Four Traps to Success

Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast, the podcast to help you, the independent insurance agency leader to help you gain clarity, build consistency and to make a commitment, a commitment to become your best version possible. Our book co-authored by Roger Sitkins and myself, by the way, my name is Brent Kelly, if you don't know me. That book, Best Version Possible is available. We continue to get some great feedback, love to continue to hear that people are taking this book and beginning to execute on some of the ideas. And you can get your copy at sitkins.com/bvp. You also can find the audible versions if you like to listen to books or the Kindle version if you go to Amazon as well. So check that out. And what I wanted to do on today's podcast, I want to give you the agency leader as much value as I possibly can.

I really want to help you. I mean, our mission is really exactly what I just said. I mean, we want to empower you to achieve higher levels of success, whatever that means to you. And I know people can define success differently, but to help you move from wherever you are today, whether it's not so good, whether it's pretty good, maybe it's really good, but you know there's a better version of you waiting. I want to take all the things that we have talked about, all the things that's in the book, all the things that we've learned from 40 plus years of the organization and combine those and give you four, give you four practical things. I want to share with you today why these four things are so important. In fact, why agencies get hung up in these four things. I'm going to share some examples and of course, if you don't do anything, what it can cost you, but also some things that you can begin to implement and what you can gain by doing it.

So I want to give you an overview of those four things. And this is all in conjunction with things that we're going to be doing with our agencies, but I want to give you the podcast listener some things right now that you can begin to think about. Now and as I go through these four key areas, and by the way, to take 40 years and put it into four is a challenge, but there's a reason why we're doing this. And in fact, I had a conversation yesterday, I was doing a training session with sales leaders and I asked them, I said, "Have you ever had a professor or a teacher or someone I don't know, in power that you could tell their main goal was not to help transfer their knowledge that you could actually execute, but to just make themself sound really smart?" And they all nodded.

We've all had that. I've had that, I'm sure you have as well. And so my goal and our goal for you as an agency is not to give you 75 things that sound really cool and go, "Wow, there's 75 things." But to say, "Listen, there's four things that have very great substance, that if you can commit and go deep and communicate, and I'm going to talk about these things today, that'll make a huge impact." And you've heard me say this before, whether I've had guests on before, certainly some of the conversations I've had with Roger Sitkins, who's been a guest many times on this podcast before, these things aren't necessarily complicated, in fact, they're fairly simple. It's just you have to go deep to execute in them. And the agencies that continue to do this. And it's one of those things where you hear a few examples and you go, "Oh, that's really cool."

And then all of a sudden you hear more and more and you get agencies that say, "Hey, we finally are gaining some focus. And now look what's happened." In fact, I do want to share one example because it's very recent. I had a call recently with one of our agency members. In fact, this agency has been a featured guest on my podcast. I'll go ahead, if you want to flip back, I don't know on the podcast, his name is Paul Corder is the sales leader for Peel & Holland Insurance. I'm going to go ahead and give them a shout out. They've got a great team, great leadership, Roy and Keith Riley, Paul Corder, got some great producers on their team as well. Just a really fun team and a great team to work with. And as great as they are or were, they knew they were being a bit stagnant. And we started working with them officially about 18 months ago.

Got re-involved and in going through some of the things we talk about. In fact, based around these four things I'm going to share with you all today. And I had a conversation with Paul last week, we were doing a regular coaching call and he gave me an update on some things and he said, "Listen," I want to tell you that we're about nine months obviously into this year if you're listening to this podcast now or getting almost to October here. But when we talk, he said, about nine months and some change into this year, he said, "A year ago at this time we had written $600,000 year to date in new business revenue." And he said, "That's kind of the trend we had been on. And we've been on that three, four, 5% growth over many years, but doing okay because we were fairly profitable." And he said, "This year we are at over $1.2 million in new business revenue."

And my math isn't very good, but I could figure this one out that, that's a hundred percent plus growth in new revenue production in one year. Now here's the kicker to this. A lot of people will talk about growth, but maybe they acquired an agency, which by the way is fine, or maybe they added two or three new producers or one new producer and they got some book of business that way, which is fine as well. But this was with the exact same production team. There were no changes, no acquisitions are involved in that. This is their producers actually producing. And I'll talk more about that a little bit today as well. So I want to share that with you mainly to give a shout out because it's a great agency that continues to impress me. And again, reach out to them and just say, "Hey, how'd you do it?"

