Designing a Model to Explain the Performance of the Sales Network in the Insurance Industry

Insurance companies are increasingly developing their representatives to gain a larger share of the target market. Therefore, representatives’ ability is very crucial in profitability. In this regard, it is innitailly necessary to identify the factors affecting the performance of the sales network in the insurance industry in order to empower targeted representatives. Since analysis of the statistics and performance of the representatives of the sales network in the insurance industry indicates that most of the representatives are not capable of achieving these goals irrespective of the objectives set by the related marketing and monitoring network. The other representatives are not adequately satisfied with their performance toward the market potential. Hence, there is relatively a little sale of various types of insurances in these representatives. Therefore, the present study seeks to answer the crucial question of what factors can explain the performance of the sales network in the insurance industry.

The grounded theory has been used in the present study based on Glaser and Strauss’ proposed guidelines. The statistical population includes all insurance industry experts in Gilan province, including the experienced insurance industry sales network with higher education degrees, as well as technical and executive managers and major insurers. Consequently, 17 of them were selected considering the inclusion criteria (having at least a Master's degree and a work experience of at least 15 years in the insurance industry) using snowball sampling method as a purposeful method in qualitative research. After the interviews, theoretical saturation has been achieved.

The findings show that the factors affecting the performance of the sales network in the insurance industry include individual factors related to representatives (individual intrinsic characteristics and individual acquired characteristics), factors related to the representatives organization (organizational characteristics, customer relationship management, human resource characteristics, and marketing structure), insurance representatives’ performance (their financial performance, service performance, and communication performance), factors related to insurance company (insurance company characteristics), factors related to the central insurance company (central insurance characteristics), environmental characteristics (economic, political, cultural, social, and legal factors), sales network performance in the insurance industry (representatives and brokers’ performance), empowerment of sales network (economic growth and development of sales network, social development of sales network, cultural growth and development of sales network).

The proposed model reveals that causal conditions include: individual factors related to representatives and factors related to the representatives’ organization. Besides, phenomenon-orentation include performance of insurance representatives; strategies include factors related to the central insurance; contextual factors include factors related to insurance company; and the intervening conditions include environmental factors that lead to these conditions. It leads to the development of sales network’ performance in the insurance industry.