Charting a Path to Success: Setting and Achieving Goals for Your Insurance Agency

I know so many agencies that do not focus on goals, as a matter of fact, they don’t even mention goals. I spent years at agencies trying to implement goals and was astounded at how many humans don’t have goals. 

They wander around in life with no goals. To me, that is wandering. No purpose in life. 

Goal setting can drive success and challenge people to do hard things. Clear precise insurance goals can lead a team into a place of success they have never known and never been a part of. Leading and guiding them there can be your biggest success or your biggest challenge.  

Insurance goals can keep your agency moving and growing even during difficult times. Goals can transform an agency into a well-oiled machine producing and causing agency growth that in turn becomes profit and also causes client satisfaction. 

Remember to make your goals SMART, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. You can find even more about goals and a  strategic planning guide in our course “Build Your Agency’s Annual Plan.”

Understanding the Power of Goals for Your Insurance Agency

What are your agency goals? I hope you have an answer! 

You need to start by looking at a 10-year plan and working backward. You want to determine your 10-year target. Once you have determined what this is. It will help you create your yearly and 5-year plans to accomplish your 10-year goal. 

All of your other goals will lead to your 10-year goal. It is best to start with numbers. Agency Performance Partners uses a growth calculator that helps determine where the agency should be in 10 years. 

Your 10-year plan is your long-term vision while you will have short-term objectives that should be met to help you accomplish your long-term goal.  

Goals are a great way to accomplish success for you and your team. Everyone feels great when they successfully complete a goal. You need to make your goals logical, consistent, and accomplishable.  

I like to mention that I worked at an agency that had monthly goals, we met every month to discuss where we were, but the monthly goal was easier for us because if we had a bad week, we could make it up the next week. I always made my goal by the end of the month. It was stressful during those bad weeks, but a relief at the end of the month. 

You could also have quarterly insurance goals each year. The more you track and have clear expectations of goals set the more successful your team will be at following them and the more successful they will feel as employees of your agency. 

You need to remember that your agency would not function without your amazing staff, make sure they are part of the reward. It always feels good to receive bonuses and extra incentives when you help your employer reach their goal.

If your team knows what they are going after and they work as a team to accomplish a common goal they will be more excited about their job and their contribution! 

Take a look at our “Build Your Agency Plan” course that just released in October!

Recognizing the Benefits of Goal-Oriented Management

If you don’t have insurance goals currently, then what is everyone doing? What are they striving for? Do they have their own goals? 

If they are salespeople they may have a goal because they get paid only commission, but what about service staff? Retention is part of growth, right? 

Goals provide structure, they provide direction and they should provide reward when they are met. That reward may be their pay, but you want to make sure they feel recognized for their contribution to the agency. 

I heard stories of agency owners who promised lavish trips, they were won and he attended them and did not allow staff to go on them. He actually was an exclusive agent and unbeknownst to the staff, they couldn’t go on them, they were only for the principal agent. When this is the way you treat your staff there is a problem! 

However, that same agent decided to make everyone 1099 and work for commission only. His service staff who he thought wouldn’t do so well, made the most money that year, even more than the sales staff. 

Don’t underestimate the power of goals and people’s desires to succeed, especially if they are competitive. Goals can accidentally cause people to have more focus and help implement processes and procedures. 

So you have a team and their goal is to do annual renewal review calls, if they put their heads together and come up with a plan, a strategy it will help everyone reach their goals. Make sure you are aware of their personal and insurance goals and do what you can to help them achieve them. 

If they accomplish their goals you will be that much closer to accomplishing your agency goals! You will then start seeing efficiency, better retention, and overall profitability.

Identifying Your Agency’s Key Goals

What are you looking for?

• BETTER RETENTION

• RENEWAL REVIEW CALLS

• • • • BUILDING RAPPORT
      • DISCOVERING MISSING COVERAGES

• GROWTH

• BETTER SALES PROCESSES

• • • • ALIGNED AGENCY SALES PROCESS

• BETTER LEADS

• • • • REFERRALS
      • ONLINE LEADS
      • LOCAL LEADS

• CUSTOMER SATISFACTION

• • PHONE GREETING UPGRADE
  • BUILDING RELATIONSHIPS
  • KNOWING YOUR CLIENTS
  • MEETING NEEDS
  • FINDING DISCOUNTS

Sit down and evaluate or do an assessment of your agency. 

