How to sell insurance software – focus and conversions!

9 weeks in StartupBootcamp have flown by and we have gathered a lot of experience that is worth sharing with all our readers. Here are some tips how to sell insurance software – focus and conversions!
From the beginning we have established that our focus here in London is sales and only sales. We are here to get as many brokers and agents as possible to use our cloud based software.
However, soon enough we came across a rather surprisingly difficult challenge – even more difficult than getting clients to sign up – getting the clients to use the system. Thus we realized that this goal needs to be divided into at least two sub goals:

1. Get clients to sign up
2. Convert the sign-ups to using customers

For both a slightly different skillset was needed.
Sure, these two steps sound pretty obvious but the realisation of how far we were from getting the clients on board smoothly was really a bit surprising. We will surely write a longer post on what we learned when working on this in the future.

When you look at the big picture, our sales strategy can be split into two considerably different journeys, one being sales to UK or more specifically London brokers. The other strategy is making sales mostly through internet marketing but also outbound phone calls to different brokers and agents all over the English speaking world. Although the Insly system can easily be translated to several other languages, our capabilities to support other languages are currently a little too limited and we decided not to extend that.

The focus?

We ourselves along with several mentors have often wondered if we should focus even more. Suggestions have been the following:

• Why are we focusing on both, the internet sales and face to face sales, here in London, at the same time? Maybe we should pick one and practice that to perfection?
• You should focus only on one country, conquer that and then move further.

Although our general ethos here is that it is better to have one thing done properly rather than have 20 things undone, we decided not to listen to this advice.
Clearly we had to have active internet marketing in order to sell the product globally as this is our ultimate aim and showing the traction and scalability of our solution is one of the most important things we need to achieve. Also as we are in London it was really important to get some of the London brokers on board as our clients in order to get the most out of the London program, create trust (if the London brokers are using our system then others should trust it as well) and get ourselves connected to the most globally connected brokers.
We discarded the idea of focusing on one country at a time because in terms of internet marketing and globalization we did not see any reason to get stuck behind geographical boarders. And, as we are talking about a cloud based innovative insurance software, it is very likely that our clients are early adapters and there might not be very many of them in each country alone. So the artificial limitations that focusing on just one country would have put on us, would not have benefitted us and we would have been focusing only for the sake of focusing.