Firestarter
Leessa West
Product Manager at The Baldwin Group
I work on the marketing team for Guided Solutions, a subsidiary of The Baldwin Group, where we specialize in offering property and casualty (P&C), and Medicare coverage. Our goal is to be the go-to broker for our clients, providing answers to their insurance questions and emphasizing the importance of adequate coverage.
Due to the unique nature of each person and situation, it can be challenging to provide the right kind of sales and marketing support to every team we serve—whether they are insurance advisors, Medicare agents, or our various partners.
Our former tech infrastructure had its limitations. We managed separate CRMs for our P&C segment using Salesforce and internally developed tools for Medicare. The Medicare team’s strong reliance on our internal CRM prompted us to retain it rather than migrate to Salesforce, causing a bottleneck in our marketing efforts. To overcome this hurdle, we sought a CMS solution capable of consolidating and tracking all marketing activities on a unified platform. Additionally, we aimed to empower our independent Medicare agents to personalize marketing materials while maintaining their unique brand identities.
The solution? Total Expert—a comprehensive platform that integrates various sales and marketing tools, offering us a complete view of our contacts’ lifecycle.
Marketing automation powered by Total Expert
Marketing automation driven by Total Expert plays a pivotal role in our operations. For P&C insurance, we leverage both Salesforce and Total Expert to create detailed customer profiles and deliver tailored content throughout their journey. Automated campaigns triggered by specific activities such as lead conversion or inactivity ensure seamless customer experiences.
On the Medicare front, our approach is nuanced. Our independent Medicare agents prefer to manage their own marketing efforts. We provide them with customized materials branded to their identity, enabling them to oversee their marketing activities independently. Our materials cater to a broad audience by remaining carrier-agnostic, empowering agents representing multiple carriers to expand their reach and offer comprehensive Medicare assistance.
The all-in-one customer engagement solution
Total Expert serves as an all-in-one customer engagement solution, encompassing CRM capabilities, productivity tools, and content management systems. This consolidation streamlines workflows, automates repetitive tasks, and enhances the measurement of marketing effectiveness.
Total Expert’s versatility extends beyond conventional approaches. We have developed advanced communication strategies based on intricate data points like personas, enabling us to deliver highly targeted campaigns and journeys tailored to individual preferences and behaviors.
When we promote Total Expert internally, we focus on highlighting how the platform can enhance a user’s productivity, strengthen their client relationships, and grow their revenue. Those are pretty impressive benefits in and of themselves.
But we’ve found one significant challenge to getting more users to adopt the system, no matter how much they agree with the benefits we lay out: independent agents are concerned their contacts will be taken away if they leave Guided Solutions — something that may have happened to them or a colleague at other agencies. To reassure them, we consistently communicate that agents don’t lose ownership of their contact lists when they use Total Expert. We also emphasize how the improved marketing materials and additional platform assistance we’re able to give them thanks to Total Expert gives us the time and bandwidth we need to better support all their needs.
But reassurance alone isn’t enough. You also need a good plan for training your users.
To address this, I hold live webinars to train users on various aspects of Total Expert, including how to import and manage contacts, find people, use groups and filters, and build emails and templates.
Recognizing that live sessions don’t always fit everyone’s schedule, I also recorded brief videos (about 3-5 minutes each) demonstrating tasks like sending emails and printing materials. These videos provide a clear perspective on how Total Expert works and are posted on our internal website so our Medicare Agents can access them anytime, at their convenience.
Building a forward-looking, future-proof customer engagement platform
As you can imagine, supporting the individual sales and marketing needs of both insurance advisors and Medicare agents can be tricky.
But with Total Expert as our customer engagement platform, no opportunities are missed, relationships are nurtured effectively, and I know my members feel my support and service throughout the year.
Thanks to Total Expert, we’ve seen:
- A significant lift in how many P&C quotes convert to closed/won status.
- Higher engagement with the existing “Client Welcome and Nurture” email sequence we revamped and automated using Total Expert.
- Higher conversion rates for our recruiting initiatives.
Even people who don’t use Total Expert regularly still recognize its value. Last year, for example, one Medicare user who loves Total Expert but wasn’t using it very much generated a significantly higher referral rate after she put her entire book of business onto a Total Expert Journey.
Looking forward
Next up, we’re planning to use Total Expert to develop an insurance-focused user interface.
Beyond that, we’ll stay focused on blending digital elements with personal touches throughout the entire client lifecycle. That’s because all our audiences want every interaction with us—both in-person and digital—to be personalized.
This hybrid model is especially important with our Medicare side of the business where most of our clients are over 65 and are still a bit wary of digital interactions. Tailored experiences that deliver a human touch help them feel more confident that the coverage we’re recommending aligns with their specific, unique needs.
