3 Reasons You Need to Fire Your Producers From Service

Foreign welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. Thanks so much for joining me on today's episode. Very excited to share an important concept today that my guess is most of you I think will get it and understand and agree. But some of you might think this is a bit, I don't know if I say controversial. Here's what I'm going to talk about today. Why you should fire your producers from service. Why is it important? In fact, I'm going to share with you today three reasons why you need to fire your producers from service. And I'll give a lot of context and examples with you today. Some things that you can do, whether you're already doing this to some degree, we can make improvements or maybe this is a newer concept and I'm going to give you some ideas of how to get started. But most importantly, even before the how is the why this is going to create such a huge impact on your agency and your agency's success. Now, as always, the purpose of this podcast is to help you, the independent insurance agency leader, regardless of your specific role. I know we have agency principals and sales leaders and producers and service team members. If you have influence and you do, then you're a leader. So the Agent Leader podcast to help you, the agency leader, gain clarity, which is focus on what's most important to help you build consistency on the key habits and the behaviors that make the biggest impact. And of course make a commitment to be accountable. Right? Be accountable to become your best version possible. A few things that I want to share off the start and I reference this on most of the podcasts but I always want to show a visual for those of you get my words out that are watching on YouTube or, or I'm doing LinkedIn Live. We're streaming on numbers of platforms live here now but the best version possible book certainly you go to sitkins.com bvp to get yourself a copy. You also go to Amazon or Audible. But if you go through our site, we've got some extra stuff for you as well. So go check that out. We continue to get great feedback on the book. Want that to get you get that in your hands. As many agency leaders as possible also. Big, big, big, big announcement. I've teased this a few different times on what we're going to be doing moving forward, but there is a big announcement and now we have an announcement date, right? So there is a true announcement date of a big event that's going to be happening on September 7th at 11am Eastern, 8am Pacific so sometime in the morning for all of us, regardless of your time zone, I'm going to be delivering a live presentation which will be a live conversation. Conversation to you, the agency leader on the multi million dollar mistake that most independent insurance agencies are making. You don't want to miss this. It is going to be hosted live through LinkedIn. So you need to go to LinkedIn, but if you go to our website, if you look online or go to LinkedIn, you're going to find the event register. There's no cost other than an hour of your time. And I'm committed to giving you the best hour I could possibly give independent insurance agencies to help you not only not make this multi million dollar mistake, and it's possible, like, certainly worth a try. It's better than keeping them and doing nothing. Maybe they get reprimanded, right? Or most people say, well, gosh, eight out of 10 times, if they consistently make the mistake, we should probably let them go. Now we have a bit of a joke which is sort of a joke, but not a full joke because there's also reality in this, is that our joke and our reality is. Or we could make them a producer, right? If someone's making a mistake 8 out of 10 times, maybe we can make them a producer. Now why do we say this? Well, the way that we phrase it and the way I'm going to phrase it to you, the audience, is how many out of ten times in general, and this is if you're an agency leader, principal, think about this. If you're a producer or service person, of course, think about this. But how many times out of 10, if a producer were to take a change or service request right out of 10 times, would that producer the first time have 100 complete, total and accurate information, meaning that they would get everything that they needed one time, all in one shot. It would go directly, in this case to the carrier, right? If they took the change and there was no problems, no mistakes ever made. Now, when I ask that question, we get a variety of answers, but typically we get maybe one, maybe two, maybe three. There are some producers, oh man, I could do four or five times, right? I'm at least 50%. What's funny is I asked this question several years ago to one of our private client, one of our great members we've been working with, and I was in front of a room of all their service team members and their service team leaders, and I asked this question and the front row, the service team leaders started chuckling, they were laughing. And I said, okay, did I say something wrong? And they go, well, no, you said that typically producers make mistakes 8 out of 10 times. I would say it's at least 98 out of a hundred times. Right? So the bottom line is this, and we're going to talk about specifics of this, is that most producers, and by the way, this isn't usually with malice, right? Or they're not doing this because they've got, you know, just a lack of intent or credibility or integrity. We're going to talk about some of the reasons why, but they just don't do a very good job of it. And what happens is when producers get involved with service stuff, they make mistakes. And I'm going to share with you three things, three specific reasons why producers should be fired from service, why they should not be doing service work. Now, I'm going to give one big caveat here at the beginning. This does not mean that producers should do 0% of service. We talk about, and if you've listened this podcast, you've heard this before. There's green zone and there's red zone. And certainly with producers, green zone are for money making activities, sales, relationship management, proactive continuations. Right? They were making the renewal and non event and pipeline development. Those four things. Sales, relationship management, proactive continuations and pipeline development. That is the green