Back in the day, sales managers wanted producers pounding the street calling on prospects for new business. The plethora of today's value-added sales technology allows producers to be more productive sitting in their office working phones and Internet sales technology. Hopefully, you have a sales manager who gets it and understands this easier and more productive method of selling.

Truth is, benefits producers traditionally have not wanted to drive a couple hundred miles to prospect a handful of employers in small towns that dot the map. Let's call these employers remote buyers. Telephones and value-added Internet sales technology changed all that.

Today, tech-savvy producers can contact employee benefit buyers in small school districts and one-factory towns with an aggressive introductory pitch and a request for an e-mail address. That e-mail address allows the producer to set the rural prospect up on value-added sales technology for a taste of what could be. It's a safe bet that prospect is not getting anything from its current broker, who is still stuck in the 1970s selling rates and a cheap relationship.

Changing your thinking

Transform your mind, change your sales behavior, and you will have a different sales result. While this may sound trite, it is the basis for moving forward into a whole new world of gaining business in a technology-laden world. Sales technology is simply an enabling structure to help you navigate the value gap. The value gap is the bridge connecting the world of transactional selling and the promised land of performance-based selling. Transactional selling is a world of high turnover in accounts, little fun and lower profits. You want to be a performance-based seller because it's fun, productive and more profitable. Value-added sales technology is the only way to profitably manage a big book of business while selling based on performance.

Performance-based selling

Employers want more for less, regardless of where they are located. That's where you get in the door. Once you have established contact with these remote buyers, you pepper your contact with value-added content through your value-added sales technology once or twice a week. Send tools and content that you know the prospect will appreciate based on your inquisitive telephone calls.

Follow up each value-added delivery with a phone call to seek buying signals and solidify the relationship. Tie performance-based selling concepts versus transactional selling methods into your weekly conversations with the buyer with increasing intensity. Draw a distinction between what you and your agency have to offer versus their current broker without being negative about that broker. Repeat this process for about four weeks. In each follow-up phone call, note the differences and emphasize what you can provide. After a few weeks, you're ready to attempt closing the sale.

How this works

I realize this seems a bit out of the norm of selling. Yes, it does work, and I've seen it accomplished many times.

One entrepreneurial producer in our network relocated from a remote part of the state. He was familiar with all those small towns with little factories and school districts in a hundred different towns that no one ever heard of. He did precisely what I outlined in the previous paragraph while his sales manager was nagging him to get out and sell a 20-life group.

He persisted and was able to write $160,000 of net-new business mostly this way in six months. He commented to me that the first time he met the buyer was when he drove a few hundred miles to get the AOR on a nice group. The incumbent brokers did not know what hit them.

Can e-marketing work for you?

The answer is: It depends.

Technology is a wonderful thing, but only if it is good technology and leveraged appropriately. It's hard for someone who has sold benefits in a certain way for many years to suddenly embrace what sounds like motivational speaking with little practical application. But, it does work. Someday, every producer will work this way.