Technology
Industry specific 4-1-1
First Research provides a suite of critical-knowledge sales tools
By Nancy Doucette
Chuck Hood isn’t a selfish guy, but when it comes to First Research, his behavior changes. “Selfishly, I don’t want my competition to know about First Research,” he says with a smile. “Whether we’re pursuing P&C or benefits, First Research gives us a leg up on competitors who don’t take the time to know or understand the business of the prospect,” he says.
First Research, Inc. breaks out business information by industry and provides it online to salespeople. Chuck Hood’s 24-person agency, Hood Hargett & Associates, Inc., based in Charlotte, North Carolina, has been a subscriber for just over a year. About 80% of the agency’s revenue comes from commercial lines. Benefits business brings in approximately 14% of the agency’s total revenue.
Hood Hargett specializes in residential contractors, he explains, so producers know a lot about that industry. The State Profiles that First Research provides highlight trends for residential contractors in other parts of the country, which Hood says “solidifies and broadens our knowledge of something about which we’re already pretty familiar.”
But should Hood decide to venture into something different—either by way of referral or a decision to pursue a new niche—“we don’t have to go in cold,” he says. “Suppose we decided to make a pitch to structural steel fabricators or metal fabricators. Maybe we don’t have an account like that. We’d begin by looking at the information in First Research. It enables us to learn about an industry or a specific business within that industry. It gives producers more confidence and more credibility when they call on a prospect. They can speak that industry’s language and, as a result, they’re more likely to be successful on new business calls.”
Hood adds that when carriers decide to pursue a new type of business, it’s not necessarily in an area where the agency has expertise, which puts the agency at a disadvantage. “First Research gives you a foundation upon which you can build your expertise,” he says. “You’re not starting from scratch.”
Filling a void
Wil Brawley, senior vice president for the financial services segment of First Research, was in the commercial banking segment at Bank of America when his colleague Bobby Martin left the banking business in 1998 to start laying the groundwork for what would become First Research, which was founded in 2000.
“Bobby and I were calling on mid-sized companies in various industries,” Brawley recalls. “We needed to understand their business before we went on the call. Being in front of a CEO or CFO, we needed to understand what kept them awake at night and position ourselves as trusted advisors to them—individuals who would try to help solve their business problems—versus bankers who were trying to pitch them credit.”
Brawley says there were no products that provided the information in a concise format. “We had to call the research desk at the bank and search the Internet,” he explains. “Then once we got the information, we had to synthesize it, interpret it and make sense of it all. Bobby was smart enough to see a business opportunity, and had the idea for First Research.”
So that’s what First Research provides—industry intelligence that’s been synthesized, interpreted and presented in an easy-to-digest format. “First Research doesn’t just aggregate information,” Brawley emphasizes. “There’s no value in that. So we go to 10-Ks for public companies within an industry to look at common threads of discontent, competitive factors and strategic drivers. We go to industry associations to gather facts about an industry—they have a lot of good statistics. We go to government sources—the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau, for instance—to get facts about an industry. And we go to industry news and publications.”
Brawley continues, “Our job is to take information from those different sources, pare it down into a concise format and apply the analytics. What results is a 10- to 14-page profile which tells salespeople: ‘Here’s how companies in this space operate. Here’s their supply chain, here are the products they provide and most importantly here are the C-level strategic issues.’” This is the Industry Profile, the cornerstone of the First Research products.
“By understanding the C-level issues,” he adds, “a producer can get outside the ‘insurance box’ and approach businesses more from an advisory perspective and discuss overall risk management issues—the strategic, financial and operational risks.”
Pursuit of excellence
For Hub International Limited, headquartered in Chicago, First Research provides the organization’s 900 producers with the knowledge they need to do the best job they possibly can, according to Julie Zimmer, Hub International’s vice president of sales for North America.
Hub has considerable expertise in a number of well-defined industries, she points out. And while it’s “great to have niches and practices and it’s great to have experts,” she says, “the producers who are meeting up with the opportunities day in and day out may not be the ‘experts’ all the time.
“When I was a young producer myself,” Zimmer remembers, “I don’t know how many times I’d get an opportunity with a client in a business that I knew nothing about. At Hub, we equip our producers with tools like First Research to help get that dialog started.”
“Many salespeople like to get their information in a very concise format,” observes David Buffaloe, vice president of marketing for First Research. To satisfy those individuals, First Research offers its Call Prep Sheet. “The Call Prep Sheet is an offshoot of the Industry Profile,” he explains. “It’s a one-page summary that gives salespeople several talking points and anywhere from 20 to 35 questions that zero in on that industry’s key business issues.”
