Executive summary

Business Challenge

When a regional insurance company restructured its sales operations, the new Senior Vice President Sales and Chief Human Resource Officer committed to the following goals:

• increase sales with a lower cost structure
• increase customer and broker focus
• streamline the sales process
• retain targeted sales staff

Sophia Network Engaged

Sophia Network was engaged to create a high-performance culture that would immediately deliver breakthrough business results across key sales functions.

Results

• The sales organization was restructured without losing key staff.
• Changes were embraced by the organization and silos disappeared.
• Customer quote process redesigned from 5 weeks to 3 days in 16 weeks

Summary

Dramatic improvements like these require cultural transformation in most organizations. Achieving demanding goals requires overcoming business-as-usual attitudes, risk aversion, inadequate infrastructure and internal IT-driven processes. When organizational change is pursued in service to aggressive business goals rather that for its own sake, cultural transformation can lead to breakthrough performance as described in this white paper.

The Process

Overview

This engagement had five phases:

• Cultural assessment
• Team formation
• Transformational Workshops
• Structured Brainstorming
• Breakthrough Projects Initiative

Cultural Assessment

We conducted a cultural assessment to determine organizational barriers and catalysts to change.

The assessment identified the following:

• Senior leadership was committed to creating a breakthrough in the sales organization
• Their acquired self-insured business unit had a customizable, customer-focused IT platform that they could build upon.
• There was a business imperative for changing the lead-to-claim process
• A culture of resignation: people didn’t think change was possible
• People didn’t think they could make a difference because of the complexity of the issues within the organization.
• A pattern of unfinished initiatives and projects with no official closure
• Finger pointing and blame
• Silos, especially IT, sales and operations
• Insufficiently informed workforce
• An “internal focus” in which the customer experience was not always considered
• Low morale among associates

Team Formation

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The organization’s management determined the need for initiatives around four teams:

• Broker engagement
• Broker service center
• Self insured
• Lead-to-claim process

Transformational Workshops

Transformational Workshops were held for 75 key employees to build a context of high performance based on integrity, accountability and authentic communication.

Integrity:

• Doing what you said you will do and on time.
• Letting your team and others know when you’re not going to be on time or that you’re not going to do it at all

Accountability:

• Taking responsibility
• Produce results that meet or exceed expectations
• Make agreements and honor them.
• Getting things done

Transparent Communication:

• Listening to others, with curiosity from a clean canvas, with no agenda
• Standing in another person’s shoes, seeing, and honoring the world from their perspective
• Being straightforward

The Transformational Workshops formed the foundation/context for the Breakthrough Projects Initiatives. Based on positive feedback from both leaders and participants, an additional 150 employees were scheduled to attend the workshops. Leaders expected this number of trained employees would position the organization past the tipping point of high performance.

Structured Brainstorming

Our consultants led each team through a day-long three-step brainstorming process:

• Each individual generates and documents four priority ideas
• Groups review their combined ideas and select and present their best four to the entire team
• Team votes to prioritize top four ideas

Breakthrough Project Initiative

We conducted the Breakthrough Project Initiative beginning with a two-day Breakthrough Project Laboratory, including an innovation process that incorporates the results of rapid prototyping, in which engaged teams and stakeholders iteratively improve project plans and objectives.

Next, we distinguished the Breakthrough Project process:

• Create
• Enroll
• Implement
• Celebrate/Exit

Most projects teams spend 10% of their time creating the project and 90% implementing it (with no focus on the other two steps). Breakthrough Project teams spend 30% of their time creating the project, resulting in “out of the box- innovative” thinking that results in projects that are exciting with the promise of extraordinary results. Breakthrough Project teams spend 30% of their time identifying stakeholders and enrolling them in their project so that they experience a groundswell of support. As a result, excited team members and enrolled stakeholders implement projects with velocity. The Breakthrough Project teams created a community of support around their projects. Breakthrough Project teams celebrate their success—they actually come to a formal end—and then turn over responsibility to a group accountable for taking over or maintaining the project.

An Oversight Team consisting of the CEO’s chief of staff, the SVP of Sales (and staff), Chief Human Resources Officer and a senior consultant provided the Breakthrough Initiative with direction and guidance.

We provided teams with regular coaching throughout the Design Thinking Innovation initiative:

• The broker service team set out to regain #1 status in customer service by achieving best-in-class service metrics. The team emphasized promoting and supporting self-service options while decreasing sales involvement in non-sales functions. Manual quoting of small group policies was discontinued. An online broker information portal was designed.
• The broker engagement team set out to develop more A-level brokers and recruit more brokers overall. They learned that brokers strongly preferred webinars over breakfast trainings. The team found that brokers liked being invited to events with sports celebrities but cared much less for free tickets to sporting events. The broker engagement team analyzed broker compensation models and spotted opportunities for dramatic cost savings.
• The self-insured team was assigned the goal of taking the lead in this trending market. It conducted a thorough analysis of the business, financial and sales models of the parent organization and the acquired self-insured business unit and decided to propagate the acquired unit’s models across the entire organization. The team set up sales and operations training in the new model for the organization’s staff. The team is rebranding the organization’s self-insured business offerings with new website, sales collateral and advertising.
• The lead-to-claim team set out to transform internal processes and touch-points. A CRM-based solution was designed to replace a manual lead-tracking system. Quoting was redesigned from five weeks to three days. Modularized product offerings replaced thousands of pre-defined, fixed products. A mobile app was specified.

Challenge	Goal	Results
Increase operating margins	Increase sales with lower cost structure	Reduced headcount costs by $1.5 million annually. “Significant” additional savings from revised broker compensation model.
Many processes were based on needs of the IT department, not the company or its customers	Increase customer and broker focus	Brokers and customers interviewed. Four teams established to develop new processes: Lead-to-claim, self-insured business team, broker service center, broker engagement
Quotes took 5 weeks versus 5 days at competitors	Streamline the sales process	Quote process redesigned to take 3 days
Discharge ineffective leaders and redundant positions	Retain targeted sales staff	100% targeted staff retained despite two rounds of layoffs

Additional Results

The Transformational Workshops and Breakthrough Initiative had a profound, qualitative impact on the organizational culture. Employees now own, are accountable for and complete their projects. Silos have been dissolved and teams work cross-functionally and collaboratively. Milestones are achieved with velocity. Key processes have been redesigned from the perspective of customer needs and business requirements.

The organization discovered that the IT infrastructure of an acquired business unit could be used as the platform for the rapidly-trending self-insured business.

The broker engagement team discovered disparities in broker compensation models across states. The team recommended that the organization lead its industry with a new compensation model in their largest market that paid only on a Per Employee Per Month (PEPM) basis while eliminating bonuses based on percentage of total premiums for large groups.

Summary

As a result of the consulting engagement associates have seen that their efforts—individually, with their teams and with other teams that they historically had not worked with—have indeed made a difference. Savings have been generated, broker engagement has increased and processes are being improved. Things that historically have stuck are now moving.

Quotes from Associates and Stakeholders

“Sophia Network’s work helped us to understand the importance of being accountable, living from the context of Integrity and being in action. The tools keep us focused and in action.“

“The most important outcome I have seen out of Sophia Network’s work is that the silos are dissolving.”

“We can’t get over how, in only 16 weeks, our teams are managing themselves. People are showing up for meetings on time, with agendas, and getting the work done. Teams are reviewing milestones every two weeks, and they are meeting and exceeding them consistently.”

“I’ve been here 25 years, and this is the first time we’ve ever worked effectively with other departments.”

“We’ve never seen a team produce such extraordinary work and detailed process flow maps with such velocity and in such a shortened time frame.”