Spearheading Analytical Capability Development to

Improve Business Processes 

 

Company and Role

The Hemmings Group is an independent insurance broker with 160+ clients and $9M premium under management. Insurance brokers are an intermediary that advocate for an organization’s cost and coverage needs — and ensure insurance providers offer plans that are cost and coverage optimal. As a member of the Business Development Team, I was responsible for interviewing organizations to identify areas of alignment between their pain points and our services. I also acted as internal consultant in areas pertaining to the department's development, and spearheaded two department improvement projects centered around developing the team’s analytical capabilities and client outreach strategy.

 

The Situation

The Business Development Team utilized volume metrics to measure performance. While these metrics tracked output, they failed to capture critical inputs for closing sales leads.

 

The Challenge

As a consequence, critical sales processes weren’t recognized in department performance data — creating incentives for Business Development Specialists to overlook important behavioral inputs for closing sales.

 

The Opportunity

An opportunity existed to improve sales processes by creating a comprehensive suite of performance metrics that captured department performance holistically. With more comprehensive performance metrics, critical behavioral inputs would be acknowledged and incentives, creating stronger alignment between team behaviors and department objectives.

 

The Creative Solution

I recommended a suite of new performance metrics, which included:

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• Decision-Maker Penetration Rates: Measured our ability to reach key decision-makers during renewal period — the time organizations reviewed their insurance plans, which was a critical input for acquiring clients. Previous measures of performance didn’t capture this critical step within the sales process.

• Adjusted Conversion Rates: Measured our ability to close clients we had conversations with — a true measure of sales-person communication performance. Previous measures of performance included unsuccessful client outreach attempts, where a client was contacted with no response — introducing noise into performance data.

 

Implementation and Impact

I secured stakeholder buy-in by publishing a blog post on the department’s internal MS Teams channel. This blog post included an “opportunity statement” outlining problems with current measures of performance — and recommendations for additional measures of performance. Recommended metrics (mentioned in the previous paragraph) were supplemented with clear definitions, calculation methods, and their impact on processes. Management acknowledged the need for my recommended measures of performance, and approved pilot testing within my own sales process — a sandbox for further optimization until measures of performance were fine tuned, and ready for integration within department processes. The impact of my recommendations — more robust sales processes where team behavior was more strongly aligned with department objectives.