Rethinking a complex and persistent sales challenge​

Rethinking a complex and persistent sales challenge

Selling insurance through bank branches is incredibly hard. The typical approach – strong incentives, countless trainings and support tools for client advisors – just doesn’t seem to work. In an attempt to try something different, Sabadell Seguros decided to immerse into the lived realities of client advisors, to find the root causes for this challenge… and probably ended up saving €500,000* as a result.

CHALLENGE

The team at Sabadell Seguros have been trying different approaches to support the bank’s client advisors – without the desired level of success. Despite huge incentives for bank advisors, countless trainings and various digital and physical support tools, the people in the branches continued to struggle to find the right messages that resonated with customers.

THE INITIAL IDEA

After realizing that trainings and more incentives don’t work, the team was planning to build an AI-powered chatbot to help bank advisors ask questions related to the insurance products they are supposed to sell.

WHAT WE LEARNT

It turns out, bank advisors – for better or worse – don’t recognize that they lack product knowledge. Therefore, it’s highly unlikely that they would have used a chatbot focused on a problem they don’t perceive.

OUR APPROACH

To avoid reinventing the wheel, we started by capturing the leadership team’s current problem understanding and what they had already tried in the past to create a unified picture of what’s known.
Together with the team, we then challenged this understanding by immersing in the realities, decision-making and context of bank advisors to understand the barriers they perceive in their day-to-day.
While many of these barriers weren’t unheard of, capturing everything on an impact map and showing their importance and the causal connections between drivers and root causes was a real game-changer for the team’s alignment and decision making.
Thanks to the impact map, they were able to take a much more conscious decision on which root causes to focus on and which ones to delegate or de-prioritize.
Finally, we ideated broadly and creatively on ways to tackle the root causes and prioritized more effective intervention options using impact and feasibility metrics

IMPACT

By not pursuing the initial solution idea, the client probably saved €500,000* in resources and opportunity cost that can now be used to pursue more effective change levers.
A shared, black-on-white understanding of the problem and how its rooted in the advisor’s human experience was a real game changer for the team’s alignment and focus.
Based on reframing the root causes we identified, we were able to develop five actionable intervention areas that promise to tackle the problem more effectively. The client has already started 3 separate initiatives based on the levers we identified.

IMPRESSIONS

To capture everything we’ve learnt about the problem, we’ve created an impact map that clearly connects the visible problem to underlying root causes and outlines possible interventions.

Our goal throughout the project was to build capacity in the core team. Taking the time to dive into the human context behind the business challenge facilitated a perspective change that helped to overcome previous biases and assumptions and unveiled new, more effective impact levers.

QUOTES

"You completely changed our perspective on how to solve this problem."

Tiago Das Neves

Customer Strategy & Innovation at Banco Sabadell

* All impact estimates are our own, based on what we expect the initial solution would have cost in terms of development, training and opportunity cost.