Gaocai sells insurance agent market from "crowd tactics" to "elite tactics"

● Our reporter Li Jing

On the social platform, there are more and more highly educated and high-quality professionals engaged in insurance sales. From IT elites to architectural designers, to those who used to work as actuaries in insurance companies, why did these former gold collar workers choose to work in insurance sales?

In recent years, the insurance agent market has experienced a change from weight to quality. Major insurance companies have adjusted their strategies, optimized the structure of the agent team, strengthened their professional quality and service ability, and tried to promote the continuous growth of business through "elite tactics". This change is not only a round of shuffling of the insurance industry, but also a new challenge to the professional development of insurance agents.

High talent transferred to insurance sales

"A former colleague of mine, formerly a senior actuary, has recently transformed into an insurance salesperson, focusing on the promotion and service of insurance fund trust business, with the main customer group being high net worth customers." An industry insider who once worked in a state-owned insurance enterprise said, "With the growing demand for middle and high end insurance in the society, the requirements for the quality of agents are also increasing accordingly. High net worth customers have a higher awareness and demand for insurance, which makes high-quality, highly educated agents more popular. "

In addition to the market's desire for high-quality insurance sales personnel, insurance agents for high net worth customers usually have higher income and broader development space within the insurance industry. "High net worth customers have a strong purchasing power, a high probability of transaction, and a much higher proportion of insurance purchases than low - and middle-income families. Compared with the actuary profession, the income of insurance agents is more flexible, and his experience and resources accumulated in the actuary position provide a strong support for his transformation." said the above person.

It is not uncommon for highly educated and experienced elites to enter the insurance sales market. They often have rich network resources and good professional quality, and can provide professional insurance consulting and planning services for customers, which makes them more competitive in the insurance market. This phenomenon also reflects some changes in the current employment market. Because of its low entry threshold and relatively free working style, insurance sales have become an option for many highly educated talents to re engage or make career transformation.

Many talented insurance agents said that the huge market potential of the insurance industry and the flexibility of their work were important reasons for their choice of this profession. In the current economic environment, insurance, as an important tool for risk management and asset value maintenance and appreciation, has attracted more and more attention. As Oman, an insurance agent in Guangdong, said, "Everyone is more and more aware of insurance. At present, interest rates are falling and the appreciation effect of real estate is decreasing. Some people begin to save and move to buy insurance products. At the same time, with the deepening of the reform of pay per patient group (DRG), commercial medical insurance also shows broad prospects for development." Oman said.

From weight to weight

At present, the insurance agent market is gradually moving from the past extensive growth to the high-quality development stage. The resale of insurance by talented people is to visualize the "optimization", which corresponds to the continuous reduction of the overall size of the market.

According to the 2023 annual report, China Life Ping An Life Insurance, Taiping Life Insurance, CPIC Life Insurance Xinhua Insurance Personal insurance sales personnel of PICC Life Insurance totaled about 1.66 million, a year-on-year decrease of 18.68%. Among them, the biggest drop was Taiping Life Insurance, with a year-on-year decrease of nearly 40%.

In fact, since 2019, the insurance agent team has been continuously "downsizing". According to the White Paper on the Empowerment of Insurance Agents (2023), the number of personal agents in China will decline year by year after reaching a peak of 9.1 million in 2019, and will decline to 5.95 million in 2021. Behind this change, the insurance industry attaches importance to and improves the quality of the agent team.

In the past, although the "sea of people strategy" has opened the insurance market to a certain extent, it has also brought many problems, such as low threshold for agent recruitment, simplified training, and insufficient professional ability. This not only affects the promotion effect of insurance products, but also harms the interests of consumers. "I considered buying annuity and incremental life insurance, and communicated with several insurance salesmen. However, I found that once I met insurance salesmen who lacked professional knowledge, the willingness to buy insurance would quickly decline. Since it was incremental life insurance, it was mainly the financial property of principal and interest protection, IRR (internal rate of return) is the most basic common sense. A salesman told me that he had never heard of IRR. So the insurance agent market really needs to develop towards high education and specialization, so that customers can get high-quality services. " Ms. Zhang, an insurance buyer in Beijing, said.

