On April 29, Mark Breading of Strategy Meets Action, a leading insurance consultancy firm, moderated a thought leadership panel on sales, marketing and digital content in the insurance world. He was joined by Monique Hesseling of Strategy Meets Action and Ed Calnan, President and Co-Founder of Seismic. This is Part 1 of 3 of their discussion.
Mark: “There are several executives who play a role in the generation and distribution of content including the CMO. Who is involved in actually creating and managing digital content? How influential is the CMO in terms of digital sales enablement?”
Monique: “Over the last decade or so, I’ve seen the CMO’s influence growing. This happened when digital became part of the communication strategy for insurers about 10 years ago, starting with service issues – service apps, reaching out to customers, focusing on self-service. CMOs got a bigger chunk of the budget for digital outreach.
Over the years, companies came to the conclusion that all of the data they collected, the relationships and touch-points they created with clients over service issues could lead to sales opportunities – to cross sell, right sell, upsell – proposition products services to clients, small businesses and middle market space. When that happened, combined with better insight and data – which was driven with by all of the data quality and analytics – people truly felt that there was value in finding and resourcing digital projects to grow business and profitability.
Historically, this was part of the CMO’s accountability – the outreach part of it, the materials and the messaging. CMOs got an increasingly big part in the say to create a digital strategy. It sort of came full circle from personalized service together with segmentation and data analytics and the full data strategy touching on all contact points with clients.”
Mark: “What kind of changes do you see in who sponsors and shapes new initiatives to digitally enable sales professionals?”
Ed: “I think for the first time in the last three years or so, there’s been a real change. We’ve been reading a lot of research over the last few years about how marketing is now gaining control. There is a lot of control shifting to the marketing side of the house for the branding experience, online experience and advertising. Marketing is really starting to own and drive. The industry is becoming much more “cool” than it has been historically. But for the producer, it’s still heavily controlled by technology.
Historically, the CIOs of insurance have held the keys to the castle for data and systems, and there’s good reason for that. Some of this data has to be confidential, and some of these systems need to be fool-proof and scalable. We’re starting to see the two worlds come together. Over the last 12 months or so in customer situations, the two have been forced to play nice with one another. It’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves over the next few years.”
Keep an eye out for Part 2 of this series next Wednesday.
