As a broker, you are always looking for ways to grow your business. Have you ever considered automation? Adopting automation technologies is a good way to make your business more efficient. When you increase efficiency, you give yourself the opportunity to grow your business.
Being a benefits pro means being part educator, part sales professional, and part business partner. You truly shine when your ability to educate and inform is on full display. There is little you can do to automate this part of your business and still maintain a solid relationship with your clients. But you can automate certain segments of the sales process.
Sales automation relieves you of certain repetitive tasks that otherwise prevent you from giving your clients the attention they deserve. At the same time, automation streamlines those tasks so that they are done more efficiently, more accurately, and more consistently. It all adds up to more time you can spend on being an educator and business partner.
Examples of Automation
So, what does automation look like practically? That depends on the tools you adopt. Most AI-based sales platforms include a core set of tools that nearly every broker can utilize. Here are just a few examples:
- Prospect Vetting – Automated tools like AI-powered chatbots can vet prospects when they visit your website for the first time. Through a series of answers and questions, the technology can deliver promising leads before you ever have that initial conversation. Prospect vetting is a good way to limit the amount of time you spend down chasing prospects who ultimately go elsewhere.
- Calendaring – Brokers tend to work on a routine. Completing one task triggers the next. Automation makes this process easier. Through a set of predefined rules, you can set up your software to automatically calendar tasks in succession. You mark task A complete; it automatically schedules task B.
- Emails – Brokers spend a lot of time sending out the same emails to client after client. Through automation, you can continue sending those emails with very little effort on your part. Write the email once, schedule it according to your parameters, then forget about it. Automation takes care of the rest.
There are other automation tools above and beyond these three. Hopefully, you get the point. Automation handles the more mundane tasks that come with the marketing aspects of being a broker.
Improve Your Productivity
One of the first things you will notice upon implementing automation is that your own productivity improves. You might find you are no longer spending the first two hours of your day on email. Automation has reduced it to 30 minutes. You now have an extra 90 minutes to devote to more important things. And at the end of the day, you have accomplished more in the same amount of time.
Along those same lines, improving productivity gives you the opportunity to focus extra attention on those parts of your business that require it.
A Better Customer Experience
The end goal of increased efficiency is creating a better customer experience. As long as you are bogged down with menial tasks that consume your schedule and scatter your brain, you cannot give your customers the personalized attention they deserve. Things change when you automate.
Allowing automation technology to handle those repetitive tasks for you eliminates the many things that prevent you from giving your customers your best. The result should be growth. Being more attentive to your customers improves your brand, increases word-of-mouth advertising, and brings new customers on board. It's not rocket science. It is just good technology.