The following is part four of our five part series developed for your insurance agency to learn more about growth. If you missed the first three parts of this series, be sure to check them out: Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

After your agency has been through the process of sorting out the numbers to better understand new business sales and account rounding, it’s time to tackle retaining your clients. Once you know what you take in, it makes sense to understand how to sell… without losing clients.

It makes no sense to sell one and lose another at the same time. That’s not growth! Instead, you want to retain your current clients while gaining new ones. However,retention is tricky to track in most management systems because they are built to handle carrier downloads not re-written business.

If you are not doing so it is critical your agency starts coding re-writes in your management system to get an accurate retention number.

Here is what you need to focus on to make the most of that:

• Retention Rate: The # of policies up for renewal that month and how many of those stayed. Remember: Do not count new business in this!
• Number of re-markets attempted.
• Number of re-writes bound.

The focus of this data task will be the most difficult but not impossible! Once you know the agency’s retention rate you can identify two main objectives:

1. What you need to sell each month to grow.
2. If you are satisfied with this number.

I caution you to not rely on the carrier’s retention numbers of your book with them. It’s not accurate! You move business and we can’t confirm how they are calculating that number. There are a slew of ways you can work to improve retention. In fact, this area of agency growth is the most important. The higher the retention rate the easier it is to grow!

You need to monitor re-marketing activities especially in personal lines. Remember, your agency makes $0 quoting business.

If you are struggling pulling your hair out to get these numbers check out the Zywave VPC. We have developed reporting that makes it easy to see your book’s potential!