Do You Produce or Do You Practice?

My question for you today is do you produce or you just practice? That’s the topic of today’s post.

I hear it all the time from agency owners and sales leaders across the country, how do I get my people to produce? Well, the fact of the matter is you’ve got to teach them how to sell value and sell a relationship. Right now, we’ve got agents running rampant, doing their best to compete on price, and I hate to tell you, that’s like building your house on a foundation full of sinking sand. People want value. They may not realize it at the beginning of a meeting, but that’s your job to show them precisely what you can do that they’re currently not getting. People who sell on price will also lose on price, and people who sell on value will take that business every time.

We have equations that we’ve used over the years. Call 100 people, get 50 people to answer the phone, get 20 people to meet with you, ten will let you quote, and two will end up being your client. That’s insane. Work so much smarter than that. You have to know who your audience is. You have to know the motivating factors behind what drives them to give you the order, and then you have the leverage that every time you meet with them. We don’t need people to be in our organizations that only quote, “trying to earn business.” There’s no value in that at all.

Figure out a way to differentiate yourself. Create a unique process and approach and brand that, with its brand separate from your agency’s. Then go out and define your ideal prospects, put those people in your pipeline, and call on those people and nobody else. Those couple of steps will be one of the things that help you keep from practicing more than producing. If you fill your pipeline with the right people, if you remain relevant by staying in front of them, if you have a value proposition instead of a quoting machine, that is exactly what’s going to allow you to kill it in commercial insurance.

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