1. Call a truce with sales--Take head of sales out to lunch to find out challenges they face in selling. What are their pain points (not customer's)? What do they need from you to make their jobs easier? What are they hearing from potential customers, and does it differ from what you hear? Share your knowledge as well, but make a point of asking questions.

2. Try something brand new--Most marketers have pet ideas they'd love to try, if only they had time. Make time for one of those ideas. Maybe it's a customer advisory panel, a new premium on a direct response campaign, or your first email promotion. If management won't sign off on it, suggest running a small test. When results exceed your expectations, you can roll it out in a big way.

Finding Employees For Insurance Industry Jobs

Finding right employee for any job opening can be a challenge to say least, and this is no truer than in insurance industry. With considerations ranging from experience and education to their personal skills, decisions faced by recruiters and employers can be of critical importance.

When hiring employees for insurance industry jobs it is important to take many factors into account. Summarized, these factors include:

1. Education & Certification
2. Experience
3. Personal Skills

Obviously one of first criteria you will be looking for in a candidate will be their education. Whether employee is applying for a one of your insurance sales jobs, customer service, risk management or some other position you will want to make sure that their education matches criteria of job. With this in mind an employer will often find him/herself in a position when multiple candidates are well educated and/or certified. While it may take additional time, looking into schools themselves may yield significant differences.

A certificate from "University of Phoenix Online" is worth significantly less than same certificate from an accredited educational institution but unless you look into credentials you may be tempted to consider them all equal.

While education cannot be considered end-all-be-all of hiring any qualified candidate, a solid education from an accredited institution reflects more than a knowledge of industry - it also reflects job applicant's ability to write and present ideas clearly and also to stick with something they have started.

And isn't that a key feature in a candidate, whether education is necessary in their job function or not?

This is perhaps most important factor in filling jobs in insurance industry (or any industry for that matter). What you should be reading into their experience is not simply number of years they have worked in same or similar roles however. While experience in a specific field lends itself to a strong understanding of ins-and-outs of it can also have its downside that must be taken into account.

The value of experience in insurance industry comes primarily from reduced training that will be necessary to get employee functioning. Knowing how to perform a specific function, especially a complex function such as risk management or loss control, can save a company countless dollars in training.