And I know they're an agency that wants to help and also an agency that deserves kudos. So here's the point of all of that. We've got multiple stories of agencies that are achieving these levels of success. Why not you? And if you're listening to me right now, why not you? Now whether you work directly with us, which we would love if it's a great fit, or whether you just get serious and make a decision, that's up to you. We want to provide you a roadmap that's a big part of what we do, to organize some of these thoughts, to help keep agencies focused and accountable and to help be third party credibility for your agency and your entire team. But regardless of what you determine to do, you've got to make a decision. And here's the biggest hindrance for agencies to have success, distraction, lack of focus, confusion, all those things come into play.

So let me get into these four areas because what is actually holding you back as an agency? Well, there are four things. Now you can call these traps, you can call these gaps, you can call these challenges, you can call these roadblocks, give them whatever name you want. But there's four things that we see. If you look at agencies and you ask questions of, what is holding them back from their best version possible? And I'm going to start off by just giving an overall. So this might be a bonus, this is like before number one or could be the fifth one, however you want to describe it. Is this, I want to ask this by a question. What is your current training and development program personally and professionally for your agency team today? What is the model for training and development for your team today? And I talk about this all the time, the number one role, the number one focus for an agency leader, above all else should be, how do we develop our people?

And I've talked about that in previous podcast, but I just want you to think about that because the more and more that I talk about it, the more and more that I get to work with agencies, that I get to travel, that I share, if there's this blinding flash of the obvious is that there's these outward struggles we may see in different areas, but as very core, it's because we haven't really had a key focus of how we are going to actually develop our people, all right. So with that all being said, I want to get into these four key areas and I'm going to go through the gap, the traps that are holding agencies back. I want to talk a little bit about what's the cost of that, what does that actually cost you? Not just in money, which is a big part, but in time and freedom and in relationships, whatever that is.

And then I'm going to get into the four areas and give you some ideas and things that you can begin to take grasp of right now. I'm going to give you something you can do right now. And I know I'm not going to change anyone's life in 30 minutes, but if I can be a light bulb to click on and go, "Okay, that particular area makes sense to me, we've got to get focused in it." Then I've done my job that then I've done something. This is what I Want to do on this podcast is be a value to you.

So what's holding you back? Number one, lack of clarity, communication and ongoing team development. I already set that one up. So again, maybe that's one in one A, but it's lack of clarity. And this comes back to if you talk to leadership, if you talk to sales, if you talk to service, and if you said, "What's the mission and the purpose of our agency? What are we really all about? What do we stand for? What do we not stand for? What do we believe in? What moves us? What are the type of clients we really want to work with? Why?" I mean, those are important questions. But oftentimes when you talk to different departments of an agency, there's a lack of clarity and communication around that area. So that's number one. That is such an important thing because it's so easily overlooked, not a big deal, oh, I disagree. It's a huge deal.

And the agencies that we see that are having phenomenal success and yes, money success but beyond that, culture success, there's a success of having deeper purpose and meaning. By the way, I think this business should not only be profitable, but it should be a heck of a lot of fun. Doesn't mean it's always fun. There's going to be hard days, hard weeks. But this is a huge part of having fun. And I will tell you one of the things that I see right away with teams when we begin to work with them is you realize very quickly there has been a lack of communication between departments, there's been a lack of alignment. And because of that, there's tension, there's friction, there's uncertainty, there's confusion, there's chaos. So all of this comes back to how can we get greater clarity on what we really stand for? That's number one.

Number two, part-time producers trying to win a full-time game. You have too many part-time producers in your agency, that's the bottom line. Maybe your agency has three producers, maybe you have 30 producers, maybe you got 50 producers. I don't care the number of how many producers you have, but we can see very clearly that the producers, which by the way, the definition of a producer is one who produces, that is the role. Now maybe you give them a different name, fine, that's fine. But at the end of the day, their job is to produce, that they're playing 30, 40, 50% of the game and wondering why they're not getting to 80, 90, 100% effectiveness. So part-time producers playing a full-time game. Number three, what's the third trap gap that's holding agencies back? This is something that's fundamental and fundamentally missed, is this, profitable accounts subsidizing unprofitable accounts, profitable accounts subsidizing unprofitable accounts.

Now there's a lot to this, this is what I'm talking about, there's depth. But at the very basis of this is the fact that there is a predictable imbalance in the universe. I've talked about this before, the power of 80/20. And it's one thing to know 80/20 or go, "Oh yeah, I agree with 80/20 or I get 80/20." It's another thing to apply the principles in your agencies of 80/20. Now this is the idea of knowing versus doing. But this gap is that we have profitable accounts, which are typically around the top 20% of our clients and they're subsidizing the rest of the entire book, the business. Now what does that ultimately do? Well, what it's doing is it's trapping our team and our capacity for growth because it sucks up time and energy.

