We often think about producers as these larger than life figures. They do things most account managers don’t want to do (like live off of commission). However, one thing I have seen producers do better than anyone is sell their manager on why they aren’t selling. Sounds logical, right? Why focus energy on prospecting? Instead let’s focus it all on explaining our lack of sales to our manager. The problem is that more times than not the manager is the owner. The owner also sees all the agency challenges so all it takes is a confirmation from a producer that there is a challenge and we generally let the producer off the hook rather than holding them accountable to their goals through good times and bad.
The reality is you have to make payroll at your agency in good times and bad as well. So why don’t producers have to hit goals? Here is the truth. For most non-producing producers, they aren’t doing the back end prospecting work that it takes to build a strong and solid pipeline. Now I’m not saying that every month will be your best month but when you see producers providing sales excuses vs. true problems I can see it a mile coming. They pitched their excuses to everyone to get you to believe that’s the real challenge.
The most common non-production excuse I see is the too busy servicing excuse. I love this excuse because so often it is just that. It’s the one time that they did a certificate that week in a jam and now they will wear that excuse like body armor. There are generally only a handful of too busy servicing to sell profiles you need to be on the look out for:
Too Busy Servicing Because They Are Stuck Behind a Desk
Great news! Service work will find you especially if you are behind your desk. It’s really easy to do when you are behind a desk all day. The emails and calls come in and rather than send it to the already too busy service team you just do it. The problem is you are training your clients to contact you with service requests. Would you rather make 100 cold calls or take care of a certificate? One is easier but it won’t get you paid.
The Producer Who Isn’t Well Liked By the Service Team
In our E-book earlier this year we discussed the common rift between sales and service. When a producer is not well liked by the gang of account managers guess where their work goes? Straight to the bottom of the pile. Producers, you get more with honey than with vinegar. Take a page out of the old “How to win friends and influence people” and work to butter up your service team. Trust me, it will be time best spent to help keep you focused on your goal of new business.
The Missing Producer
This is the producer where you never really know exactly where he is, but when questioned it’s always that he had to smooth something over that service messed up. Your gut is they aren’t working but instead at an early happy hour.
The Type A Control Freak
This is the producer that feels they are superior to everyone and no one can treat their clients like they do. Rather than delegate, train and coach the team, they hold the clients hostage out of fear of a mistake or that the team member won’t do it exactly the way the producer would. This means sales goes way down while they are over servicing accounts out of fear.
All of these profiles have no place in your agency! We need to focus on ways to create a system that works for everyone. This includes the sales manager who needs to push the agents out of excuses on lagging performance. Our agency assessment tackles these challenges and more to help clear out the excuses for real agency performance.