zone. When producers do that, they are allowed themselves and their agency to make money. Red zone is all the other stuff. We could name a bunch of different stuff. The emails, right. The change requests, all these kind of things that we'll talk about. But the things that are typically inbound things are typically activities of red zone. The outbound things the producer needs to be proactive are green zone things. And you can't make money in the red zone. But most producers get caught up way too much in the red zone. Now back to what I initially said. Should producers have zero red zone? No. Our frame of reference, we believe this is fair and it's been very effective with agencies and producers. And the high performance teams is about 20%. Right? So they're gonna have 20% of your time, energy and effort in service stuff or red zone stuff, because you're gonna have it. But 80% needs to be in green zone things that we're going to be doing. Right? So just understand at the beginning, when I say fire producers from service, it doesn't mean they'll never do any. By the way, sometimes do emergencies happen, right? Sometimes does the yogurt hit the fan, as someone told me years ago, yes. Right. In those cases if the producer needs to hop into an emergency, then they can. Right? In fact, the analogy of this is producers is much like an airline pilot as an analogy. Airline pilots. Airline pilots take the plane off and they land the plane. Right? Right. New business, continue the business, but they don't do all the stuff in the middle. I've never had an airline pilot, at least that I know of, get my luggage ready. I've never had an airline pilot check me in at the gate. I've never had an airline pilot serve me coffee or give me a snack. Right. Whatever it is. Haven't had that. Right. There's specific focuses, remember? Same goal, different roles. But there are. Sometimes there could be an emergency and if there is, the pilot, or in this case the agent, the producer needs to step in and do some things. But here's something that really has been critical the last week or two in our programs and it's really neat to hear not us say it as coaches, but the agency leaders, the producers, the account managers, the sales leaders, they say it. In fact, I'm gonna have a guest guest on the podcast here shortly talked about this specifically, but he said this. One thing we've really learned in our agency is not everything is an emergency. There's this thing in agencies that for whatever reason, we think that just because it was the next thing that came in our inbox, it is the most urgent and important thing. It's not. It doesn't mean it might not be either. It may not be urgent nor important. It's just recent. But, you know, I got to work on what's next. And what often happens is we miss out on the important things because we lie to ourselves on what we really think is urgent. So again, there are emergencies in flight, but not everything, not everything is an emergency. Okay, so let's talk about the three specific reasons why producers need to be fired from service. I already talked about this one a little bit. But let's go deeper. Number one, and I'm going to put my little, little notes up here. Number one is it's ineffective. It's simply ineffective when producers get involved in service and service related activities. Now, at the end of the day, who is it really about? Like, who is it about? It's about the client, right? It's about the client. And when producers get involved in service overstep their bounds, it makes the process often very ineffective. It makes it very ineffective. A phrase that we talked to account managers in particular is let's do it one time, the first time, right? Let's do it one time, the first time, where possible. Now, I know things happen. I know there might be fob information and things like that, but let's do our best to get as much of what we need once that we can do it once. And you think about the client experience. This happens frequently. We know this because the producers and account managers and sales leaders talk about this with us, is that a producer collects some information for a change or service. And by the way, why does the producer do that? Because the producer oftentimes has a mindset of if you need anything for any reason, anytime you call me because I'm your guy, I'm your guy, right? Which then they call them and they go, why are they calling me? Well, you told them to, right? There's a whole different podcast we could do, but the idea is that they get some type of change or request or service thing and they miss something like, I don't know, the serial number or, you know, was it a boat or a car, right. Or you know, was it 800,000 in sales or a million in sales? I'm just making stuff up here. But they get the wrong information or incorrect information. And then of course, the client thought is taken care of because they called the producer who said, if you need anything, you call me. And then of course, the producer relays that information oftentimes to the service team to actually do the thing. And the service team gets the information, but it's not complete information. So they have to do two things or three things, but they've got to first of all make sure it's correct. Secondly, they got to call the, the account, the client to make sure that I don't think this is right. Or they got to call the carrier back and forth several times, oh, I need more of this. You didn't get this. This wasn't complete. Could be a number of different things. Bottom line is it's truly ineffective. Mistakes cause delays, right? Mistakes cause delays. And so we think about producers getting involved. They butt in things that they're not very good at, which we're going to talk about next, right? And they also interrupt, which we're going to talk about after that. So it just is an ineffective process that starts this domino effect of any of ineffectiveness and a poor client experience. Here's the last thing I'm going to share. If you're taking notes, here's what I would challenge you as a high performance team. If you have producers or people on your team going, well, I've got to be doing this stuff, right? I'm the producer and I know lots of stuff. I would ask you this, is the client experience in your agency culture about excellence or is it about ego? Which one? Excellence or