It causes more problems in many cases because we're not as focused. It sucks up our employees, our valuable resource to our agency. And it's really costly, it's expensive. And so this idea of, wait a second, we need to look at this. So I'm going to spend a few minutes to talk about that. And then here's number four, no defined and or named and effective sales process or sales playbook. Agencies still are in essence quoting and they're floating. They don't have a design and defined way of how they're going to obtain new clients, of saying, "This is the exact type of client we want. This is the process, we walk through it. This is why it's different. It's named, it's owned, it's replicated, it's understood, it's practiced." And so those are the four. And I'm going to get to this because this will become all part of everything that we teach and preach.

And I will tell you if you've heard some of these things before from me, good because one of the things that I want to continue to do and we want to continue to do is help agencies go deeper in the right things, not get spread thin in all the things. Now it doesn't mean there's not going to be other things in your agency you're doing, of course there are. But the question is, where's your focus? Where your focus goes, your energy flows, where your focus goes. I am focused. I am focused on the fact that we've got to get better clarity in alignment in the agency. I'm going to be more focused tat we've got to get our producers more in the game. I am going to be focused that we have a predictable imbalance in our book of business and we need to leverage and maximize that at a much higher level.

I am focused on the fact that we don't have a true set offense or at least it's not named or effective as it should be and it certainly isn't practiced. So those are the four areas, it's just those four. So I want to give an overview of each of these four because now it's like, "Okay, well you've struck a nerve, Brent." Or maybe I haven't, I don't know, but you struck a nerve or there's something there. Well now what do I do? Well, what does that mean? Well, let's talk about each of these four and just talk about some practical things that we see because the first phase, I talk about lack of clarity, is solved by alignment, it's alignment. And we talked about this in a previous podcast. If you've got a car or truck going down the road and you've got a wheel that's out of alignment, it's noisy, it causes friction, it causes frustration.

And if you don't fix it, it causes more money and frustration later. Eventually a problem left unattended becomes a crisis. Well, that's the problem with alignment. And I talk so much again, about the purpose of leadership and what it's all about. Well, a big part of a leadership is influence and getting your people to understand, where is it that you really want to go? Why do you want to go there? And what's going to be the key principles of how you're going to do it? That may sound like such an easy thing to say, but if I ask a hundred agencies, "Hey, tell me exactly where it is that you want to go. Why is that so important to you, to your team, to your clients, to your community? Give me an emotional response. Why should I care? And what is the key plan to get there?" Now what'll typically happen is you'll get a 40 minute response.

Guess what? Your team doesn't get that, they want to get clarity. And of course this also goes into retaining, attracting, developing your people, is that the more clarity we can get around this, the better ability we have to get the alignment. It all starts with that. A clear vision, a common mission. Otherwise you're going to get stuck. So my question to you is this, if you look at this first question, this first pillar is how is your agency aligned today? Are you speaking the same language? Are you engaged in a unified process? Now again, there might be different departments, but do we have the same goal with different roles? Same goal, different roles, football team, quarterback, offensive linemen, running back, receiver, different roles, same goal, touchdown. There's a great quote. I'm going to wrap this section up by a great quote by Brian Tracy.

He said this, just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals and values are in balance. I'm going to say that last part, when your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions, your goals, your values are in balance. And here's the trap that I hear oftentimes with agency leaders, we ain't got time for that. We're too busy doing other stuff. We got too much chaos going on. Listen, part of the reason you may have chaos or confusion is because you haven't taken the time or energy to really understand clarity and how we're aligned together and begin to develop a roadmap of how that looks, all right. So alignment's number one. Number two, we've done podcasts on this. I'm going to give some brevity to this, but I do want to go back to the importance of focus.

The second area. And remember I said that the bottom line is we have part-time producers trying to win a full-time game. The second phase is about green zone, and that's a term that we use at Sitkins, but green zone, getting your producers to be in the green, which is money making stuff as much as possible. As much as possible as they can be. And I mentioned the story earlier about Peel & Holland, our friends at Peel & Holland, a hundred percent increase. Now they did a number of things, but above all, in talking to the sales leader, he said, "Listen, we got focus in green zone activities and there's four green zone activities. So here's four pillars and then there's four points within this. Four things, sales and sales conversations, relationship management. I am proactively as a producer, proactively, let me say that word again, proactively creating a relationship management calendar with my clients so that I'm proactively touching base as much as we should because sometimes good intentions don't always get it done.

