As 2015 approaches, have you begun yet to think about business planning for the coming year? The first quarter is when most agencies set the strategic and tactical goals that will improve the firm’s performance and lead to top- and bottom-line growth.
With our agency clients, we emphasize The Seven Agency Growth Factors as an organizing structure for a firm’s success. We recommend that all agency planning and activities be based on these key growth factors:
- Personal Development
- Strategic Planning
- Agency Operations
- Lead Generation
- Prospect Conversion
- Client Maximization
- Agency Evaluation
Distilled from our work helping grow agencies across the U.S., The Seven Agency Growth Factors are those necessary agency functions that lead to growth and success. When an agency optimizes all seven, the results are multiplicative as they work together to produce serious growth in sales, size of the book, and profits.
Those seven factors, however, can be reduced down to just three essential functions of any business, including an insurance agency:
- Grinding – producing, pricing, and delivering your products & services
- Finding – generating prospects & converting prospects into clients
- Minding – daily and long-term management
Looking at your firm in this way helps you to appreciate and decide what skills you need for success, to organize and execute daily and longer-term management, and to know when to call in specialized help to grow your firm.
Too many agency owners and producers think that their business is merely “grinding” – instead of a symbiotic combination of all three functions. And Grinding alone won’t grow your firm.
Grinding
In employee benefits, Grinding is the blocking and tackling of the business. Plan design; learning the products, their features & benefits and how they solve problems for clients; the ACA and its requirements and compliance demands; analyzing client needs; spread sheeting; and negotiating the renewal with the carrier are some examples of grinding.
Grinding is the work for which you get paid, just as an attorney gets paid for writing a contract or trying a case in court. This is the work that historically has defined benefit brokers. (The smart agency owners and producers understand that definition has to be broadened and the firm’s value proposition greatly expanded to succeed post-reform. But that’s another story for another time.)
Yet the most knowledgeable (and diversified) benefits firms that grind with the best of them will never know ultimate success unless they tend to the other two functions, Finding & Minding.
Finding
Finding is the work of acquiring and closing your prospects…marketing, prospecting, selling, and cross-selling. Very few products or services sell themselves. Just as that lawyer will starve who can’t or won’t hustle up new cases, so will that benefits broker who can’t generate a steady stream of qualified prospects and close a high percentage.
I constantly remind my agency clients and other principals that an insurance agency is, at its core, a sales organization. [see my September 4 Zywave blog post, “What does your agency do?”] And the always insightful Wendy Keneipp of Q4 Intelligence points out that marketing is just the first step in the sales process. So these activities of Finding better be at the heart of an agency’s efforts, with all other activity (Grinding & Minding) supporting and strengthening the sales function.
Some of the key questions to ask about your Finding activities:
- What is my Unique Selling Proposition (USP)?
- Who is my target market? My ideal prospect? Am I properly niched?
- Where can I find my ideal prospects? How can I reach them?
- What is my marketing message to my prospects?
- Am I engaging both the logic and emotion of the prospect?
- Am I selling in a consultative or a transactional style?
- How am I adding value to the selling process?
- What type of needs analysis or fact-finding process am I using?
- What solutions am I bringing to my prospects?
Minding
Minding involves the daily and long-term management of a business. Any business must attend to its daily operations to ensure client satisfaction, minimize problems that distract staff and disrupt the operation, and measure & monitor the key business metrics that inform management decisions. A smooth and scalable operation is essential to agency growth.
And planning for the future is important; without a business strategic plan and tactical goals, a principal is like a sailor without a map or compass, unable to navigate to the desired port and unable to tell where he is or what progress he’s made.
Some key questions to ask about your Minding:
- Where do I want my business to be in three years time? Five years? 10?
- How do I get there… what skills, staff, funding, etc. do I need?
- Can coaching or a consultant get me there faster?
- What regular and frequent activities must be completed for the business to meet its obligations and fulfill client expectations?
- How can I automate, delegate and outsource lower-level activities to free myself for more strategic and highest-value activities such as prospecting and selling? And my staff for their highest-value activities?
- What am I doing consistently to motivate my team and myself and improve our skills?
- Is my agency / practice able to operate at the same high performance level if I’m out of the office or even out of town?
- Am I tracking and evaluating the Top 10 Metrics in my business so that I can modify my sales and marketing efforts for high ROI?
The Seven Agency Growth Factors provide a principal with the most in-depth and comprehensive field guide to agency growth available, taking the mystery and luck out of agency success.
But the agency that, at the very least, focuses on Grinding, Finding and Minding will have greater success, achieve its goals faster, and avoid many of the pitfalls that hinder agency growth.
For a complimentary overview of “The Seven Agency Growth Factors,” and a worksheet to easily create your own Unique Selling Proposition, send an email to [email protected] with the subject line “Agency Growth.”