AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
tailored to each segment. Since the selling processes in the
spheres of “business-to-customer” (B2C) and “business-to-
business” (B2B) differs, this research is limited to the analysis of
sales of B2C, as the specificity of B2B sales requires separate
research and analysis.
Although it has been found out that the survey sample consists
of 355 dependent life insurance intermediaries, a total of 298
completed questionnaires have been collected, thus the missing
number of questionnaires can be attributed to research
restrictions. On the other hand, the return of questionnaires
comprises 83.94 percent and it enables to draw statistically
significant conclusions.
In the course of the research, representatives – the dependent life
insurance intermediaries – of the major life insurance companies
in Lithuania have been interviewed. Although these services are
also provided by independent intermediaries – brokers with the
right to represent more than one insurance company – they have
not been interviewed in this research, as the nature and methods
of their work are likely to be different from those of the
dependent insurance intermediaries. The dependent
intermediaries are more active in performing the functions of
forming consumer demand and active sales. Whereas
independent insurance intermediaries, representing the interests
of several life insurance companies, usually provide not only life
insurance services, thus their main task is usually to select the
customer an offer of a particular company without focusing on
active sales.
The representatives from life insurance companies belonging to
the main banks of the country – “Swedbank Life Insurance SE”
and “SEB Life Insurance” – have refused to participate in the
research on the ground that they do not employ life insurance
intermediaries. In the companies, these functions are carried out
by the appointed employees, who usually sell life insurance
services by cross-selling. Large part of such contracts is
concluded by issuing loans to customers (important condition for
issuing a loan is the borrower’s life insurance). It is noteworthy
that selling of life insurance services in life insurance companies
that belong to banks is only an additional function of employees,
therefore the aspects of selling the services analysed in the
research are not relevant to the mentioned companies, and the
different specifics of the work do not correspond to the analysed
theme. Thus, the refusal of these companies to participate in the
research is not significant and has no impact on the statistical
conclusions and obtained results.
7 Conclusion
The market of life insurance is a complex system where there
interact insurers, the insured, intermediaries and other
institutional units. The complexity of the product of life
insurance and the specificity of the use of this service require
competent management of the sales process. In this context, the
importance of insurance intermediaries, the need for personal
selling and the advantages of selling life insurance services are
evident.
In the course of the research, the dependent insurance
intermediaries representing the major Lithuanian life insurance
companies have been interviewed. The results of the correlation
analysis have revealed that the selling methods used by the
intermediaries are directly positively related to the results
achieved. This means that higher job performance is reached by
those consultants who are able to effectively select and apply
various selling techniques, depending on the situation in the
sales process or different clients they meet; who seek to orient
their sales behaviour to the customer and to solve his problems
by adapting their services; who strive to actively listen to a client
to choose a solution that best meets his / her needs. In other
words, they conclude more life insurance contracts, their average
monthly premium of the signed contracts and the resulting
commissions are higher than of those who rarely apply or are
unable to apply the analysed sales behaviour.
Personality traits of the consultants – self-efficacy and high
emotional intelligence – also correlate with job performance.
This means that the more of the mentioned traits are inherent to
the dependent intermediaries of Lithuanian life insurance
companies, the higher is the number of life insurance contracts
they conclude, as well as the amount of premiums and
commissions.
After a more detailed evaluation of the research hypotheses H1–
H5 with the help of the multiple regression analysis, the research
can be partially expanded by analysing the possible causal effect
of sales factors on sales performance.
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