Closing the Performance Gap: The KPIs That Drive Agency Growth

What are the performance gaps that are holding your agency back from its true potential and the results that you ultimately want? On today's Agent Leader podcast, I have a fantastic conversation with Roger Sitkins and we talk about performance gaps, what to measure, how to measure, and how to instill consistency in the most important gaps that will drive your agency towards success. You're going to love this episode. Have your pen and paper ready.

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Welcome to the Agent Leader podcast. This is the podcast for insurance agency leaders to learn, to grow, to become better, ultimately become their best version possible. And heck, we might even have some fun here along the way. My name is Brent Kelly. I'm your host. It's a pleasure to be with you on this episode and if you are watching this on a video format, you may see I have an amazing guest. He's a repeat guest. He's been good enough that I've been allow him to come back on for multiple sessions. I have Roger Sitkins, founder and CEO of the Sitkins Group. Roger, welcome in to the Agent Leader podcast today.

Well, thank you Brett. I'm really glad you've allowed me to come back because it's a new topic that I'm very excited about.

Yes, I put that in quotes, allowed Roger come back in. Obviously we always get a great deal of wisdom from Roger when he comes on here and and I want to set this up because there is a reason specific topic that I wanted to bring Roger in on. We as an organization just wrapped up our Agent Executive Edge program. This is our leadership program that we run for all of our Sitkins network members. It's one of our four core programs. So we have a leadership program, Agency Executive Edge. We have a producer program producer fit. We have a service professional program account manager fit and we have a sales leadership program coach. The coach and these programs al over a 90 day sequence so that entire agency is hearing a similar message and can better communicate throughout their agency. It's super impactful. And so again, those are our four core programs and the Agent Executive Edge is the first program, the kickoff program for agency leaders. And in one of our recent sessions we talked about key performance indicators and why they matter and what are some examples of key performance indicators. And within that conversation, Roger led a great discussion not only on key performance indicators, but some of the gaps in performance, AKA performance gaps. So we're going to talk today on this podcast. I want to bring Roger in to talk more to you, the agent leader, about some of the key performance indicators and some of the gaps that maybe you as an agency are experiencing. And I think this will be a. In fact, I don't think I know this will be a great tool and resource for you to become more aware of some of these performance gaps. And speaking of, of resources and tools, one of the things that I mentioned on my last podcast that in 2025, we want to continue to add more value to you, the agency leader. Yeah, we want you to hear this or watch this message and be able to digest and take notes and apply some aspects to your agency, but also give you any resources or tools that we can that are applicable based on the conversation. So if you go to sitkins.com podcast sitkins.com podcast and we'll put this in the show notes, you'll have access to that page where if you put your name and email in, you'll have access to our downloads. And today we're going to be adding a download, a performance gap analyzer. Did I get that right, Roger? Yes, Performance gap analyzer. And it's actually a new tool that Roger's created. We're excited to go through some of the things we talked about today. So as you hear Roger talk about some of these performance gaps, you'll have the opportunity to go to our site, download that and see for yourself on where you're at. So it's going to be extremely a valuable tool. So with that, I want to get into discussion and talk about KPIs and performance gaps and start with about as basic questions I can get. Roger, I know you'll expand upon it, but let's just start with the topic of key performance indicators. What are they specifically key performance indicators? And why is an agent leader, should they matter to me?

Well, they should matter because they give us the direction that we want to go on. And we always have to make sure that the direction we're on is leading us towards our desired destination, not some other place. The performance. The key performance indicators are a core foundational part of a business plan. And we have the bvp, best version possible business plan that we lay out. Okay. And we look at this, we talk about the business plan, or more importantly, business model. And something I know I've heard you say in the podcast, we certainly say it all the time, is your current business model's perfectly designed for you to achieve the results you're currently achieving. And most times when we say that, even in our agency executive edge program that just completed that you mentioned first time the executive hear that, they kind of get like a two count before they went, well, wait a Minute, one of the reasons we're here is to get a better business model. And maybe our current business model, maybe we don't have one, we say, well, actually you do have one that's just not intentional. So the key to the business model is be very, very intentional. Now, how do you know if it's working or not? Well, it comes down to the results that you're getting. So the KPIs key performance indicators give us a tracking tool to say, are we hitting the numbers? As I know you've talked about, we talk about in all of our programs, there's three things that we focus on. We focus on the mindset, the beliefs, we focus on the behaviors and strategies and making sure they're aligned with the beliefs. And then finally we look at the results. So it's beliefs, mindset, behavior, strategies, and then results. And anytime the results are not where we want them to be, the big mistake that we see leaders make in all areas of an agency is they look at the numbers and they go to them, either the manager of the department or they go to the individual producer and say, your numbers aren't where they need to be. Go work on them. Like Brett, your closing ratio is not where it should be. Go work on it. The reality is, as we preach all the time, the numbers are the end result of behaviors and strategies. In fact, in the last podcast I heard you talk about that a lot about when what is normal get the behaviors and strategies where we want them. The numbers are pretty predictable and guaranteed. So the key to this is really getting your handle, getting a handle on what are the KPIs for a company and then more importantly, what do we do to improve them to make sure that we're getting the right results. So there's a basic start, but again, it all comes down to business models. Your current, your current business models perfectly designed for you to achieve the results you're currently achieving. And if those are not acceptable to you, if they're not driving the value of your firm, they're not driving the profitability firm where you should be, then you need to change the business model. And that's where we've got to come back and look at the KPIs.