“Perhaps producers didn’t do call preparation in the past,” says Brawley, “so this tool requires them to spend more time up front. But in the end, they’ll shorten their sales cycle because they’re going to differentiate themselves at the front end.”
Of course, quick access to the information is almost as important as the information itself. Zimmer appreciates the fact that First Research built a co-branded site on the Hub intranet so there are no user names or passwords to contend with. Users have one-click access from the agency’s intranet to the First Research information. Hub producers also have Blackberry access to First Research information on the fly.
She says that Hub was using another online content provider before switching to First Research nearly two years ago. “We looked at a lot of other products,” she explains. “Some of them provided a broader scope of information—company-specific data or customer research. But we chose First Research because their value proposition was so much stronger than the other products. The First Research price point is extraordinarily competitive.”
First Research helps customers assess their return on investment through its Utilization Reports. Zimmer uses the reports to see how much usage there is in any of Hub’s 25 sales regions. She can drill down further to learn who logged in and how frequently they logged in. Details can be presented by month or by year.
“When producers target industries, they may use First Research once a month or once every couple months,” she reports. “During the business planning months—August through October—use goes way up. That’s a positive thing. It tells me that people are using First Research the way it should be used.
“I encourage our sales officers in our various regions to use the State Profiles for their business planning,” Zimmer says. “These summaries look at the economic environment and trends for the region that the sales officers are working in so they can match up their strategic business directions with what these reports are telling them.”
Brawley points out that State Profiles and Call Prep Sheets were added to the Industry Profiles—the initial product offered by First Research—based on customer requests. “Customers drive our product enhancements,” he says. Customers also drive which profiles First Research offers. Brawley says the decisions are made based on the volume of requests. “Recently, we added deep sea shipping and used merchandise stores,” he points out.
David Buffaloe says there is a recent enhancement to the Industry Profiles: Focus. “Focus allows users to dig deeper into niches associated with a particular Industry Profile,” he explains. “Let’s use Healthcare as an example and the Physician’s Offices profile. Perhaps a producer wants to begin selling to pediatricians—a niche inside a niche—a category that doesn’t have enough information to warrant its own Industry Profile, but enough to need more detail. Focus will give producers more information so they can be more targeted when they meet with clients or prospects.”
More enhancements are on the way, Buffaloe continues. He says an audio version of some of the key profiles is in the works. Subscribers will be able to download a three- to four-minute recorded overview of an industry including some of the key issues and challenges. “Subscribers will be able to use this as a refresher or as a way to introduce themselves to a new industry,” he says.
Also in the works is Industry Prospector, which Buffaloe says will select and rank industry profiles based on specific financial information and statistics. “Let’s imagine that I want to go after industries that have razor-thin margins because I think I can improve their cost of risk,” he explains. “Prospector will help subscribers determine what industries they should be going after.”
Brawley concludes, “Our objective is to provide a desktop sales readiness tool to an organization’s sales force and marketing folks. While we have pay-per-view products, insurance agencies typically purchase an enterprise license with unlimited access. This enables them to deploy First Research to their sales force, build it into their sales process and drive heavy usage. We don’t want our customers to worry about each hit costing them an incremental additional amount.”
Core Products The Industry Profile. As of January 2008, First Research offers some 290 industry profiles—they cover more than 700 4-digit SIC codes. The 10- to 14-page analysis includes chapters that can be arranged in whatever order best suits the subscriber. Chapters focus on business challenges as well as trends and opportunities. Additional industry research is available via Web site and media links. The Call Prep Sheet is a one-page summary of the Industry Profile. Producers can get a crash course in the business challenges and opportunities for a particular industry. The Call Prep Sheet also provides executive talking points tailored for conversations with the CEO, CFO or CIO as well as HR and Sales executives. Fast Facts provide a glimpse of an industry’s universe, revenue, key players, products, markets and business practices. E-mail Alerts are provided on a quarterly basis. Subscribers can self-select their key industries. The e-mail will detail the changes and developments in those particular industries. Alerts may include critical issue updates—changes in raw material costs, for instance—as well as industry updates. Alerts can serve as a springboard to upselling clients. State Profiles help producers know what’s going on in local economies—employment, unemployment, personal income, tax revenue, exports and venture capital investment. State Profiles, which are updated quarterly, also detail which industries are growing and which industries are shrinking in addition to some other economic information. |
For more information:
First Research, Inc.
Web site: www.firstresearch.com/insurance.asp