Study On The Competency Of Grass-root Sales Managers Of Life Insurance Industry In Shanxi Province

Since the entrance into the 21 st century, the life insurance industry in Shanxi Province has been experiencing a sustainable, rapid and booming development featured by constant market improvement and continuously increasing service means. But along with the development of this industry, there emerge serious problems such as extensive management, poor industry image, generally low-quality marketing personnel and etc. And the incentive competition caused by all-around liberalization of this industry further amplifies those problems, negatively affecting the sustainable and healthy development of the life insurance industry in Shanxi Province. Grass-root sales managers in this insurance combine together the roles of life insurance sales and manager of his grass-root marketing team. Therefore their competency to perform their work is essential to the development of their enterprises'business, standardized management of their marketing team and the competitiveness promotion of their enterprise.By way of analyzing the roles and functions of grass-root sales managers of the Life insurance industry in Shanxi Province, the author first tentatively defines the competency requirements of grass-root insurance sales managers in Shanxi Province. After that, the author applied the Behavioral Event Interview and interviewed 10 excellent-performance grass-roots sales managers of Shanxi Branch of China Life Insurance, and then used oral coding method and extracted the competencies of those grass-root Life Insurance sales managers in Shanxi Province. The next step, the author selected 200 such sales managers from the Shanxi Branch of China Life Insurance and in accordance with established standards divided them into general-performance group and high-performance group. Then role-and-function analysis and 31 competencies extracted from those high-performance managers in the Behavioral Event Interview were used to carry out questionnaire survey of both sample groups.When carrying out testing significance of difference on the survey results of both high-performance group and general-performance group, significant difference were found in 20 competencies between the two groups of grass-root sales managers of Shanxi Branch China Life Insurance:specialization, learning and development, power of influence, achievement desire, incentive, initiative, training of others, planning, troubleshooting, professional dedication, integrity, time management, customer-oriented, information collection and analysis, flexibility and adaptability.And in further exploring the internal structure of those competencies, the author found that all competencies of grass-root sales managers of Shanxi Branch China Life Insurance could categorized into 4 dimensions:market development, team management, interpersonal communication and motivation & personality. Then the author used stepwise regression analysis and analyzed all together 18 competencies of 4 dimensions before he obtained relevant effective competency-predicting data of grass-root life insurance sales manager in Shanxi Province and prioritized them from the most to the least:initiative, empathy, learning and development, teamwork, incentive, customer-oriented, sharing of resources, information collection and analysis, flexibility & adaptability, power of influence, troubleshooting, professional dedication, planning, time management, language ability and expression.