Yeah, it's, it's again, simple but powerful and oftentimes missed. And you know, it reminds me too, just recently, I don't know, it's been depends on when you listen to podcast, but later in 2024, I had the opportunity, based on your relationship, to have a great conversation with Dr. Rick Jensen. And I want you to expand upon this because, you know, Rick talked about outcome and performance stats and I know something that you had introduced to me when I joined the organization and then we've talked with our, our agencies and see things differently. I'd love for you to maybe talk about, you know, certainly that relationship, but off, off also what he introduced to you and how you've applied that in working with agencies.

Yeah, I'm really glad you had Rick on because first of all, he's a phenomenal friend. I'm really blessed to have him as a friend and to a degree, mentor. We share ideas together so many times. It's a lesson that I learned from him. One of the first times he was coming to speak at one of our events with our private clients, I got to know him through a golf clinic he was part of. And of course I went up and I just wanted to talk to him and ask more questions about it. And so when we were talking about what was happening within independent insurance agents and even, even though I know you mentioned this during the podcast with him, he works with professional golfers, professional tennis, and high net worth financial planners, which is kind of a neat thing. And in the golf arena, his, his players that he's worked with, again, he's a sports psychologist. The golfers he works with have won over 30 major tournaments. So he's dealing with the best of the best and those, those type of people. You can learn a lot from him. So when we got talking more and more about what happens in agencies and looking at statistics, because he wasn't aware of what, you know, statistics, KPIs we would have in our business. He said, roger and I know you've talked about it, say that nine more times. There are two types of stats we worry about in professional golf. There's an outcome stat and a performance statistics. I said, well, I don't know the difference. He said, well, the outcome stats, what happens? So the outcome stat in golf is pretty simple. Where are you on the money list? What's your average score? Okay. What's your overall rating? Are you number one in the world or number 153? And he said, but the real key is not the outcome stats because that's the end result. We would call that a lagging indicator. The real key is the performance stats. And I said, all right, take me deeper on that. And the performance stat is where you look at and say, okay, like for golf, it's fairways hit, it's greens and regulation, it's strokes gained, putting, it's scrambling. It's all of these things. He said the golfers, the best ones, don't necessarily worry as much about where they are. They worry about improving the performance stats. So we looked at this and we said, how do we apply this to an agency and how do we apply it to the various teams in an agency? Well, the outcome stats for an agency, keeping things as simple as we possibly can, come down to just a few things. What are our total revenues? What's our organic growth percentage? What's our operating profit percentage? And as I know you've talked about before on the podcast, and we certainly drive it in all of our especially agency executive edge programs, we call it Grow Fit. And Grow Fit is the combination of the organic growth rate, that percent plus operating profit percent. And I'm sure 99.9% of your listeners know that it's about operating profit, not actual, not total, total profit. Because we always want to take interest income, contingency income, investment income off there to get it. And in most agencies right now, based on the last best practices study, average agency has somewhere between 8 to 10% of their revenue coming from contingency slash investment or interest income. We have to take that off because that's 100% profit. So when we look at this, our outcome stat that we measure is growth. Percent of organic growth rate, again, plus operating profit. Standard we have is 40. And if you're not at 40, maybe we should talk. So if I have a 20% operating profit and a 20% organic growth rate, that's 40. Okay. Now that's pretty heavy for most people, but that's where our best members are. That's the type of results that they're driving. So when we look at this again with agencies, we say, all right, that's the outcome stat. That's the ultimate, we want the ultimate number to fall off the the line, I guess, at the end of the day. And the real key becomes getting back to beliefs, behaviors and results. We've got to start looking at what are the things that will drive performance. That will drive performance. Well, if you just look at what statistics most people track and it's crucial to track them and certainly it's part of the best practices study. You're going to be looking at revenue per employee and we look at spread per employee. In fact, I had a great call today with a longtime client. I told you about it before we started recording. And their revenue per employee right now is not really where they want it to be. It was just short of 240,000. Okay. But the bigger news was their spread per employee, which is, you know, it's the average revenue per employee, average compensation per employee was really well, because they do a very good job of managing things properly. So their spread or gross profit per employee was very, very high. So again, we can look at. Most people would look revenue per employee, spread per employee, revenue per validated producer. We certainly want to look at revenue for our average client overall. But more importantly, break that down on A, B and C clients. Top 5, middle 15, bottom 80% clients. We want to always look at Prado's principle overall, the 8020 rule. And then something we're not ready to publish yet, but we're going to be talking about it real soon is a deeper look at 80 20. And rather than saying, okay, the top 20% or 80%, we're breaking it down into four tiers. Top 25% of customers, next 25, next 25, bottom 25. And we're just getting the numbers in from our clients we deal with. So we'll be publishing that pretty soon. The initial numbers are exciting yet scary because we're seeing in the average agency we work with, and they're great agencies, they're committed to growth. The top 25% of the customers, what we see so far, it's about 88% of the revenue. So we've got to be aware of that. But those, those are some basics that we look at. But there are some other things that, that we really need to drive on is what are the things that create those type of numbers? So we get back to behaviors and strategies. And you and I have had some really great conversations, as we always do, about certain things we might mention, like, okay, we believe that 100% of the producers should hit their goals. We believe that 100% of the a and B clients should give us referrals. And I never, never forget, Brett, the conversation we had during the holidays where we said, you know, a lot of people when we talk about this, they say, well, that's not possible. That's not possible. And our response is, you're right. That's not like it's not possible to have 100% of your new business come from referrals. Well, that it's possible. If you have a lot of new business, you sit there waiting, aggressively waiting for the phone to ring or at the computer today. But the reality is that everything we're about to talk about is possible. If you're willing to accept a paradigm shift because a paradigm holds you in place. This is. Well, this is the way we think it is. But if we can say, well, you know what, maybe that's not possible, or do we say that is possible? Or to me, it's not possible unless we do what. And we got to start looking at things a lot differently.

