As we travel the country and meet with insurance agency owners, they often tell us they’re a referral based business. When we ask how many referrals they received in the past month the answer is always “not sure”. The reality is, these agency owners have no idea how many referral quotes come into their agency or any type of quotes for that matter.
The CEO of Astonish; Adam DeGraide, always uses the example of air traffic control. Can you imagine if airports didn’t measure and monitor every single in and outbound flight in airports? What would happen? Chaos! Same thing applies to your insurance agency. Would it be helpful if you knew how may quote, endorsement, payment and other service or sales calls came into your agency? Would it be helpful for you to look at a spreadsheet at the end of each month and know exactly how many calls each CSR/Producer took, how many were sales, how many were service and how many were sold or rounded out? You don’t need to answer the question because it’s invariably YES.
As you look for ways to increase the production of your agency, the most important thing to remember is that you can’t set goals on where you want to go if you don’t know where you are today. Developing a bullet proof sales and service process that enables you to measure and monitor every inbound phone call will help you determine your next course of action.
You could centralize certain functions if you’re receiving a lot of a certain service request, you can give new opportunities to closers if you know everyone’s closing ratio and you can make intelligent staffing decisions by knowing these metrics.
Before you spend money on hiring, monitor and measure everything in your agency. In most cases people are a lot less busy then they claim to be when you track the numbers. And remember, numbers don’t lie.
If you’d like help implementing a sales process in your agency, please contact us for a free no obligation phone consultation to learn how we can help you Find,Sell and Keep more clients for less cost.