Stop Running Your Business Like an Insurance Agency!

You want more business, you want more business, you want more business. I get it. All of us do, but here’s the problem. You’re running your business like an insurance agency. You got to cut that out. That’s the topic of today’s article.

The Approach is Wrong

So here’s the deal. We all want more sales. I get it, but the problem is that the average insurance agency out there is running their business like an insurance agency. That’s a problem. The deal is we’re not an agency and until we sell a policy.

You Have to Sell Insurance to be an Agency

My fundamental belief is that until we get the order to bind, we write coverage, and we have policy administration to do, we’re not an insurance agency at all. We’re a sales organization. That’s the thought process you have to have.  If you think that way, your habits are going to change.  Your investments are going to change in terms of where you put your time and energy. You will change the resources you use.  For example,  your technology stack is entirely different. Here’s why:   I don’t know of a single sales organization out there that runs their organization off of an agency management system. Because they don’t, agency management systems are for insurance agencies.  Do you know of a high performing sales team from a Fortune 500 company that is using Applied to run their sales processes?  NO!  They are using a CRM.

Sales Organizations Use CRMs

CRMs are for sales organizations. As long as we’re clear on that, we can continue down this road.  You need a way to organize and track who’s going into the top of your funnel.  Do you know who is going all the way through the buyer’s journey to the bottom of the funnel?  How do you ever get enough data to improve your processes? How do you know what marketing efforts you need to replicate? How do you know how to help your salespeople? Maybe they are missing something in a followup stage. Perhaps they’re not hitting enough volume in their cold calls. Maybe their email template needs tweaked a little bit. All of this stuff is stuff you can help them with when you run your agency like it’s a sales organization because it is.  You can transform the way that you think and quit running the front end of your process like an ages-old agency. You can adapt like a 21st-century sales organization, you and your team are going to kill it in commercial insurance.

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