Does your agency need a boost in insurance policy retention?
Are you selling one policy to lose one? It can happen in agencies as you grow. It’s a challenge to maintain growth when your sales team can’t fuel the run off. Even if a client moves, passes away or sells, that premium must be made up so your agency can stay on track to grow! So how do you do it when the universe isn’t naturally aligning for you? Let’s see how Clevenger Insurance, in Indiana handled increasing insurance policy retention.
After contracting with Agency Performance Partners we conducted an agency assessment. In reviewing the agency we learned they had a great book of business but it wasn’t being nurtured the way it could be! We quickly launched our AppX Retention Program.
Let me walk you through the steps we take to launch the program with Clevenger Insurance and all Agency Performance Partners clients.
- Job Description Update: If we want the team to make a proactive call to every client once per year, well it needs to be listed clearly in the job description. We have sample job descriptions that we use with clients but it’s awful hard to hold someone accountable to a core function of their position if it’s not listed in their job description.
- Setting a Team Goal and Incentive Plan: Whenever you launch something new it’s a great idea to have an incentive plan tied to a very specific goal. For Gina and Joe it was a bonus if they hit 91% ,92% or 93% retention. There were some sales metrics in there too but they had 3 tiers of results. Getting to 92% would be a 4% jump in retention within the year. Bonuses were monetary but for each agency we work with we make recommendations about a bonus plan based on what the team wants.
- Setting Routine Meeting Cadence: Whenever we launch anything new we set up a bi-weekly check in meeting with the entire team. It’s generally by video conference. This means that everyone knows that every two weeks we will be reviewing their performance. This leaves almost nowhere to hide! So if you aren’t making all of your calls, great news! Your team, your leader and the APP team will know. More importantly all of our incentive plans always have a team component so if you aren’t making the mark you are holding your entire team back!
- Identify Baseline Metrics: So in order to know what you want to improve we need to identify a baseline. So if you want to boost insurance policy retention we have to know where we stand currently! It’s not fair to you or your team to pick a number out of the sky. At APP we help you pull the numbers out of your system and analyze them so we can be precise in knowing where you stand, where you want to be and how to prove positive ROI on our program.
- Select a Place to Display the Goals: For Clevenger we selected a bulletin board in the main conference area. Everyone has to walk by the goals to see them even when going to the bathroom.
- Hold a Launch Training: We always fly out to the agency to handle the launch training. This is our shot to earn buy in and get everyone on the same page. It’s always a half day training and then we do one on one meetings in the afternoon.
- Provide The Team With A Clear Plan & Workbook: You need to outline EVERYTHING. For account managers they need clear structure and details. The more details the better!
- Tracking: When people start a program you need to know clearly how to track it. We always set up tracking first and identify exactly how it works in the launch training.
When you can get down a good launch rhythm you can see the results. In just 6 short months Clevenger Insurance saw a 4% bump in insurance policy retention and even great results on decreasing re-shops, increasing coverage and selling more insurance. To check out their results you can also view their case study!
