Anytime. Anywhere.

As insurance and financial services firms face some of the biggest challenges in recent memory, many sales and marketing professionals are considering new tactics to reach advisors. Confronted with sales force reductions, cost save mandates, and the need to cover large territories more efficiently, some firms are augmenting traditional wholesaling activities with e-Selling—virtual meetings conducted over the Internet—to boost sales effectiveness while reducing costs.

E-Selling on a Growth Track

61% of companies utilizing or soon to utilize e-selling:

Put e-Selling to Work

To better understand how financial services firms are putting e-Selling into practice, Carpenter Group recently interviewed companies that have incorporated it into their distribution strategy. A common theme emerged: successful e-Selling leverages the interactive environment to deliver content in ways that traditional presentation decks do not. A shift away from uni-direc-tional, fixed presentations has significant implications for content development, marketing support and sales functions. While each situation is unique, considering the following criteria can help to optimize e-Selling opportunities.

1. Set clear objectives. Knowing what you hope to accomplish helps you frame the agenda and gather useful resources.
2. Know your audience. Leverage what you know and CRM data to orchestrate your meeting.
3. Consider the medium. Eefresh existing content or create new tools with e-Selling in mind.
4. Combine content for impact. Use variety and selective editing to build an engaging meeting and appeal to the specific learning style of your audience.
5. Maximize interactive features. Engage your audience to improve retention with e-Selling tools like video, whiteboards, Webcam and links. Consider sharing control of the meeting.
6. Prepare for change. The e-Selling environment encourages new thinking. Be flexible with content and ready to adapt on the fly.

Advantages of e-Selling:

e-Selling is reshaping traditional sales organizations and the way marketing organizations support them. It offers insurance and financial services companies of all sizes the ability to proactively engage financial advisors anytime and anywhere, thus increasing coverage to advisors previously considered “off the beaten path.” Additional benefits include:

• Enhance the efforts of traditional wholesalers by creating an -internal team of hybrids who can continue conversations, strengthen existing relationships and turn advisors into producers;
• Achieve much of the immediacy and personal feel of an in-person meeting at a fraction of the cost;
• Optimize the number of “in-the-field” wholesalers—whose salaries and travel expenses and time limitations may be too costly to -maintain indefinitely;
• Customize communications on the fly to deliver targeted, relevant information to advisors;
• Describe complex products more effectively using real-time -illustration software;
• Reduce costs through efficiencies of scale.

Incorporating e-Selling into your sales and distribution strategy -requires a firm-wide commitment—from management and compliance to IT, sales and marketing—as well as a shared understanding of how e-Selling fits into the firm’s overall distribution strategy and the resources needed to support it.

For more than three decades, Carpenter Group has helped financial services organizations grow their businesses and improve profitability through objective business advice, branding and marketing solutions, and creative services. Carpenter Group brings together seasoned professionals from the financial services, branding and creative industries to develop and implement solutions that drive business goals forward.

Our clients include many of the most prominent firms in the asset management, investment banking, insurance, brokerage and commercial banking sectors.

Carpenter Group
72 Spring Street, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10012
212.431.6666 tel
212.334.9723 fax