Welcome to our February 3 Minute Training Video!
The Common Dispute Between Insurance Agency Owners And Team Members
On the 1st day of each month we will be releasing a free training video for you to share with your team. Each video will be no more than 3 minutes and it will share one strategy on leadership, sales, service or marketing. We encourage you to use these videos to start your team meeting, send around to your staff or just to enjoy yourself.
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In this video, we’ll discuss:
- Getting everyone on the team (owners and management included) to understand one another better.
- Distinguishing why results trump activity
- Strategies and tips to drive your business forward in an efficient and effective way
Want to learn more on how Agency Performance Partners can help your team with their sales process? Book some time to chat with us – we would love to get to know your agency and learn how we could support your team.
(Full transcription available below)
Do you ever feel in your agency that no one ever gets you? If you’re the owner, maybe it’s that your team doesn’t understand what you’re trying to accomplish, maybe if you’re a team member it’s just kind of like, “Why doesn’t the owner ever understand how hard I’m working?”
Well, this is a common thing in agencies across the country, and actually small businesses across the country. One of our top read blogs last year was actually the conflicts that exist between CSRs and producers. Now, we know that they have different brains, so we helped break that down to put you guys into each other’s shoes. Let’s stop and take a look at what it’s like in the owner’s shoes versus a team member’s shoes.
Owners care about the results, team members often care about all the activity that they did. Killing themselves at their desks to try hard to get that result. A great is example of this is you’re working on a big renewal, everybody is putting in their blood, sweat and tears. You’re on the phone with a carrier, you’re staying late to get the proposal together for the big renewal, and it just doesn’t come through. We lose a client. The owner is upset that we lost a client, decreasing revenue, decreasing strategies, decreasing resources, right? You’re upset because you’re like, “Man, I just put so much activity in, so much hard work. Why couldn’t it pay off and why doesn’t the owner still see that we tried so hard?”
We have to stop and take a moment and understand that the reality of the situation is that results are always going to trump activity. If you’re feeling more and more like there’s a disconnect there, we need to stop and take a time-out, right? So, owners, you need to stop and say, “Am I clear in really telling my team the result I’m looking for?” This needs to be published, discussed at every team meeting and we need to post the results on a routine basis so everybody is clear on the result you need to drive the business forward. We know at a growing agency it’s going to cycle back into the staff with bigger bonuses, more team members, more resources, better health insurance.
Staff, you need to take a quick look and say, “Is the activity we’re doing really generating the results that the business is looking for?” What does that mean? For example, in some agencies that we’ve run into, they send out renewal questionnaires in the mail. It’s very timely, right? It takes a long time to send out that many letters, expensive with mail, and the results are maybe that you get a handful back and it’s the same people every year. We need to put the brakes on and identify are there better ways of doing it. Just because we’ve always done it doesn’t mean we should keep doing it. I need everybody to understand that you can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. We all need to put a big brake on and say, “Are there better ways we can accomplish that gets a better result?” and even how can we use technology to support that, right?
So, at the end of the day, this is what we specialize in. Our agency assessment is super awesome to help solve that problem. We go top to bottom throughout the whole agency and find those pockets so that we can help you guys deliver that result, but by doing less activity that drives that higher result. You should check it out on our website. In the meantime, we’ll see you at our next three minute video.