What is the status? Are there processes and procedures that lead to the goals the agency has? Do you have a mission,  vision, and values statement for the agency? Are there clear roles and job descriptions? 

If you don’t know where to start we can help. If you want a 3rd party to come in and do an evaluation, we do that at APP. It is a great way to start. Doing a comprehensive review of your agency can be a game changer. You may learn things about your agency you didn’t know about. 

Staff may not like something or may have suggestions that will help motivate and bring staff together., You can find out so many things by doing an assessment. Maybe some of your staff have goals even though the agency doesn’t. It is a great way to get to know your agency and your staff better. 

NEXT, WHAT IS YOUR AGENCY GOOD AT?

List your strengths and weaknesses. Use this as a guide to spark thought and get started on listing your agency’s strengths and weaknesses.

Strengths	Weaknesses
Industry Expertise	Competition
Diverse Products	Complexity
Personalized Service	Regulatory Challenges
Claims Assistance	Price Sensitive
Risk Management	Dependence on External Factors
Local Presence	Limited Control Over Underwriting
Client Education	Retention Challenges
Technology Integration	Cyber Security Concerns

 

Operations

Customer Services

Sales Operations

 

Strengths	Weaknesses	Strengths	Weaknesses	Strengths	Weaknesses
Processes & Procedures	No Processes & Procedures	Processes & Procedures	No Processes & Procedures	Processes & Procedures	No Processes & Procedures
					Don’t Assume Sale

You need to use your chart to leverage your agency’s strengths and weaknesses and your staff’s individual strengths and weaknesses to then build up to accomplishing individual and agency goals.

If you’ve followed APP for a while you know we are big on visions and values. Your vision tells us where you want to be in 10 years and your values help you figure out how to get there.  

Your goals should align with your visions and values.  So let’s say you want to grow by X% in 10 years, you would divide that amount by 10 that is each year, then divide that by 12 which would help you determine roughly how much you need to grow each month to hit those goals. 

This is a rough explanation because you would also have to consider retention in the mix, but it is a start.  So say you have to grow by 10,000 a month and you have 10 producers. 

Each producer would have to sell at least $1,000 in premium every month to hit their 10-year goals. Hopefully, you will increase it and challenge your staff. 

It is great to accomplish your goals but it is even cooler to exceed them.  Make sure your goals are realistic and attainable, you don’t want to overwhelm your staff with goals that just aren’t realistic or attainable, which leads to burnout and unhappiness.  

Insurance Goals have to be measurable. Numbers never lie, as hard as we would like to think they do.  So we need to make clearly defined goals that make sense, but that also guide our staff step by step to hit their goals and the agency’s goals.  These goals must be measurable. It can be the number of policies, number of calls, policy premiums, etc. But you must find a way to measure them to track success.

Let’s look at Key Performance Indicators.  Below is a list of KPIs that can be used to gauge agency success. You as a leader or your team will need to determine which ones you want to use or which work best to track your agency’s success. 

We know all agencies are different. Your average premium as a PL agent compared to a CL agency would be drastically different. You need to take some time and determine what works best. Some agencies only write commercials, and some only personal. Some agencies do not deal with claims. 

So take the list below and use what works.

• Policy retention rate
• New Business Growth
• Average Premium Size
• Policy Cross Selling
• Conversion Rate
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Claims Processing Time
• Agent Productivity
• Customer Satisfaction or Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Loss Ratio
• Expense Ratio
• Online Engagement and Web Traffic
• Lead Source Performance
• Churn Rate
• Profit Margin

This is where you want to use your management system and numbers very wisely. You want data-driven insights, facts not feelings. 

These numbers will show you where you are doing well and where you need to improve. You want to use these numbers to determine what insurance goals you want to reach, some areas may need more improvement than others. Remember to make your goals realistic and attainable.

Strategies for Achieving Your Agency’s Goals

How Do We Get There?

One of your biggest lead generators is your own book of business. If you don’t require your team to cross-sell and upsell, now is the time. 

Besides doing those, what other lead generation do you use? Do you pay for leads, what marketing do you do? Do you have salespeople prospecting? What are the techniques? What is working and what is not? 

These are the discovery questions you need to use to determine what your insurance goals for the agency will be when it comes to new business and prospecting. What strategies do your sales team use to “close the sale?”  Now the old saying “the customer is always right”, didn’t really mean that. 

