Recently, I bought car insurance online and in the process, observed a few interesting actionable sales strategy used by a few companies.
Did you
know that Internet accounts for 18 percent of financial products sold in India?)

To give you certain context, my car policy expired on July 27th and i came to know about this on 29th – hence search started for an insurance company that can renew the insurance without much hassle.

Search, as always started with Google and ended up with the companies who were running ads (congrats Goog)- i.e. ICICI and Bajaj Insurance.

Since the policy was expired, the insurance company had to send a surveyor to verify car details and that’s where the fun began.

Bajaj Insurance outrightly told me that I need to go to the nearest dealer to get the process started. Essentially. online selling was restricted to *standard* process and a little deviation wasn’t part of the deal.

On the other hand, ICICI did a very simple thing – they took my money, put the renewal under ‘to be approved’ state, sent a surveyor who did the necessary inspection and later approved the renewal.

What’s the difference between the two approaches? ICICI converted the lead on a near real-time basis(*). Most importantly, they took the money then and there itself and the online-offline integration enabled the conversion.

What companies need to understand is that customers won’t be around forever waiting for you to iron out the process. If not conversion, engagement matters and you need to start engaging with the customer, the moment he/she comes in to your system.

What’s your take? Before running after leads, have you figured out ‘what will you do when a customer enters your system’?

Will you collect all the necessary info for futuristic email/sms marketing or focus on selling NOW?
* – the entire transaction was initiated using live chat service present on these sites.