29 Mar Do You Manage All Your Producers the Same Way?
In order to have a successful agency you have to manage your personnel effectively. There are four types of producers and to get the most out of them, they need to be handled differently. Here are some tips on how to manage these different types:
High Performance – these people are making it happen, year after year. They produce the majority of your new business and have the largest books of business. They grow and they are consistent. The key with this group is to find out what motivates them and keep doing that. And also find out what the de-motivators are and do your best to remove them. An example might be filling out applications or submitting certain types of reports. With this group of High Performers, reassign the de-motivating tasks to a staff person. They will appreciate it and you will confirm to them to do what they do best… grow their book.
High Potential – these people have a lot of capability, but aren't always exercising it. This is where your training, mentoring, coaching has the biggest impact. They are considered high potential because you believe, based upon their intelligence, drive, knowledge, ambition… that they have potential to become much better producers, and maybe make it to your top group, the High Performance Group. All coaching activity should start with serious and in-depth goal setting. You've got to get the producer interested in their own well-being first. Their family finance, college, weddings, retirement funds… then work backwards towards building a book of business that will fund it. From there, you need to analyze what's their obstacle… is it organization, sales skills, prospecting skills, insurance knowledge…. And then create a written growth plan.
New Producer – you need a formal training plan for them, keep them between the lines… drive them hard. If you ever played sports, you know that they have spring training in baseball. There is a lot of conditioning and skills building. If you don't look at your new producers like athletes, you're making a mistake. You need to work them hard, make them do reps over and over of your sales call process. (If you don't have a sales call process, you need to find one.) Without that structure, they are aimlessly going into a call hoping to get a chance to quote. From there they will be lucky if they don't get rolled by the incumbent. Same is true on making cold calls, practice, practice, practice. If you don't have a cold call, appointment setting process, that's a mistake. It's like sending your new producer into a gunfight with only a knife.
Legacy – sometimes referred to as Retired in Place….2 things to analyze here. There are a lot of legacy producers in the insurance industry that never sold anything. They inherited a book and have done a decent job of retaining it. That means they cannot and will not sell. The only advice is: reduce your costs and your risks on them as much as possible. If you have legacy producers that actually produced their book, that's a good sign, they do know how to produce. Next question is this… if you fired them today, would they have enough money that they'd never have to worry about finances, if so… leave them alone and protect yourself by getting another producer in on those accounts as you put together a plan to transition the business. If they know how to sell, and they still need the money, I would encourage you to use that leverage to get them back into growing, selling and being a part of the sales team.
No Comments