Recipe for Success Wednesday: Insurance Agency Incentive Plans
Have you ever struggled to get your team to go the extra step or stretch out of their comfort zone? It happens to every agency! Incentive plans are a great way to help motivate your team while achieving your agency’s goals. Through our Agency Assessment we have found the following three things to be the most motivating to agency teams:
- Money
- Recognition
- Thrill of Achievement
When crafting an incentive plan, you want to make sure you hit all three of these components. Too often, agencies’ create incentive programs that only hit one of these components. The ideal incentive program will celebrate success, provide rewards of value and provide recognition. In order to start an incentive plan you must first identify what you want to achieve. To make it easy on you, our reader, we have listed the following as common agency behaviors we want to encourage:
- Asking for Email Addresses
- Asking for Cell Phone Numbers
- Confirming Contact Information
- Doing Account Reviews on Every Call
- Finishing the Renewal List Calls on Time
- Good Attitude
- Account Rounding
- Calling Lost Business and Aged Unsold Quotes
- Getting your Agency App Download
- Generating Referrals
- Getting an online review
- Getting a testimonial
- Handling Late Pay Calls on Time
Once you identify what is important to you and your agency, you can create your incentive program. There are three different incentive programs we recommend:
- Pure Reward: These are bonus and incentives programs that happen based on achieving certain goals
- Accountability: The agency provides a certain amount of a bonus. Each team member can earn the bonus or loose the bonus based on positive and negative activities
- Performance Based Pay: The agency decides to reduce the base pay of the team members and increase the performance based pay. Basically the more the team member perform, the more they can make.
We believe that every incentive program needs to have positives and negatives associated with it. You can’t only give out rewards, you need to also provide a sliding scale of performance. If you have a team member with a great attitude who is decent at account rounding, however they have issues with tardiness, the rewards need to reflect the positives and the negatives. Your incentive program needs to be designed to reinforce behavior to make good behavior a habit and poor behavior go by the wayside.
No doubt incentive programs can be tricky, you have to really understand your metrics to know what your budget can be. You want your plan to be motivating enough to work! Money is great but also think about gift cards, nights out and time off. Sometimes these things are valued more than money!
Here are the three outlined plans we recommend:
| Option 1 | Option 2 | Option 3 |
| Recognition & Reward | Raise & Bonus | Decrease in Base Pay |
| Base Pay Remains the Same However Each Week there is a Reward Raffle. For every good task they hit they put a form in the fishbowl. For every negative activity one of their form’s gets taken out. You can spot check what they write down. Rewards range from a $1 lottery ticket to $50. |
Current pay rate stays the same but any raises and bonuses are now only given based on performance. By hitting goals you get part of your bonus added to your “account” to be paid at the end of the year. For every “downgrade” you lose money from your account. The team would get a “statement” with their paycheck. This is no net increase to the agency since the end of year bonus and pay raises were already accounted for. We recommend keeping the dollar amount the same for each employee so you can track it publicly. |
Decrease base pay by $2 (or more) per hour or $80 per week. You show people that by performing they have more money to gain, but in order to achieve a higher pay point they need to take ownership by reducing pay so they feel the need to change behavior. |
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This option would take a one more planning meeting so we can determine the dollar amount of the bonus and distribute the pluses and minuses accordingly. For example for every account round you get 50% of first year commission. For every time you are late you lose $10 from the account. |
We provide them a bonus of $250 per month if their renewals stay over 92%. If they provide 8 account rounds or referrals to sales they get a $150 bonus. If they get 20 emails, app downloads, online review, testimonial or cell phone numbers per month they get a $50 bonus. One person in the office gets an attitude bonus of $100 per month.* With this one we may want to add another tier for people to hit. For example for 93% retention they get $350. People can sandbag which only hurts the agency. |
If you are ready to have an incentive plan tailored to your agency for all roles and goals, give us a call today! We love helping agencies perform!