ego? Now, if there are true trust and credibility issues, could do another podcast on that. That's a different discussion. But oftentimes because we don't communicate very well internally, we have a lack of trust. And I've talked about this many times. That sometimes isn't a true lack of trust or that the account manager can't get it done. It's that the producers never allowed them to. Right. And if there's issues, how do you possibly get better if we don't communicate this because long term, if the producer is handling all the service, if you need anything and every email and everything comes to me, and then maybe it gets forwarded, maybe it doesn't, maybe I got it right, maybe it didn't, the producer will always be trapped in the red zone and then they can't grow and the agency doesn't grow, the producer doesn't get a raise, the account manager doesn't get a raise and the client's frustrated. Outside of that, it's a fantastic, fantastic process to have producers dive in and do a lot of the service. Right? So number one, ineffective. Number two, this is similar but different. Inefficient. Inefficient inefficiency is about using resources properly. It's not putting your team in the best position to win. And the big part of this, and why the first one is so ineffective is often because of this one, is that producers just aren't very good at this stuff. It's not as Dan Sullivan talks about, of strategic coach, their unique ability. The best producers typically, and again, I know this is a bit of a generalization, but it does hold true in most cases. Are really good at relationship building, right? They're really good at some of these skills needed to grow their business. But when it comes to details and data and specifics, sometimes they forget where the decimal point goes or the zero goes. And by the way, I'm raising my own. I know that. And by the way, if you try to fix a bunch of weaknesses, all you're going to have is a bunch of average weaknesses. So part of this is know thyself, put your team, put yourself in the best position to succeed at the highest level. And what's really cool is when you do stuff that you're already really good at or naturally, naturally, naturally good at. I'll get the word out. You can become good to great, excellent to that best version possible. Because you get energy when you do it and you want to learn how to do it better and you want to dive in deeper. But if we keep crossing channels, we just keep button heads and we're doing things that we're not very good at, right? It's inefficient. I've already mentioned this. The producers are not in the green when we do this. And by the way, when the producers aren't in the green, what this typically causes. In fact, this is one of the hesitations that producers have. Some will say this and some won't. If I don't tell the client, if you need anything, call me. What? Where's my value? Like if they don't talk to me or at least go through me, right? Even if I'm not even a conduit through the service channel, then they may not see or hear from me, then maybe they don't say that, but you could be thinking that. So now what am I doing? Well, if you're not doing the reactive stuff, the inbound stuff, you best be doing proactive things. I mentioned earlier the four green zone activities, well, sales is one of them, but relationship management is another. That you've got a proactive schedule of relationship management that you're doing proactive things in the continuation. I've done other podcasts on the continuation process, but they were having conversations to define expectations, to document expectations, and at a minimum, at a minimum, a six month stewardship or promise report that we're going to, the things that were agreed to. As a risk advisor slash producer, your job is, yes, to produce, but you proactively provide risk advice and solutions. That's where your value comes in. The service team has it. They're really, really good at reactive service and those relationship management things. And of course they can continue to get better at what they do. I just did a program this week with account managers and we talked about this, right, like we should be doing low risk practice as account managers. What objections did you get? What frustrations did you have? How do we get better at our skill set? That's on the phone, in person or on a zoom call, right? So all of this, if we have producers doing work that isn't theirs, number one, it's ineffective. Number two, they say here it's extremely inefficient. It's extremely inefficient. Which leads me to number three, this one gets overlooked, but it's really important. And when I work with teams on this, they typically do something like this. You're right. Interrupt. When producers. If we don't fire producers from service, there's a constant interruption. Now part of this is to avoid interruptions during the week. We have specific conversations to start the week. Something I always say is you have two choices. You can either prepare or you repair. Repairing is a bunch of interruptions. We never get much done. We're always working on what's on fire because we never got specific and intentional on what's most important as we started the week as a team. And because of that we interrupt. Maybe the producer's bored, maybe the producer just has. I don't see we're gonna check in. In fact, you know, during our in person events, we would talk about high performance teams and not interrupting. And I would get a chuckle because this would be like a Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. So it's later in the week and they're doing a training down with us. And the first break, like 80 of the producers would call in and be like, hey, just checking in, just seeing what's going on. Listen, if you do a good enough job to prepare. Now again, there might have been a question to you you might be following up. I'm not trying to pick on producers. I know stuff happens. But a random check in or a random thought isn't going to help your service team. Because here's the thing with interruption, service team's job, you probably already know this is not easy. It's a huge challenge. It's also huge opportunities in doing that, that job better. But there was a study recently that came out, it talked about interruptions and what it does, their level of focus. And again, there's been different studies on this, but the one that I read, it was interesting. It said that when you're in a level of deep focus or deep work and you get interrupted, it takes the human brain 23 minutes. 