Calling All Insurance Agents: Are You an Eeyore or a Tigger?
I recently trained two new agencies to the Agency Performance Partners family. After the session, I polled both groups on what stuck out the most. The answer was unanimously “keeping a positive attitude.” I was a bit taken back, after all, I brought all my insurance ninja tricks to the sessions but a simply positive attitude was the answer. Why is this so important, well insurance isn’t easy today. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that. We hear all the time from our customers that price is all that matters, that no one has any money, and that everything is the agent’s fault. Rarely do we ever got a phone call that says great job my rates went down? Truly there is only one time people don’t talk about price, that is in a claim.
So the advertising is working. The billions of dollars of advertising are working. You know what else is working, is that for many of us we start believing the customer only cares about price and we forget to bring the why. We all have insurance to protect the things we love the most. It’s about the house where the kids are born, it’s about the small business that started in the basement, it’s about not having to go to work if your spouse passes so you can pay the mortgage. For some reason, we stopped talking about the things we protect and we fell victim to talking as well about price. We have to pivot to value.
I’m a huge believer that attitude is everything. We make a choice every day. If you get a speeding ticket, are you going to let that ruin your day? I can certainly introduce you to people who would rather have a speeding ticket then what they are going through. You choose your attitude, the problem is your attitude is contagious. So if you have a badittude (my new word for bad attitude), you will infect your coworkers. No doubt, if we could quarantine badittudes the world be different.
So that leads me to conclude with my two favorite critters, Tigger and Eeyore. You get to choose which one you want to be every day. Chose wisely as it will impact everything. Just try, instead of getting off of an upset client call stand up and say I totally nailed it I got him to understand. Take out any sentence that starts with “Can you believe….” It never ends well. Choose to be a Tigger, you will be surprised how many people you can positively influence.
I’ll leave you with a real story. I am working with an agency in Louisville, they completed the agency assessment and the common theme was negativity. One manager committed to only being positive for one week. She was amazed at the different, her lowest achieving employe started trying harder, her husband became happier, she started cringing when she heard Eeyore comments. She said the first week was exhausting but it’s easier now and it changed everything. Try to be a Tigger, you will be shocked at what happens next.
