Independent agents are most commonly found in the financial, insurance and real estate sectors. When selling within these sectors, products are usually highly complex and highly regulated. These factors alone require the need for a highly knowledgeable individual to sell it - making this distribution model extremely attractive for certifiable formal training and the need to use a learning management system that can handle the complexities that come along with it.
There is a certain way in which your organization conducts business that's different from your competition. A certain way you engage your agents/brokers which is dependent upon your unique business model. Along with a unique business model, organizations in the financial, insurance and real estate sectors must also be able to accommodate owners that own multiple units and allow them to manage the training across all their units.
Depending on how complex your organization's products are, you may have different field organizations (or office locations) that support different product lines. For example, in the insurance sector most firms sell several insurance products including auto, life, and property insurance. It is very common for each product to have it's own specialized agents responsible for the sale and knowledge of each one. This type of process calls for support by multiple field organizations and must have a system sophisticated enough to handle these complex workflows.
High compliance costs are associated with products that are complicated and highly regulated, so it's important to the organization that training is completed. But with the absence of management command and control how can you insure that agents take the training, know your product, and know how to comply within regulation? The solution is performance based certification. Performance based certification training is a very powerful tool when dealing with this type of distribution model. The learning (or training) side of performance based certification insures all agents meet the minimal level of knowledge required to sell your products. The performance metrics side is used to reveal whether or not agents are performing to your standards. For the insurance sector, strong metrics may include things like policies sold, types of policies sold, and retention rates. This type of training will allow your organization to differentiate from the agent that has successfully completed training, sells a lot of policies, and has a very high retention rate from the agent that has also successfully completed training but sells very little policies and has a lower retention rate.
Other performance metrics can include things like complaints and violations in regards to regulation. Using this data coupled with incentivizing is a very powerful tool in terms of managing the agent's performance and quality.
Learn more about how LatitudeLearning meets your unique training needs.