23 minutes to get back at the same level of productivity that it was before the interruption. So how many interruptions are producers adding if we don't fire them from service? Of I did this. Did you do this? Where are we at here? All these kind of things. And by the way, here's the other part of this. Interrupting is just plain rude. We so often have a lack of respect for each other's time. Got a minute? You ever said that one? I have. Right. Got a minute. Now again, I think our intent is good and we want to help people. So often we go, well, sure, yeah, okay, right. But the level of productivity and agency with interruptions is incredible. What happens versus defining the Work, Doing the work and doing it with great. With greatness. Right? With excellence. And at the end of the day, the interruption is this. The biggest part of this is it moves your teams from high maintenance. There's always maintenance to high performance. Right? High maintenance to high performance. So those are the three reasons that you need to fire your producers from service. Number one, it's extremely. I had the wrong one. Ineffective. It's extremely ineffective. Remember, it's about the client and whose job, whose role, same goal, retain and obtain ideal clients with different roles. Let's be really clear on those roles and do those roles with excellence. Remember, excellence or ego. Number two is inefficiencies. It's the unique abilities about doing things that we're naturally good at and we like doing. And we can improve our skill on versus crossing over and trying to improve a bunch of. Of weaknesses. And of course, this also allows us to be more proactive. And the last one I just mentioned was the level of interruption or at the level of interruptions. So there you go. I would challenge you as an agency. Now, some of you make abilities about doing things that we're naturally good at and we like doing and we can improve our skill on versus crossing over and trying to improve a bunch of. Of weaknesses. And of course, this also allows us to be more proactive. And the last one I just mentioned was the level of interruption or the level of interruptions. So there you go. I would challenge you as an agency. Now, some of you may be doing this really well. Good for you. But I'll tell you, when this concept comes out that people kind of laugh and smile. In fact, when we talk about firing producers from service, I typically would think initially, now I've learned after several years, but I typically would think that producers would be the most excited for this. The producers would go, oh, this is, this is great. I can be in the green zone. I can go sell more. I can. I realize that my service team, I need to, I need to depend on them more. They do a great job. I'm interrupting them too much. I can go out in the marketplace and go sell more stuff and make more money, achieve my dreams and goals. Right? That would be what you think. And by the way, for the great producers, they do. But many other go, oh, no, if I don't do that, I'm going to have to do that. Remember, the definition of a producer is one who produces. That's the definition. One who produces. So if we're not producing, what are we doing? What are we doing with 80% of our time, energy and effort. The green zone. And so often some producers will hide or bury themselves behind activities because it says well I'm just busy, I don't have time to go do that stuff. Right. So you would think that this firing yourself from producers would be or producers from service would be most liberating for producers. But what's interesting is when I teach this and share this and have conversations with, with producers, account managers, the one, the one group that gets even more excited is the account managers. In fact, just this week Roger Sitkins came on and let off our program and shared some stories about his experiences. And even back when he would do a lot of one on one consulting and after he'd go to the agency, he would ask a question to the account managers. Do producers get involved in service? Do producers get involved in day to day service? And you always love when he tells a story. If you can't see me on video but looks like this, they go yes, not yes. It's great. They get involved and help me out. It's yes. They get involved and they screw things up and they interrupt me and they take my. They basically, basically in essence say what you do isn't very good so I need to do it right. All these things we look at. But this is interesting because you think about it, wouldn't the producers love this idea, this high performance team to go out and sell more? Well, most do, or at least many do. The good ones do. But the account manager, the ones that really get excited. Let me educate me, empower me and equip me to do my job with excellence. Stop getting in my way. Right? So you need to fire your producers from service. Listen, last thing on this, I mentioned this on the beginning of the podcast big event presentation happening September 7, 11am Eastern, 8am Pacific. We'll send some more things on how to make sure your agency avoids the multimillion dollar mistake. It's going to be the most powerful presentation and conversation with a huge announcement that we've ever done at Sitkins. Once you be part of that, go check it out, get registered again. It doesn't cost you a dollar other than your commitment of one hour of time to become your best version possible. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks so much for listening to the Agent Leader podcast. If this is added value, hey, leave a rating a review. We would totally appreciate it. Wish you all the best in your success. Thanks for listening. The Agent Leader podcast is brought to you by the fine folks of the Rough Notes company. They are publishers of the insurance industry's leading magazine and technical insurance content. Roughness Magazine Profile Successful agencies plus keen insights from respected experts on a host of must know topics. RoughNotes Advantage plus provides the tools to help the your agency grow, providing authoritative information on complex coverage issues. Visit them and learn more@roughnotes.com.