients, go to Jack Kirby’s case study to read another.