Plan Backwards

This business is not that hard, but we oftentimes make it way more complicated than it needs to be. We’re early into 2021. And if you are an effective producer, you have a business plan you put together at the end of 2020 for this year. But my question is, did you do that with the end in mind?

Be Consistent

As producers, you should write a business plan every single year for the upcoming year. I require that of all of my team here at Florida Risk Partners, and it’s the first thing that we need anybody to do when they get into the Killing Commercial online sales training community.

Start at the End

You need to understand though you need to do two different things when you do a business plan. You build the plan with the end in mind. And what I mean by that is you have to decide how much money you want to make. Now, if you’re on a draw and you’re happy with a $25,000 new producer draw, then don’t worry about planning. And in fact, go ahead and get your resume ready because you’re going to be looking for another job here in another few months. But if you want to be a producer and want to go out and kill it, figure out what you want to make.

Know how much you Want to Make

If you want to make $100,000 this year, it’s straightforward to understand how much business you have to produce to do that. If you get 50% commission on new business, and by the way, I don’t necessarily advocate that, I’m just not good at math. So we’re going to use 50% to make it easy on me. But if you get a 50% commission on new business and want to make $100,000, you know you need to go out and write $200,000 in new business revenue.

Now, other factors go into this, like your renewal book and your rounding of existing accounts and all of that. I’m just talking about pure planning if you want to know how much you want to make in new income. Once you see that number, you have to define your daily behaviors to execute daily with that end in mind.

Break Down the Math

So I know that for me to write $200,000 worth of new business, I need to write four accounts that are $50,000 in revenue or more, or eight accounts that are $25,000 in revenue. And then, I begin to work my way back through the metrics of precisely what I need to do every day. I want to know how many marketing drops I should be doing, how many phone calls I should be making, how much direct mail I should be sending, how many email blasts I should be doing. And I need to know what my starting point is.

See, the thing that makes our business easy is that it’s very predictable, but you have to have a data set to make it predictable. So until you figure out what your end goal is, you begin to put the daily behaviors into place and execute those daily behaviors. Then an essential thing, review your progress regularly and adjust as necessary. You’re just flying blind if you don’t do that.

I want to know that my producers understand that they need to be making between eight and ten marketing drops a day, 25 phone calls, 25 email follow-ups, and sending out 25 handwritten direct mail pieces. Those are all behaviors that I can see. And guess what? I can monitor those as the agency owner inside of our CRM. So if I have a producer who’s going through a dry spell, all I have to do is simply look at their behaviors, and I know that those behaviors will breed results. It’s a proven process.

It's Numbers Game

But the one thing they may need to change is volume. If you’re not getting enough results, you’ve got to do more during the day to get those results. And so that’s why you have to adjust and tweak as you go and make sure that you’re checking this on a monthly, quarterly basis, whatever works for you until you get it dialed in. Then when you know those metrics, when you know here’s how many prospects I need to have to get 50% of those people to answer the phone, and 25% of those people to agree to meet with me, and 25% of those people to agree to allow me to present my solution to their problem, and then 50% of those people hire me, that will help me walk into my numbers of knowing here’s how much I have to have at the top of the funnel to end up down here at the bottom.

So that’s a lot to get into and complicated to explain. But if you have questions, feel free to reach out. I’m always available. My calendar link is on the internet everywhere. And if the time’s available, I’m welcome to take a call with you. I want to make sure that if you’re planning to go out there and absolutely kill it in commercial insurance, you have the deck stacked in your favor.

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