What is Your Sales Process?

The next thing you need to do is to make sure you have a defined sales process. I’m not talking about something that’s in the works. I’m talking about something that you have vetted and tested repeatedly and prove that it will be successful on the streets. The first thing it has to be is understandable. It can’t be some convoluted menagerie of legal pad pages that you throw in front of everybody and expect them to digest. That’s how a lot of my ideas start, but it has to be more refined than that when you roll it out.               

The second thing is, it has to be replicable. It has to be something that you can replicate across all of your producers and get the same execution from each of them. Now, producers will tweak what they want to tweak, but if you keep your process very easy to understand and replicable when they don’t hit their numbers, it’s straightforward for you to go back and find out exactly where they missed the boat in your process.               

The third thing is, it has to be a process that allows you to hold them accountable. If you don’t have accountability measures in place, you’re not managing anybody. You’re not leading anybody. You’re merely paying people to go out and not perform. So you have to have accountability measures in place.

Most importantly, you have to have set milestones where you’re going to address that accountability. Maybe you meet with your producers quarterly. Perhaps it’s every six months. Maybe it’s monthly. Maybe you have somebody on a weekly plan. I don’t know. But you need to make sure that you have accountability measures in your process and understand them. They know when they’re coming. And then it’s never an emotional discussion; it’s a business discussion.              

You either get your numbers, or you don’t. You either use my process, or you don’t. But don’t come and complain about not hitting your numbers, and we find out, well, you skipped this section, you missed this section, you forgot this section. Likewise, as an agency, if you don’t have that defined process, it’s pretty tough to hold a producer accountable when you have no idea what they’re doing out on the street. If you can get your process dialed in, if you can hold your producers accountable, and if that process is replicable, you and your team are going to kill it in commercial insurance.