You May be Managing Your Producers WRONG!

Are you an agency principal that’s getting frustrated with your producer’s lack of production? Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but you might be managing them wrong. That’s what I’m going to talk to you about today.

The Frustration

If you’re an agency principal, there’s a high likelihood you have producers that you’re frustrated with because they’re not hitting their numbers. And if you’re a producer and you’re new to the game, you might be getting frustrated with your agency principal because all they’re doing is talking to you about hitting your numbers. Here’s the problem that we have in the industry. We manage results. Now we want to tell our clients that our value proposition is highly proactive, and we do everything out in front, but we don’t do that with our staff. We don’t take the time to have our producers develop a business plan. See, when somebody comes to work at Florida Risk or a new client comes into Killing Commercial, the very first thing we have them do is develop their business plan. I don’t want somebody to tell me how much revenue they’re going to do.

The Problem

I want them to tell me how they will do that revenue. That’s a big deal. The problem is that we manage that number that our producers are supposed to hit in the end, but you can’t do that until when? Until you get to the end. You can manage the number a month in, but it would be ludicrous to manage an annual production number a month into the year. It would honestly be ludicrous to manage a monthly production number a month because we should be addressing the behaviors.

The Solution

We should be looking at how many phone calls get made. How many emails get sent? How many marketing drops are happening? How many new business meetings did they book? How many presentations of our work product have occurred? See if you can focus on those things, and you have a CRM system that will capture that; you can monitor the behaviors until you’re blue in the face because you know the revenue will follow. That’s a big deal as an agency principal.

I’ve had patches in my career where I’ve gone two months without a new business appointment. I have producers that have gone six to eight weeks without new business appointments, but I knew that the behaviors were there. I knew they were making their phone calls, emails, and marketing drops, and I knew that it was only a matter of time before the flywheel caught and they were off to the races in production.

The Other Challenge

The other challenge I would have for you as an agency principal is thinking big and teaching your producers to think big. You know, I think producers are often only going to produce up to the level that we expect of them, and if your goals for them in your mind, or that you have portrayed to them are too low, they’re never going to get above that. Even the most self-motivated people will find comfort in the fact that they are meeting or barely exceeding their annual goal. If you think that your producer having a book that is $200,000 or $300,000 in revenue is all you want for your agency, then that’s acceptable.

If not, tell them you want 600,000 and see what happens. A pure producer will hit it. The issue is if we’re not willing to think big, our producers aren’t inclined to think big. So if we can think big and establish stretch goals in addition to what we know, they’re going to achieve, define the behaviors that get wrapped around that, and then measure those behaviors daily. I’m willing to bet you you’re going to take a producer that’s never written more than their current average, and they will double it in a year. If you can do that, you and your agency are going to kill commercial insurance.

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