Baby it’s cold outside (well at least here in New England). But just because it may take a bit for you to get out from the nice warm covers doesn’t mean your agency should feel that way. It’s a brand new year. Time to get going on crushing those goals. For some agencies they feel like they can’t quite get on track. Just like when you have a cold, you’re trying really hard but it’s easier to stay in your office than fight through it. Think of an agency assessment like a Dayquil, Chicken Soup, and OJ trifecta for your agency.
Agency assessments are solving the major challenge that plagues agencies-how to get everyone working together toward a common goal. Far too often we see a lot of effort going into holding each other back. If that same energy and time could be redirected towards positive results generating activity many agencies with a cold would be thriving. But unlike a cold, sleeping it off will only make things way worse.
We start the agency assessment off with an anonymous survey that the team completes. This goes over everything from responsibilities, leadership, marketing, team and culture. The responses can be intense but they help us point to what’s causing the challenges. We also review 1 year’s worth of data points for the agency and conduct secret shopper calls. We then then fly to your location and interview every team member. This helps connect the dots. By this time we can see the 3 core areas that are holding the agency back from having more fun and making more money!
Then the real work hits.
We spend the entire next day with the leadership team reviewing data and building a 90 day plan. We partner with you to help fight back the cold and get better in just 3 months. You may be thinking that it’s easy enough to do this in house, but is it really? It’s very difficult to be impartial and not get emotional. The bottom line is that everyone caused the cold but curing it may need some outside reinforcements. We found a great article you can review on why people work with consultants.
Don’t suffer if you don’t have to! You can even read some of our case study success stories from Preferred Insurance Center and Insurance Management Group to learn how an assessment helped spark their results!
Once the assessment is over we spend the next 90 days working on getting geared up to do big things! This includes polishing up job descriptions, identifying how and what to track, building incentive plans, cleaning up any interpersonal issues and often times even appointing team leaders. We meet with the agency bi-weekly but also remain on call as necessary. From there many agencies have us stay on to launch our AppX Sales or AppX Retention programs.
Here is a recap of what’s included in an agency assessment:
- Anonymous team survey
- Secret Shopper Calls
- 1 Year of Data Analytics Review
- Team Interviews
- Management Review and Planning Session
- Bi Weekly Calls
- Job Descriptions
- Incentive Plans
- Goal Setting
- Data Tracking
- Identifying Team Leaders
- Setting Up Routine Valuable Team Meetings
So what are you waiting for? It’s a new year, let’s get to making 2018 Ridiculously Amazing!
