What a year it’s been for us all. One of my highlights was the conference in October. There’s nothing like connecting in person, hearing you talk about the value you got from the different sessions, and I especially enjoyed seeing some healthy competition during the Amazing Race.
Last year the Adviser Council created a workstream to manage the underwriting pipeline. The agreed actions from this have been implemented this year with overwhelmingly positive results. We set out to improve our “submission to issue” ratio from 76.7% in 2022 to 80% in 2023 and we’ve blitzed this goal by achieving more than 87% issuance rate. A huge thanks and congratulations to the team for the huge improvements in the area.
As we head towards the end of the year, it’s a great time to give your pipeline a spring clean so you can really enjoy your break, knowing you’re returning to work with everything ready to go.
Here’s some helpful tips:
- Run a report on your total pipeline for leads and opportunities from your Salesforce Home Page. There’s two reports on your dashboard called ‘My current ANZ referrals’ and ‘My current ANZ opportunities’. If you click on the ‘View report’ button below the graph this will take you to the detailed report so you can see the full summary of your active pipeline.
- Send a templated email to multiple pipeline customers that have gone quiet by sending a generically worded email template and “blind copying” (BCCing) your customers. This will allow you to close off historic leads and opportunities in bulk, while giving customers a final opportunity to re-engage with you. We’ve created emails templates which can be tweaked to suit your leads’ needs.
- Confirming appointments. Some customers will want to meet you in the New Year, and history tells us that a high number of people don’t show to these meetings. To ensure customers keep these appointments, when you make the appointment, it’s a good idea to tell them that you’ll be sending them a text message reminder the day prior to the meeting that they need to respond to for the meeting to go ahead. If they don’t respond to the message confirming their attendance, then simply cancel the meeting, and email them to arrange another time, so that you can free up that time for other activities.
- Engage with your ANZ stakeholders early. The bank stays open through the Christmas period so there’s no need to wait to get back in front of them. Agree a time and date to visit your branches in the few days after returning to work and it will help drive referral activity.
- Contact your annual reviews. You may have been busy in the lead up to Christmas and missed some of these calls. Now’s the perfect time to reach out to those customers with a phone call and offer them the opportunity to review their cover.
With migration behind us, the “Refer Only” model fully implemented in the bank, and Paul Swain starting as Regional Manager in the Northern Region, we’re set for a successful start to 2024, and therefore can focus on spending our time getting customers the protection they need. There’s some great initiatives on the roadmap to improve the way we give advice to our customers which help us be more productive with the effort we put into our roles.
I want to thank everyone in the team for their hard work and support over this year and wish everyone a safe and happy break over the festive period.
A special thanks to those of you that are working through to keep the business moving and I look forward to seeing you all in 2024.
Tim