Automation to Make Renewal Quotes Process Easier

Renewal revenues can be significantly more profitable than new revenue, primarily due to lower marketing and sales costs. Typically, the first 45 days of your fiscal quarter go towards drafting renewal quotes, a lot of work for those involved in the sales process – manually draft renewal quotes based on each client’s requirements, manage leads, and regularly check up on the completion of each renewal quote.

So how do you ensure that your renewals program is highly effective and churning out revenue with minimal effort? Well, you can be proactive by automating this whole process.

Automation can make renewal quotes easier. It can limit the time and effort taken on repetitive tasks – sending renewal quotes and confirming pricing & product data. As a result, insurers can focus on closing more renewal deals and increasing revenues.

How to Get Started?

Automation will help renewals teams establish a proactive approach to renewal quotes, which will benefit your customers – which they will appreciate, and you are more likely to close a renewal. Moreover, you will be able to address possible upsell/cross-sell opportunities better.

To get started:

1. Draft a list of processes that could be automated.
2. Create workflows and integrate technology to minimize the time and manual actions needed to accomplish these tasks.

Make your Data Work for you

Whether your company is still working with manual processes, spreadsheets, or a comprehensive data management platform, the customer data at your fingertips is a valuable tool – but only when it’s used effectively.

1. Create Workflows to Automate Renewal Quotes

By standardizing the renewals quoting process and basing it on a series of defined business rules, your renewals team can simplify and improve the necessary data collection process. With quality data in place, pulling a renewals account through the sales funnel becomes significantly easier. Once this is done, establish a workflow for pre-validating data. This will prevent duplicacy by ensuring that the data doesn’t already exist before being entered into the system, or that the customer still owns the product that is being renewed.

2. Validate Product and Pricing Data

Automating your pricing methods with standard pricing calculators makes the quoting less prone to error. By reducing the need for manual reviews and corrections, you can process quotes more quickly and make the renewal process significantly more efficient.

Automate as Much as Possible

The easiest way to get started now as the quantity of data continues to grow is to automate as much as possible.

1. Automate your Renewal Quoting

Wading through long spreadsheets to identify which customers are coming up for renewal is inefficient and unpleasant. Instead, automate this task. When a new sale is processed, the policy end date should be updated in the system. This can be done by creating a reminder before the renewal date to reach out to the client. Adopting a proactive approach to renewals can make life easier for your clients and establish an effective workflow for your renewals management process.

2. Create a System for Mass Updates and Changes

Who wants to spend hours updating a pricing change on several hundred line items? By using a system that can efficiently perform mass data changes, your data management process can be much more efficient, you can spend your time on more valuable tasks, and you can be confident that your sales data is accurate and timely

3. Create Email Templates for Standard Communications

Every time you send a quote, an email is sent to the client. Create a template for these repetitive interactions to save time.

Email templates can be used for:

• Sending renewal quotes
• Sending renewal purchase orders
• Acknowledging when an order is received
• Sending invoices
• Multiple renewal reminders

4. Cancel Accidental Duplicate Renewal Quotes

On offering multiple quote options to customers, the ones that aren’t renewed often remain in the data, creating confusion and errors. Instead, non-renewing quotes should be automatically canceled upon the customer’s acceptance of the offer.

Identify and Resolve Bottlenecks

Identifying bottlenecks and creating solutions to prevent them is an excellent opportunity to improve your renewal sales process. For example, you can reduce this process to a few minutes by identifying the bottleneck of quoting inefficiency and addressing it by building an import function to do this automatically. Similarly, if a vendor typically sends quotes in a PDF format but you need the information in a spreadsheet, resolving this bottleneck can save time. Optical character recognition (OCR) tools can import data from PDFs, such as price lists and send product updates, directly into a spreadsheet or ordering system.

By automating the renewal quoting process, your renewals team will have more time to nurture customer relationships.