It is meant to make the customer “feel” like they are always right!!! There is a difference. 

We need to have empathy and let the customer know we understand, but we also need to provide solutions to their biggest challenges and when this happens we become their hero! 

We at APP talk a lot about customer service and how we tend to give more time to lower-tier clients and we give them better customer service. Many agencies argue this point until they hear us out. 

How much time do you spend with Timmy, who walks into the office to pay every month and occasionally has to come in to reinstate his policy that was canceled? 

Then you have Kelly who has personal and business policies (about 17) that are all set up on automatic withdrawal and calls in only twice a year for a certificate or to change a car. 

Are we really spending equal time and attention on both?  Taking the time to re-evaluate your agency’s customer service and adjusting things accordingly could also make a huge difference in retention and referrals.

Strengthening Agency Marketing Efforts

In this day in age it is very important to have an online presence and effective digital marketing strategies. If you don’t have anyone to do this we recommend finding someone or outsourcing it. When someone in your city searches for insurance you want to be in the top 10 hopefully top 5.  

A monthly newsletter, podcasts, and blogs are all great ways to have an online presence. You may also combine these with automation so the leg work is done by your systems. There are a ton of opportunities on social media as well, not only are there local groups but there are local social media groups and at times they will ask insurance questions. Look into local groups like community forums or Mom/Dad groups. You’d be surprised how people trust these local groups for referrals.  

Networking in your community is also important. Do you volunteer, have charitable events, or donate to a cause? Do you go to local networking groups or local chapters, Lion’s clubs, Legions, or Rotary clubs? 

These are all connected to the local community and are great places to network. You don’t have to go in with guns blazing, you go in as a local business and supporter and when asked have a great 30-second commercial that includes who, what, when, and where. 

How are you there to help provide support and education to the group? Make insurance goals for each of these pieces, get out there, and get known.

If you have a well-trained and motivated team you’re already halfway to your goal. If not you need to get there. But how you ask? Here is a secret: the more motivated and driven you are, the more excited you are the more you can get your team excited and motivated. 

Work with your management team with this being the goal. Find what excites and motivates your people!  Another way to motivate your team is to provide training. 

How often do see a greenhorn come in and start working in our office, we throw them with the most senior agent and forget about them. This is NOT the way to do it. You need to have some type of internal processes and procedures and a guide or training about them.  

Don’t forget about your long-time staff either, a refresher course is great, the more you train the more you help build them to think and be open-minded enough to change and improve. Learning and education help us all grow and do better, it gives us the ability to also bring new ideas to the agency.

There are huge benefits to fostering a positive work culture and recognizing employee contributions. People who come to work because it is a happy place are already way far ahead of those who don’t have a positive culture! 

So if right now you don’t have a positive culture, it is time to turn it around, make positive changes, and get your leadership team and staff to help foster this by adding training and fun activities and incentives, so work is not just people working 9-5 for a paycheck, make it better than that!! 

Make it fun!

Overcoming Challenges and Sustaining Agency Goals

The insurance industry is shifting and changing with the world and society.  New technology has brought not only a ton of great things, but it has also brought more risk. 

Our agencies need to ask more questions not only to cross-sell and upsell but also to protect our agencies and the carriers we partner with. 

We are in a very hard market, does your staff know how to handle upset customers? Do they know how to listen and problem-solve instead of react and rewrite every client? 

If not APP can help, we have a ton of different tools to help guide you and your team to success. Goal setting not only helps us as individuals and companies, but it can also prepare us for harder times. 

With processes, procedures, and goals set up to hit, we can be a well-oiled machine, the best in the business, we have to be open-minded and goal-oriented.  This will keep us ahead of our competition.

In conclusion, you need to have clear and actionable insurance goals. You as an agency owner need to have even harder goals that show grit and your willingness to commit to the agency, your staff, and the final destination.  

You cannot expect everyone else to have goals if you don’t. In October we released the Build Your Agency’s Annual Plan, this is a perfect place to start if you are not sure where to start.  

Embrace a goal-oriented mindset, because a mindset is a huge strategy and is committed to achieving your objectives. You are probably an owner or manager and you had a mindset to get where you are today!  Keep it up and step it up a notch. 

Strategic Insurance Goal setting can and will transform your agency, it will allow for long-term success on a path that everyone in your agency understands and will be striving for!