My question for you is: does this prospect even deserve to have a seat at the table? You’re the only one that can answer it. That’s the topic of today’s article.
One thing I always do when I meet with a prospect is to visualize a conference room, just like the one we have in our office. I envision all of my clients sitting around the table, but one chair is empty. The empty chair is for the prospect. And the question you have to ask yourself as a producer is, does this prospect belong in this chair? See, too many times we’re out producing business, and we get our eye off the ball. We know who our ideal prospect is, but if it’s money, why not just go ahead and write this type of account this one time? The problem with that thought process is that you don’t realize you’re diminishing the value proposition for every one of the clients that are already in your book of business.
If you have your ideal prospect in mind, and you know who that should be, you should never deviate from that. At the end of the day, if you have an empty chair at your conference room table, you should only fill it with somebody who deserves to be in the presence of every other client that’s already in your book. If you don’t think that way, you’re going to end up losing the important people that are at the table, and you’ll find out that those chairs turn into revolving doors.
If you’re going to sell based on value, stick to your guns! If you’re going to sell based on price, good luck. In a time where we’re competing against Google and Amazon, not other agencies, you need to do everything you can to provide a remarkable client experience and remain relevant in an ever-changing marketplace.
If you can envision an empty chair in a conference room full of your clients, you’re going to kill it in commercial, if you only let the worthy sit in that empty chair.
Until next time: kill or get killed!
The commercial insurance world isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s unpredictable, chaotic, and constantly demanding producers to manage competing pressures—client needs, renewal deadlines, life events, prospecting goals, and agency responsibilities. And if you’re a middle-market producer, multiply that by ten.
In the middle market commercial insurance space, the role of the producer has never been more critical—or more misunderstood. Too many producers still view their job as selling policies instead of what it truly is: protecting the assets and livelihoods of the businesses they serve.
The middle market rewards depth, not breadth. Yet many producers still approach it like a volume game, quoting everything that moves, chasing price, and hoping activity turns into production. From the outside, it looks like hustle. From the inside of the underwriting and wholesale world, it looks like noise.
Personal lines has quietly become one of the most competitive segments in the insurance industry. Agencies that once dominated their local markets are now fighting to differentiate themselves against direct writers, digital-first carriers, and large brokers with massive content machines.
The cyber insurance market has always been unpredictable. Over the past decade, we’ve seen it move from an emerging line of coverage to one of the most volatile, swinging rapidly between soft and hard market cycles. But today, cyber has entered one of the softest markets in recent memory—and that presents a rare opportunity for both agents and clients.
For most of my 20-year career, captives felt like something reserved for the insurance elite—the jumbo accounts, the Fortune-level operations, the companies with multimillion-dollar manual premiums and entire departments dedicated to risk management. If you had asked me ten or fifteen years ago whether a $250,000 account was a legitimate captive candidate, I would’ve laughed. I thought captives were reserved for companies so complex and so large that the only rational way to insure them was to build an insurance company around their risk.
Please confirm you want to block this member.
You will no longer be able to:
Please note: This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin. Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.
Responses