Incentives are a huge business driver in the insurance industry, the industry utilises aggregators, agency networks, sales teams and employee marketers to sell their products and services. Apart from the remuneration paid for sales activities for every insurance sale achieved, rewards are utilised as a motivator to get higher performance from sales teams.
In the insurance industry, carriers are tasked with devising creative ways to incentivise their sales teams. It is a massive industry with huge potential but finding the right strategy or approach to designing the right growth plan however, has proven difficult for many of these companies. This has an impact on the business, as it results in:
Employee Churn: Carriers have many sales agents and marketers constantly leaving their business due to dissatisfaction and unmet expectations. This impacts the focus and targets of the business and subsequently reflects in the overall performance of the company.
Loss of top talent: Attracting and retaining top talent has become difficult for carrier companies due to the wrong application of rewards for performance achieved. This results in losing the best talent, especially those who have been wooed and lost to competitor companies.
Low return on sales, and low return on investments: Operational efficiency is impacted by low sales and overall company performance.
Challenges
The commonplace challenges insurance carriers have is self-administration and duplication. Every incentive carrier programme is unique. There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to designing incentives. It requires certain elements which are essential to its success. Some of which are:
- Planning & Strategy: Understand and identify the areas that need improvement and determine the attainable behaviour to achieve them. Analyse the appropriateness of behaviours to the desired outcomes. Planning and strategizing require time, and all stakeholders must be involved in this process. Inability to get these elements right results in creating a failed incentive programme.
- Focus & Resources: This requires a champion and a team of people who are dedicated and committed to the designing, planning, implementation, and management of an incentive programme. The team needs to be constantly inspired and motivated to drive results. As such, time and dedication are required for the programme to be a success. Insurance carriers must realise the necessity of assigning this responsibility to professionals in order to maximise results.
- Use of Digital Tools: Use of digital tools is an essential tool for running a successful incentive programme both for the users (sales teams) and employers (carrier companies). Digital representation and tracking of sales and rewards create transparency and measurability of the programme.
- Gamification for Top of Mind: Constantly promoting the programme, as well as rewards participants, could win will generate ongoing interest in the programme. Using point-scoring, game-like elements is an effective way of keeping the sales agents engaged and involved. It creates healthy peer competition as well. This can be achieved with the use of trivia quizzes, the creation of interactive leader boards, setting qualifications for incentives travel and rewarding unexpected points bonuses.
The role of professionals
The role of professionals in administering incentives helps carriers solve the problems of manual processes which reduces errors and time costs. By employing incentive professionals, companies can face the day-to-day running of the business without distractions while the experts do the end-to-end management of programmes.
Uwin Iwin Incentives is a pan-African full-house incentives company that has studied the needs of insurance companies in need of agency incentives solutions. We do the end-to-end management of incentive programmes for sales teams to achieve goals or objectives of performance so that business owners can focus on the growth of their companies.
Adeshola Ekpo is the Business Development Director for Uwin Iwin based in Lagos Nigeria and has been with Uwin Iwin for 8 Years. In Her role as Business Development Director, she is responsible for business plan & sales strategy development, Designing and implementing Incentive Programs for Employees, Sales and Distribution channels as well as Business Relations and generation within Nigeria and Ghana.