Yeah.

So there's a whole bunch of stuff to start off.

Well, no, this is a great kickoff, this conversation, because, you know, and again, what spurred this discussion for this podcast was as we were having a conversation with the attendees of the Agency Executive Edge program, you know, we talked about outcome and performance. And then what you got into is there's a deeper level and really diving into performance gaps. And I, I want to make sure I set this up right for the audience because first of all, I hope you all heard. You know, it can be easy to gloss over, I think, sometimes. Oh, yeah, there's outcome or lagging, there's performance, there's leading. But just think about it for a second. And I just ask you, as an agency leader, have you ever looked at, you know, maybe only outcome stats or focused on outcome stats? And it's good to know those. But the reality, Roger, and you said this, even, like, with closing ratio, by the time you have that data, information that's already transpired, it's too late, at least for that time frame. And, you know, so what I really want to challenge you all as an agency leader is what's the true source, what's the cause, what is really driving the things? And, you know, every agency is going to look at this a little bit different. I think there's some flexibility here, but there's some, some basic things. Roger, I know you're going to get into of, like, the depth of this. So that's where I want to go. And you mentioned paradigm shift to me. I think I, you know, as you know, we've had some. Those conversations and I love that. The fact that you just got to. You got to think differently. And let's face it, this is not to beat up, so to speak, a lot of insurance agencies out there. But I'll never forget, this has been several years ago now where I was having a great conversation, Roger, with an agency leader. This is. I was at a speaking event on the east coast, and he was having great results. And his tongue in cheek answer to my question, but what are the things that you're doing that's working? And his tongue in cheek answer to me was, well, I just kind of look around and look what most agencies are doing, and I just don't do those things. And he Kind of laughed. And, you know, the idea was there's a paradigm shift. I look at things differently than most agencies. So with that being said, I, I want to ask you and take us deeper, you know, think about, for agency leaders, what are some of the other areas that, that agencies begin to look for? I mean, provide some examples of these performance gaps and how do you measure this? Because, you know, part of this is there are things to look at, but like how do I measure it and what's the right amount? I know you're going to get to probably some of those things, but give me an overall level, Roger, of going deeper of performance stats and then these performance gaps.

