The Growth Sales Culture -
How To Create Dyed-In-The-Wool Increased Sales
If there’s one thing that I’ve become clear on in my many years of consulting with larger insurance agencies, there is no silver bullet. There is no one thing that, if an agency applies it, will result in sustained growth. You have to think that if there were, most agencies would have already implemented it.
It’s not one thing. It’s a combination of many components, consistently and effectively executed, over and over again that lead to sustained growth.
An interesting outcome occurs when you implement these components in this way – over and over. They start to become engrained. They become the culture – it’s just the way it is at your agency. I assert that this is what most agency owners want. Here’s how you accomplish it.
There are nine components that you must implement to create this growth sales culture:
- Goals Management
Do your producers have specific personal goals? We humans are driven by personal interest. If the sales goals are agency driven, then you are banking on producer loyalty for results. If the producer’s goals are personal, well then they tend to be much more effective. The first component is a system that facilitates the creation of producers’ personal goals and tracks them over time. - ‘Customer’ Relationship Management (CRM) For Prospecting
Every agency already has some form of this. Granted, it may be antiquated and it may be on spreadsheets or even note cards. I’m not saying that these are effective, mind you. To establish a growth culture, you need a CRM that centralizes all suspects, prospects and customers and manages the conversations with them. The right CRM aids the entire organization in effectively moving potential customers through the sales funnel. The ideal CRM integrates this functionality with all of the other components that I’m discussing. - Sales Meeting Management
Your sales meetings are really opportunities although they might not currently occur that way. Why are they opportunities? You can take advantage of the collective knowledge of all your producers and use that to arm them with all of the weapons they need to increase their closing ratio. However, this can only happen if the information is organized. See below and above. - Differentiation Management
What proactive services do you offer? What do you do that your competition doesn’t do? What do you do better? If you asked each producer this, how many different answers would you get? That’s where differentiation management comes in. It provides a system whereby the compelling differences that you offer or create can be maintained, articulated and honed. Without this, all you have are producers making stuff up. - Incumbent Management
How many times are you going up against the same competitor? My guess is frequently. What information do you have about that competitor? What are the points where they are weak and you are strong? Do all of your producers know that? Incumbent management is about centralizing that knowledge and having it in a readily accessible database. This makes call preparation much easier and so much more powerful. - Training Management
Say Joe is a producer. In your monthly training session, Joe rehearses his sales call. It’s obvious to you that Joe really needs some work on eliciting a concrete specific deliverable from the prospect (Vision Box for those familiar with The Wedge). What do you do? Well, ideally, you sit Joe down and have him spend 30 minutes in front of the computer reviewing the video training for that. Increase the producers’ competence so that they have the confidence to execute effectively. The training management component is having ALL of the training that you need to execute your sales operation readily available and automated. - Introductions Management
Typically, referrals are not managed at all in agencies. Some producers ask for them. Most don’t. What if you managed this process and made it part of your system/culture? With each producer, take their top 10 accounts. At each account, who are two people that they know that you want to do business with? That’s 20 prospects for a single producer. How many producers do you have? You can see that you can quickly build a prospect database this way. Now if you manage the conversations with these accounts, you can start to create, not just referrals, but (red hot) introductions to these prospects. Again, it’s about centralization, knowledge and availability. - New Producer Hiring
What process are you using for hiring new producers? What I recommend is beyond the scope of this article and there are other articles that I’ve written on the subject that you can peruse. That said, as far as a component for growth culture, you need a clearly defined process for Producer Hiring. Ideally you have a system in place that supports this process and tracks candidates through it, centralizes the information and guides you in your hire/no-hire decision. - Dashboard Reports
What’s in the pipeline? How’s Joe doing on Lockport? Who’s the incumbent on that? How are we positioning ourselves? What’s next on that engagement? How many deals are in the proposal stage? How many are we likely to close?
Now the real question: how long does it take to get the answer to any of the above questions? Ideally, you login to a system, click a few buttons and boom, you got it. No delay. No administrative time. It’s just there, the information that you need to run the organization and make decisions.
These are the critical components for creating a growth sales culture in your organization. If you put all of these together into a system, execute the process faithfully and consistently then I defy you not to grow.
