Leading Nordic Commercial Insurance Firm Increases B2B Sales 50% with Plecto

Company Background

If Erhvervsforsikring is the Danish commercial insurance division of If Forsikring, Scandinavia’s largest insurance firm. Offering an array of insurance packages, including liability, marine, vehicle, and transport coverage, If Erhvervsforsikring has solidified its position as a go-to for fast, effective, and high-quality service in Northern Europe's insurance industry.

The Challenge: It’s all in the details

Bobby Corvalan, Head of SME Sales at If Erhvervsforsikring’s Copenhagen office, had a problem: he couldn’t accurately track his team’s insurance sales data for the current month. This was leading to inconsistencies in record keeping.

For example, if Bobby made a sale at the beginning of November, but the sale went into effect December 1, the sale would incorrectly appear in November’s budget. Bobby would then be billed for the sale in November, despite the sale only taking effect in December.

“That’s why we needed Plecto to highlight the sales we have made now, in this month,” he says.

A motivational boost

Besides this inconvenience with managerial bookkeeping, there was another issue: the sales team needed a performance boost.

Bobby realized this had to occur by creating extra responsibility, and therefore extra motivation, for the team to perform at a high level. For example, rather than passing customer calls along to the business center, the sales team could assist them directly.

“The business center also has a budget—that is, some KPIs they need to live up to,” Bobby says. “So we needed to find a way to motivate the sales team, so they’re just not making a kind of service call that goes something along the lines of, ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ ‘No,’ and then take a new call. We needed to ask about the customer’s behavior a little more.”

Ultimately, Bobby says the issue his office faced was cultural–getting employees to understand their individual efforts contribute to the good of the team overall.

“The ones who are always not performing well are the ones who say, ‘Oh, I’m not comfortable about showing my numbers.’ And then that leads to the talk: ‘Why do you not want that? We’re a team, we need to focus on team goals, not only individual goals. But if everyone just puts in their little chunk, then we reach our goals.’

“We had a lot of talks about this, but it’s a question of culture we needed to change.”

The Solution: Bring on the games

Bobby understood the best way to introduce Plecto to the team and change its culture would be via one of Plecto’s main features–gamification. With this in mind, Bobby began hosting challenges for employees.

The first was held over the summer of 2023 and involved five teams drawn from different departments, working together to achieve a set goal of a certain number of points. The sales agent would earn five points if it made a sale to a new customer, for example, or if additional information was gathered on the customer when selling an insurance offer.

“The teams could work together in a fun way and follow the bar that was just going up more and more, and they reached the goal,” Bobby says.

And just what was the goal?

“It was eight million points, or something like that,” Bobby remarks nonchalantly.

“But they reached that, so they had free ice cream for the whole summer!” he adds with a laugh.

This was only the beginning. Bobby held a second point-based competition for his team, this time with a focus on liability insurance. This competition was centered on three areas: selling insurance, sending an offer, and receiving feedback. In this case, feedback consisted of gathering information that would assist If’s business center teams upgrade in the future, or setting the customer up with an electronic payment.

Sure enough, sales of liability packages increased during this period.

The success of these competitions has provided further inspiration to Bobby, prompting him to reimagine the nature of work in his office.

“We thought, OK, we need to make more small competitions for a long period. We will have them two or three times per quarter, just to make something different in employees’ daily work.

“Of course, they’re responsible for engaging with the customer, but it’s our responsibility as a leader to make it fun for them.”

Targeted help for employees

Beyond increasing sales for the whole team, adopting Plecto helped solve the employee motivation problem, as sales targets could now be individually tailored. Advisors who likely require extra motivation, such as new employees, can be specifically targeted by leadership for skill development.

“We also try to develop new agents, because maybe we shouldn't set the same KPIs for them,” Bobby says. “We can set them up individually with other advisors and say, ‘OK, you have only been here one year; you should not be set up with the guy who has been here 20 years. So you will start here, and these are your criteria.’”

Additionally, using Plecto has allowed Bobby to solve the problem of real-time sales data. “From a leader's perspective, it’s also an easy way for us to see the performance, right here right now,” he says.

Where previously a controller would create countless reports that the sales team would have to go in and look at, with Plecto, the whole team is more focused on their performance because of the improved accessibility. “We can just put the numbers up on the dashboard screen and everyone can see them, right here, right now,” Bobby says.

The Results: Sales through the roof

The adoption of Plecto on Bobby’s team has led to some remarkable results.

“We closed the year with about 50% more sales,” Bobby says.

Of course, he’s quick to add this impressive stat isn’t solely due to adopting Plecto. Achieving an exciting metric like this, however, makes sense when one considers how much the sales culture at the office has changed.

“We can see advisors have another mindset about sales today,” Bobby says. “One year ago, they always said, ‘Yeah, we talk a lot about sales but we’re not sales advisors. We are insurance advisors. We will only advise the customer.’ (But) looking back over one year, we’ve made huge steps about the sales culture here.”

The result? Long-term benefits to both the customer and the insurance giant. While improving the experience for customers who were receiving more relevant product recommendations and assistance, Bobby was able to improve alignment between the sales and business center support teams–so much so that the floodgates for upgrading customers were well and truly unleashed, and the service team’s performance has reflected such.

Celebrating advisor success

Using Plecto has changed the way Bobby’s office approaches personal success. Previously, Bobby says, the team would recognize those advisors winning a high number of small sales, while ignoring those who made fewer but larger sales.

With Plecto, however, things are different. “We can find the employees that are behind the scenes in numbers because maybe they’re obtaining bigger customers,” Bobby says.

"We shouldn't just use Plecto to highlight all the big sales, but people need to highlight team performance and how they can take some of the lower advisors in that journey and get them up. So I would say the focus is not on getting the top 10 percent up, but getting some of the other employees to perform 10 to 15 percent better."

“We need to see who we need to congratulate for working well, because you can be a good advisor if you’re helping 100 customers. But other advisors are doing just as great in a small way.”

In the end, how does Bobby describe Plecto?

"It’s easy to use. It’s easy for employees to set their numbers in, and easy for the leaders to actually customize their dashboard just the way they want to have it."

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Check out some quick links to If Erhvervsforsikring’s winning formula here:

Start skyrocketing your sales team's performance | Plecto

The Greatest Gamification Platform for Go-Getter Teams | Plecto