Yeah, again, the performance stats are leading in nature because they're going to tell you what will happen even though they've told you what just happened from a behavior and strategy perspective, they're going to drive you to the numbers you have. So some simple ones that a lot of people measure, unfortunately not everybody, but certainly client retention. And it's client retention is the number of clients. Of course, with a lot of people still enjoying some hard market impact here, they're getting better retention on revenue overall, but maybe they're not measuring just number of clients that we retain. So retention's crucial. And if your retention is less than your overall book of business, less than 90%, then you better have a hard look at this. And certainly when we look at the best agencies, they're at 95, 96% retention. Big part of it is what percent of your book is personal lines, and how is that being impacted? Like in me living in Florida, okay, that personal lines book of business gets impacted, but we certainly want to look at retention. You mentioned closing ratio already, Brent. And granted that's lagging in nature, but the reality is we still have to look at it and say, okay, of the people that we're going out to work on, what is our closing ratio? And I would make a pretty good bet that the vast majority of the listeners don't really know it. And this is one of the things I know you've talked about, we certainly always talk about in our programs. When someone asks you a number about your business and your response is, oh, it's about right, then you don't really know it well enough because you're guessing. And because you're probably an optimistic person, you're guessing higher than what it may be, or you want it to sound better. But the closing ratio itself, if your closing ratio is less than 80%, okay, I'll accept 75 or less than 75. Then there's a problem because you're doing some practice quoting. You're doing some unpaid consulting. One of the agencies in Agency Exec this past week that we just completed with, they hung on, if you remember, at the end of the session. Hey, we've got a couple questions. They have a tremendous volume of personalized people that are calling in because they're doing a really good job on their outbound marketing. And, you know, people would criticize us, saying we don't like personalized. We love personalized. We love small commercial lines, we love benefits of life, but we just. We want to make sure everybody's profitable, right? So they were doing a lot of quoting. And I said, oh, we're in trouble here. I said, by the way, what's your closing ratio? And they said, rate at 80%. Great, keep doing it. But what if it would have been 20% and it could have been hysterical activity? So closing ratio, we want to know, by the way, if you're working on an account and you super qualify it because you believe the best day to lose a sale is the first day and you don't quote it, that doesn't kind of get your closing ratio, that's a win because you've saved capacity a number that's more important. And we've talked about this before, and I'm sure every listener hasn't listened to every episode nor remembered it all. But one of the most important is conversion rate. You have a first appointment with a future ideal client. What percent of them can convert to where we move to the second appointment. And many times we see agencies, they don't take that into consideration. We told the story a long time ago about that and won't bore people with it. But you're kind of the Cliff Notes version, working with an agency that had the number of first appointments they needed was over 90%. Their closing ratio was 84%, but their conversion ratio was only 32%. So first appointments moved to second was 32%. But if we got them to the second, we closed 84% of them. If we wouldn't have known those numbers, we'd have kept doing the track we had because we were fooling ourselves saying, yeah, but we've got an 84% closing ratio. We didn't come back to why weren't we converting a higher percent? And in that agency, the story itself, the message of differentiation had been diluted. Conversion ratio is crucial. One of my favorite, maybe I should say least favorite, is what percent of our producers hit their goals. What percent of the producers hit their goals. Working with a large group of agencies several years ago, and we've told this story before, but we had 19 agencies in the room. Average agency was $21 million of commission income. So it's good size. But in that group, only 43% of the producers that hit their goals. And they were all shocked. They had never looked at it before because overall they were still doing well because the, you know, the top producers were carrying everybody else. But we look at this and say, what percent of our producers met or exceeded their goals? Okay, coming back to some real basics. When you look at what we refer to as a producer improvement cycle, we would say, okay, when we look at conversion ratio, closing ratio, revenue per sale, well, the big thing in all of this is ultimately we've got to know what our quantity and quality of at bats are we getting the number of first appointments that our plan calls for. And by the way, if you don't know, as a leader, if you don't know how many first appointments your producers need, especially those that have not validated yet, then you're just kind of hoping that things go well and you have, you know, they need about two or they need five, whatever. But when we get down to this quantity and quality of at bats, are we getting appointments with future ideal clients we've identified? And if we don't, there's a big performance gap there. First appointments held. So a great example. Go ahead, Brent.