With the change of market environment and the upgrading of consumer demand, the insurance industry has begun to attach importance to the professional quality and service ability of agents, and has changed to "elite tactics". While the number of agents declined, the agent team structure of each insurance company continued to optimize, and indicators such as per capita capacity and per capita commission rose significantly. China Life Insurance said that in 2023, the production capacity of the sales team will increase significantly, and the monthly per capita premium for the first year will increase by 28.6% year on year; In 2023, the personal insurance channel of PICC Life Insurance will realize the original insurance premium income of 47.992 billion yuan, up 5.3% year on year; In 2023, Xinhua Insurance's monthly average comprehensive production capacity per capita will be 6293.7 yuan, up 94.4% year on year; Ping An Life Insurance said that, on a comparable basis, the new business value of the agent channel will increase by 40.3% in 2023, and the per capita income of agents will increase by 39.2%; In 2023, the average monthly per capita scale premium of insurance marketers of Taibao Life Insurance was 12837 yuan, up 51.8% year on year.

The reporter learned that the China Insurance Industry Association has solicited opinions from the industry on such documents as the Standards for the Qualification Level of Sales Competence of Insurance Sales Professionals (Personal Insurance Direction) (Draft for Comments). The core is to establish and improve the qualification level system for sales ability of sales personnel, and carry out sales authorization for corresponding products. stay Caitong Securities According to analyst Xia Changsheng, this will speed up the release of low-quality manpower from the Qing Bao Dai market, reduce misleading sales, and improve the professional ability and image of agents. In addition, due to the large difference in the requirements for the service life of agents with different qualifications to upgrade and the differentiated product authorization, insurance companies may be forced to increase the strength of optimal growth and education.

Promote the upgrading of marketing team

"To promote the continuous growth of marketing channel business, insurance companies need to build excellent teams to drive healthy development with production capacity, rather than increase the number of agents to promote business growth." Wang Lianwen, vice president of Xinhua Insurance, said. In 2024, major insurance companies will launch relevant plans to build more professional and efficient sales teams.

Bai Kai, vice president of China Life Insurance, said that in 2024, China Life Insurance would continue to implement the reform of the personal insurance marketing system, and make two-way efforts according to the upgrading of the existing team and the exploration of the new team, so as to maintain the overall stability of the team, continue to increase the proportion of excellent people, further improve the per capita capacity, and continue to improve the quality of the new group. At the same time, we will focus on improving quality, strengthening professional training, strengthening sales support, supporting incentive policies, etc., to promote the high-quality development of the team.

"We have introduced a new Basic Law, which focuses on the improvement of individual capabilities and the whole organization as a fortress. In order to make the Basic Law promote the development of the team, we have strengthened our measures in three aspects: first, strengthening recruitment standards, second, strengthening basic management, and third, strengthening the honor system." Wang Lianwen said, "Looking forward to the future, we will continue to move towards the revenue growth model driven by excellent teams in terms of excellent growth and education and innovative activities."

In addition, due to the rapid growth of the demand of middle and high net worth people for pension, health and wealth management, many insurance companies have actively built top agent teams in recent years to seize this market highland. For example, TP-EMP (excellent management personnel) project launched by Taiping Life Insurance, adhering to the new three high culture of "high quality, high quality and high performance", aims to serve the high-end market and cultivate a team of "excellent management elites". Taiping Life Insurance introduced that the team has many industry leaders, such as middle and senior executives, private entrepreneurs, and professional technicians. Ping An Life launched the Ping An MVP brand. Yang Zheng, Chairman of Ping An Life, said that Ping An MVP agents have three labels. First, they have excellent performance. One of the criteria for being shortlisted in Ping An MVP is that their performance should reach the level of MDRT (Million Round Table Conference); Second, the business quality is good. The 13 month continuation rate of insurance policies sold by Ping An MVP agents is 98%, and the business quality is far above the industry average; Third, the professional level is high. Data shows that by the end of 2023, the number of MVPs of Ping An has increased by 112% compared with the beginning of the year.