While most of the dialog around mobility in the financialservices has focused on the customer experience, leading insurancefirms are exploring the benefits of mobilizing their producers.

And it's no wonder. Current producers are already carryingsmartphones and tablets in unprecedentednumbers—whether they're using them for work or not. Plus, your nextgeneration of representatives spent most of their educationalcareer on mobile devices and they expect to bring theircollaborative experiences with them.

Also, the consurmerization of IT and the Internet of Things(IoT) is driving insurance consumers—whether commercial orindividual customers—to expect their insurance representatives tobe more mobile and agile. After all, why spend resources travellingto an insurance agent's office when that representative could cometo you?

Going beyond mobile claims

In other words, it's no longer good enough to think of mobilityas only a claims function. Insurance firms that most quicklyleverage producer mobility can gain competitive advantage. Laggardsnot only risk losing market share, but being left behind.

While pushing out policy quote and issuance applications tomobile devices is still a work in progress for most insurancefirms, your organization can still provide producers with mobilityoptions right now.

Leveraging sales enablement

One such option is sales enablement, which bridges marketing andsales silos to provide every producer with the ability tosystematically deliver a personalized, one-on-one customerexperience.

By leveraging a sales enablement solution, your producers canbuild rich, brand-centric presentations—with a few swipes orclicks—from a secure content repository populated by yourorganization. Presentation templates can be placed in therepository to ensure brand consistency along with content rangingfrom multi-media options, such as videos, to more staticinformation like pie charts or bar graphs.

Advanced sales enablement tools also permit real-time data feedsfrom existing external and internal sources, allowing for morefeeds to be incorporated as back-end insurance systems andprocesses permit. In addition, robust sales enablement solutionsinclude integration with various CRM solutions, likeSalesforce.com, enabling your CRM to serve up content appropriateto each selling situation.

Analytics empower producers

Sales enablement solutions can also empower your producers byproviding analytics around prospect and customer interactions withsupplied content. This eliminates the worn-out question 'did youhave a chance to review the materials I sent you?'

With sales enablement analytics, producers know when to engageand can gain valuable insights by soliciting appropriate feedback,like 'tell me what you thought of our report on reducing commercialfleet claims?'

Compliant, cost-effective cloud

Perhaps best of all, sales enablement can be adopted as aSaaS-based solution. As with most cloud-delivered applications,SaaS-based sales enablement can ensure all types content—whethertext, logos, data, images or videos—can be managed in astreamlined, compliant manner without adding IT infrastructurecomplexity or administration costs.

In short, a cloud-based sales enablement solution allows yourorganization to begin mobilizing your producers regardless of whereyour firm is along the mobility spectrum. In turn, this supportsyour brand as an insurance innovator, especially among youngentrepreneurial business owners, and helps keep yourorganization in the game.