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Trupanion, Seattle WA

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2012, Click to Enter The 2014 American Business Awards

Company: Trupanion, Seattle WA
Company Description: Trupanion - medical insurance for pets
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Telesales Team of the Year

Nomination Title: Telesales Team of the Year - Trupanion

1. Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2013 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes: TEXT REDACTED FOR PUBLICATION

Trupanion loves its Telesales Team! As a fast growing company with year over year growth expectations of 30%, of which our sales team contributes to half, Trupanion relies on the talented individuals on its Telesales team to help the company achieve success. As you can imagine, Trupanion’s product is different from other online retail products. Not only is the product insurance, which many consumers do not understand, it’s also all about pets, which adds a lot of emotion, and rightfully so, to the mix. This interesting mix of aggressive sales targets, insurance as a product and immense love for pets means Trupanion needs to have very unique and highly skilled people on its Telesales team.

Having a Telesales team whose values align with its customers’ yields better sales success than hiring more aggressive commission based sales people. This is proven time and time again with extremely positive customer survey scores of 4.9 on 1-5 scale and average customer retention rates of 98.6%.

Before understanding Trupanion’s success from a metrics standpoint, it’s important to know the people.

Meet Tric! Tric is a passionate pet lover who goes nowhere without her beloved Guthrie, therefore, selling Trupanion has come natural. Without a sales background, she quickly rose to be a top performer on the sales team. Her results prove that selling from the heart is highly effective. Outside of work she loves Guthrie, art and nature.

The leadership at Trupanion realizes what a gift their people are, and market Trupanion’s phone number in large font on every page of Trupanion.com. The company strategy to drive customers to the phone has paid off with 48% of new business sign-ups occurring with the Telesales team. Not only is the volume of sales high, the quality of the sale is superb – with higher lifetime value and longer retention than our other sales channels.

“We don’t have a single other place in our business that has a bigger revenue impact that our Telesales team.” Darryl Rawlings, Founder & CEO

Trupanion handles approximately 10,000 inbound leads per month. Our inbound call conversion rate is currently at 41%, exceeding targets for the quarter.

In addition to having the best people on the team and having the best product to sell, Trupanion leverages technology to achieve high goals. For example, Trupanion routes customer care calls in low volume to the team so they stay connected to the product and know how to set customers up for success with future claims filing. Trupanion’s CRM is integrated with its phone system so a lead is auto-created for every call with the sales team filling in the pertinent details.

Outside of technology, Trupanion is slightly untraditional in that they don’t use scripts or have handle time goals. The company wants the best team members to shine through on every call and that means they need the time to fully take care of the customer and to do so in a manner that feels authentic to them. The team’s work hard play hard mentality also helps.

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