What are the three biggest challenges facing independent insurance agency’s in today’s world you ask?
I was recently asked if I could work on three things only within the insurance space what would it be. Immediately 9,000 things came to my mind but I spent some time thinking about it. There are the problem and the root cause and it turned out that many of the problems could be boiled down to three main issues.
Issue #1: Leadership and Management
When I started in the insurance space I focused almost exclusively on marketing. It was very funny some agencies took my ideas and ran with them to great success, other agencies took the same exact idea with the same exact marketing plan and failed miserably. What was the main difference? Leadership and execution. The agency that can coach their team, invest in them and get them to follow them in a new direction win all the time! The agency where the leaders are not aligned and the management team is literally scared of what the staff will say fail, not just at marketing but at everything. I was chatting with a prospect agency this week and they made the decision to not use my services. Now I didn’t lose them to a competitor I lost them because they were scared to change. They weren’t happy where they were however, they were more terrified of change and working together and upgrading the staff than the fear of staying stagnant. Positive effective management and leadership changes every single thing in an agency.
Issue #2: Most of the time we aren’t even trying to sell insurance
It can be argued that someone calling you for insurance is not sales, that’s giving a quote. However, after listening to hundreds of hours of calls, I have learned that we as an industry suck at sales. If we can’t beat the price we almost encourage them to go with another agent. We all hate the price game but I can factually prove we have created it. In personal lines we don’t take the time to understand the client instead we quote them, email them the quote (which check out my next blog is literally the dumbest insurance mistake you can make) and then hope to sell them. In 50 secret shopper calls, I have recently conducted only 1 even bothered to mention that they would shop the top carriers for me. So no one is allowed to complain about price in this industry until we start actually trying to sell insurance.
Issue #3: Marketing Is the Equivalent of Chemistry
I hated Chemistry in high school. Dreaded it, it never made sense to me all I wanted to do was play with the eyewash station. So rather than commit to learning even at a snail’s pace, I did the bare minimum to pass and move on. This is what agencies do all the time across the country. Put up a Facebook page and rather than learn how to maximize it they let it sit hoping for the best, kinda like me at Chemistry midterms. The biggest hurdle is understanding you will fail at marketing, then you will learn and you will get better. Some agencies don’t even know their name they have like 6 of them. If it’s not clear to you your marketing strategy its time to get on some webinars and learn or partner with a team of professionals like me. Every day that goes by of your agency not having an email, account rounding, retention, and lead nurturing marketing strategy is one more day where it gets harder.
The bottom line is agencies cannot afford to be passive anymore.
You have to step up to the challenge work your tails off and defend your turf. Running your agency off of renewals is not an acceptable strategy.