A continuation process, so I've got a continuation process and we go deep with our clients on this, but just understanding, think about this, think about this as a proactive renewal process if you're not familiar with continuation. And here's a kicker, pipeline development. So this agency said with the green zone, it's four areas, sales activities, relationship management, continuations and pipeline development. And every week, that's the focus, that's the focus, that's the focus, that's the focus, that's the focus to where it obviously becomes part of the cultures, is more that we get the producers in the green zone, the better it is we're going to win. What does it mean to you? Well, you may not get a 100%.

That sounds pretty crazy, but what if you got 25%? That to me is the minimum. If you get your producers, by the way, producer recruitment, just like Peel & Holland, it starts at home. I'm not against adding new people to your team, but typically what happens is we have agencies that say that our biggest problem we have is we need new producers. That's the biggest problem we have, Brent, is we need new producers. Now, I don't know your agency, maybe there's a major problem and you do. But the biggest problem we typically see is not that you need new producers, you need to get your current producers to actually produce. Or the culture that you have in the agency is a service culture, not a sales culture. By the way, here's a question I would ask as far as green zone to you to think about.

Are you a sales culture that provides exceptional service or are you a customer service culture that happens to do sales when it's convenient? There's a huge difference. There's this stigma that sales are bad, that sales is an icky word. No it's not. When you believe in what you do, when you know you help businesses move forward, when you know you help people in their personal lives move their life forward, when you provide the things that you know you provide, when you are an exceptional value in the marketplace, all the things that hopefully you believe in. And by the way, if you don't believe in those things, if you don't believe that your clients are better off after doing business with you, then don't sell anything. But if you do, you owe it to yourself and your producers to be in the green zone so that you could impact more people, that you can provide more good and joy to the world.

See, I believe, just like Rabbi Daniel Lapin said in his book, and I read this years ago, Thou Shall prosper, that every time you make money, those are called certificates of appreciation. You've done something good in the world. So if we're going to do something good in the world, we got to stop thinking about, well, our producers are pretty busy or I don't want to push them, they got to be in the green zone. That's the role, that's the job. So my one question here is very simple, Is your agency green enough? Is it green enough? So that's phase two. Hopefully you can hear my passion there, I got a bit excited. Sorry, I like this stuff, I love this stuff. Alright, the third part, and I mentioned of the trap, is the fact that we have profitable accounts that subsidize unprofitable accounts. And here's the truth of insurance agencies right now, renewals themself are not a problem in the insurance business.

I mean, if I ask most agencies to give me the top three frustrations you have, renewals are hardly ever if at all, one of the top three. But in fact, I mean 90%, here's the but, but typically we get less than 10 or 15% of those clients that continue to pay us money, that actively refer someone. And there's a lot of different ways we can get into referrals. But why is that? Well, I think it's because there's a lack of focus on it, lack of focus on a true client experience from beginning to end. And it's a lack of a process. And one of the biggest reasons we have lack of focus and lack of process because every client's a good client, every client is treated about the same, every client, it all depends on when you come in, if you're first, second, or third, it's how we're going to treat you.

And the truth of it is we know there's a predictable imbalance, every client that's part of your book, yes, they deserve a high level of service. But when you say yes to something, you are indirectly or I should say directly in this case, saying no to something else. You can't say yes to everything that's urgent and also say yes to being extremely proactive with your best clients who you really owe a lot to. I mean, the example here is listen, if you buy your car from a high level BMW or whatever versus an old, a used car sales place, guess what? You expect a higher level of service. I mean, you paid for it. And so we've got to make sure that all of our clients are taken care of. And there's a lot of ways, I'm not going to get in this podcast of doing that.

There's a number of things that agencies have done and you can do. My point is, are you focusing on the top clients that really are profitable, that really do appreciate your relationship, that really do appreciate your risk advice and allowing them to be the catalyst for the agency moving forward? Of this is who we work with, this is why we work with them, this is what we could do, we're going to replicate our best. We're going to continue to replicate the experience, replicate the process, replicate the strategy, replicate the services to the best. Because guess what? Your best clients want to help you. Your best clients want to help you. And we see this all the time with agencies that when they finally get focused and saying, "Listen, we owe it number one of these best clients to do more. Yes, they're profitable for one, but we owe it to them."

Guess what happens? They find that there's a greater opportunity to make more money and they also go way deeper in the relationship. And what's really cool about this is that if you talk about 80/20, you can just look at the numbers and the money and agency leaders and producers could go, "Oh, I see how this would be great. I could have more money with less clients." That's really what it looks like. But what's interesting is account managers that we work with all the time say, "I love this." And not because they're worried about the money because they get to spend more time on better relationships, which by the way, inherently improves culture. And if you start looking at some of the numbers that we see with some of these accounts and people will say, "Well, you don't understand, Brent, we've got to touch all these accounts the same. We have to do all these things."

