The 7-Drivers of agency building are crucial in streamlining a successful practice. Once you know and understand each driver, it is imperative to have a successful best practice in place for each one. It is more important you HAVE a system for each driver, rather than specifically what that system is. If your system works for you and drives results, that’s what really matters. I will touch on a few key best practices for each driver right now and if you’d like more details reach out to me directly.
Recruiting
When it comes to recruiting, I recommend a spider approach. This means having several legs for your recruiting systems. This could include LinkedIn, Facebook, Indeed ads, a professional recruiting service, and personal observations.
Training
In regard to training systems, I recommend handing out a monthly training schedule to your teams so they can see what’s coming. I refer to this as a pinwheel training system. I would take each of your main product lines and rotate training on them. I would also suggest you train on everything from referral prospecting to closing and objection handling on a regular basis. If you are in the independent space, it can also be beneficial to invite your top carrier partners to come in and train in your agencies.
Marketing/Prospecting
In the marketing/prospecting driver it’s important you have systems in place for your agents to have enough inventory of people to call 📞 to fill a weekly schedule of appointments. Starting agents with a project 💯 is always a good method. You should also take advantage of various lists as well as leads from direct mail. These coupled with a strong referral prospecting program should give your agents plenty of people to call. Refer to last weeks newsletter which covered referral prospecting in depth.
Agent Supervision
Agent supervision, after recruiting, is probably the most important driver of the seven. A proper agent supervision program should include the following:
-Call day mentoring and check-out
-Field days together
-Weekly one on one meetings
If you assign newer agents to a manager directly, you must have a system of accountability to ensure your managers are doing the above activities.
Business Tracking
Next is business tracking. It is vital you have a system to process all applications and a weekly follow up system. All business should be able to be tracked from submitted to issued. If business isn’t getting issued, agents aren’t getting a paycheck. Business tracking systems can be the difference between retaining agents or not.
Promotions & Incentives
Promotions and incentives are such an important driver and must be handled with effective systems of implementation. I am a proponent of running many different promotions throughout a given year. Here are just a few of the promotions I have run or been involved in driving:
- Top producer promotion
- Top in applications promotion
- Rookie of the year
- Never go away as the agency owner without running a last-minute promotion while you’re away.
- Hold a quarterly Diamond 💎 Club dinner for those who hit more significant quarterly numbers in a product line or certain area.
- Annual sales convention
- Gas cards
- Stars ⭐️ after hours
- Suit for a recruit
- Weekend get-a ways.
This is just a small sample. Use your imagination and ask your team what things they would enjoy. One other nugget I suggest is spending 10% of your management overwrite on giving back to your agency through these types of incentives. If you’re going to pay 💰 taxes anyway, you might as well invest in your people as potentially your biggest deductible investment.
Leadership Development
Leadership development is the final driver and is crucial if you want to build wide and deep. No one can do it alone. Building a bench of partners is imperative when building a successful agency. I suggest creating a management development syllabus from day 1 that gives people a clear pathway to advance in your organization. If people know what needs to be done, the proper talent will rise to the occasion and reveal themselves. Promoting great managers on your team will take your growth from addition to multiplication in no time.
Reach out if you’d like to drill down on any of these 7-Drivers. Remember, without proper systems in place for each, you will be building your foundation on sticks not bricks.
Greg Gelineau, CLTC
Executive Vice President