If you start looking at the actual numbers and you follow some of the processes, most of the smaller accounts and agencies are treated with benign neglect anyway, they just don't want to admit it. And so let's just be honest and say, "How can we do this better? How can we serve this client better with different types of resources so that we can serve our top clients with absolute excellence? And what that looks like." So that's number three. And then of course it gets to number four, and I mentioned one of the biggest problems we see is that we simply don't have a sales playbook. We don't have a sales process, We don't have a named or effective way that we are being able to differentiate in the marketplace by identifying future ideal clients and being able to walk them through a process or a story that says, "Wow, no one else has ever told me that before. No one else has ever asked me that before. No one else has ever brought that to my attention."

And it's systemized. There's always flexibility because you've got producers in particular who have different personalities and different experiences. So it's always flexible. But there is a process that can be replicated. And here's another thing. This is going to come back to people development and it's going to come back to people recruiting. When you have a sales playbook or a set offense that you can customize and replicate, guess what that does for attracting better talent? It makes them interested in being part of your team, certainly much more likely. "Oh, you're telling me that if I come and work with your agency, that you've also got a sales playbook or a process that you're going to have to walk me through a system that's going to help me organize and give me a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Alright, I'm game for that."

So just think about what that can look like. And something I've said so often is that you first of all have to know what sets you apart and makes you different. You can't have a differentiated selling process if you don't know how you're different. And so one of the reasons why this is the fourth phase and not the first phase is that so often agency will say, "We want to grow, we want to grow." God bless you, you should want to grow, we all want to grow, I hope you want to grow. If you don't want to grow, then what are you doing? You're just staying the same for the next 10, 20 years. But the agencies that want to grow and they say, "Well, we want to obtain more clients." Which is technically our fourth phase in our process. Well shouldn't that be first?

No, because listen, if you don't get the clarity and the communication and the culture right in alignment, if you don't get the producers in position to have more opportunities by getting in the green zone, if you don't use the power of 80/20 to retain and replicate, to really learn more about your clients, you also learn about some of your differentiation to position yourself in a much different place. Then obtaining or a sales playbook can be effective but not nearly as effective as it will be when you build the foundation first. There's a reason why these four things are the four things. There's a reason why these four things are in the right order, in this order. It's because there is a systematic way of doing it. Now, I also know this, you as an agency leader, you may have these areas I talked about, you may be doing better and some than others, but I get that.

But there's always improvement of saying, "Listen, how well are we aligned? How often are our producers truly in the game? Are we allowing profitable accounts to subsidize our unprofitable accounts? And do we truly have a sales playbook that we can replicate throughout our agency to provide, to be that category of one in the marketplace and to truly differentiate?" So those are the four things.

Again, I wanted to give you all the things we have in the book, all the things that we talk about and say these are the four. Now here's the caveat to this. I mentioned the beginning, simple doesn't always mean easy. These four things are simple. They aren't easy. I admit that, we know that. To get focus in these areas, it takes work, it takes effort, it takes diligence, it takes a commitment. But if you can put the blinders on, so to speak, and some of the gimmick of the month and the distraction and the noise, and we can do this and say, listen," at the end of the day, if we can start and say, "Listen, let's get clarity on what we're all about and get aligned back as a team, at a very deep level, let's have a common language and culture in our agency. Let's get on the same page. Let's get that right.

Then let's find a way with high performance teams, with the alignment, which high performance teams to get our producers on the court or on the field as much as possible in a productive way. Let's get out there and just get in the game more often. And that alone is a 25% increase in productivity and production. We see it all the time. Then let's really look at our book of business. Let's look at the producer's book of business. Let's look at the agency's book of business. Let's understand the power of 80/20, however that looks for us as an agency. And let's begin to have a process to round out, to retain, to replicate our best clients and get really focused on that client experience and excellence. And then let's take all of that and really put together a playbook or a set offense that completely separates us from everyone else.

And I'm telling you, you begin to do that. You're going to be one of the stories, just like I shared with you today with our friends at Peel & Holland. Now listen if this podcast is added value to you, to your life, to your agency, please give it a share to other agency leaders. We want to get this message out. I mentioned at the beginning, we would love to have a conversation with you and your agency. If you are a growth minded agency that wants to take your agency to new heights, we'd love to have a strategy call with you just to tell you more about what we do, but more importantly, we listen about your agency and what you really want. 30 minute, no obligation strategy call. You absolutely could do that. But if you never do that at all, and you can take one of these things and go out and use it, I want to hear about that too. At the bottom line is we want to help agencies become their best version possible. And with that, wish you all the best in your success. Thanks so much for listening.