Well, I just want to elaborate on this quickly. I think I probably mentioned in previous podcasts, but like you, Roger, I don't expect everyone to listen to every podcast. Right. Well, if you do, great, we appreciate it. But no, I just to stop for a second on this because I think it is super important because I think oftentimes I even hear this from agency. Oh, first appointments. Yeah, we know they're important. Yeah, all that kind of stuff. But the truth of it is they don't really know. And you know, we look at things and just to blend these together quickly, and part of this is another term, but a producer's improvement cycle. If you look at conversion ratio and closing ratio and average revenue per relationship, right, which is the size of the account, you can pretty quickly back very quickly determine how many first appointments does it actually take. And it may sound so simple, but as you know, Rogers, we're recording this. It's already the end of January now. You know, we'll have agencies, it'll be March before you know it and it'll be June and they're already way behind. They don't even know why because they've never determined what it actually takes. And then you get to October, November, December, and everyone's in frantic mode. And you go back to one of the stats you already said is, did you hit your goal? No. Well, Maybe you were 50% on the amount of apartments it actually took. So this just comes back to the idea of these are leading indicators. I mean, as simple as that sounds, if you don't know this and you're having a conversation with a producer, for example, and there are X number of appointments behind, well, when's the best time to fix that? I'd rather fix it in February than I would in November. Because let's face what happens. Here's the reality you get to about what, October? Well, I guess it is what it is for this year, but next year, next year will be better. So anyway, I just had. I had to jump in on that. Roger. Hey there, agent leader Brent Kelly here want to take just a few seconds to remind you that now is the time to create your true, best version possible agency. If you go to sitkins.com bookacall sitkins.com book a call, we'll get to know more about your agency, conduct an agency assessment, and provide your agency with a customized plan to help you avoid some of the pitfalls, frustrations, challenges and roadblocks to get your agency to true ultimate freedom and become its best version possible. It all starts by going to sitkins.com bookacall.

It's a perfect example of a performance gap. So let's say we have a younger producer and we've done the goal setting and we know exactly how many first appointments he or she needs per month. And let's say the number's four because they're a younger producer. They've got a lot of activity, they've got a lot of time. They don't have a big book of business if they only have two in January, next month they don't need four, they need six. And this is a performance gap. Number of first appointments, if not as basic as we can get. And we look at it and all too often we see, and you alluded to it well, it was four this month, I didn't hit them. But next month I need four. What if I only have two again? Now I'm four behind. I need eight the next month to even get close or I need to make the really big sale and take care of it. And that's fine, but it's just so crucial that knowing these numbers and saying okay, we know the numbers are the end result of what? Well, of the behaviors and strategies. So if we look at this and say the producer didn't have enough appointments, why not? What's the gap? Well, have they identified what a future ideal client looks like for them at this point in their career? What have they done to get those names in any sort of a drip campaign to get the message in front of them if they have not yet been referred in? Are they smiling and dialing? Are they pumped picking up my phone and calling people? Okay, are they more importantly, getting those names into a reverse referral process whereby when we are dealing with our current clients, we've done the research to know that this future ideal client and this current client are connected some way somehow in today's world, it's easy to figure that out so that I can take that name during the visit with one of my current clients and say, by the way, I've heard list of a few people I'm thinking about calling. Who do you know? What can you tell me? All right. Now, we challenge people in this all the time. This sounds real basic and real simple. It is. But as I've heard you say, and you've heard me say it thousands of times, it's just not easy. It takes the discipline to put all of those behaviors in place. So if the behaviors are not in place, they'll show up as a performance gap. And that gives us a great example. Now, how do we analyze that to say, why didn't Johnny or Betsy or whoever hit their goals? And we can go back to the cause. If anybody's taking notes, they should take what is the cause of the performance gap. It's a behavior and strategy perspective. So I think it works really well.

Yeah. And I maybe highlight maybe a few more that jump to mine. But I want to add one more thing. It's hit me, as you were saying, I think this is an opportunity for agency leaders. And this is something I deal with in some of the coaching calls. And when you have some of this data, it makes your job as a leader easier in terms of coaching. And you know, you can. As you know, I love sports analogies. I use them all the time. But they're very easy to understand and they're true. It's like you're looking at again, I play basketball. It's like if there are no stats, I mean ask, do people take stats in basketball? They look at assists and turnovers and, you know, all these things. Of course they do. And as a coach, you start to go huh? There's some clues here that we need to fix or we need to maximize or whatever the case is. And it helps you individually work with people to help their improve their performance, thus the performance gap. And I have to tell, you may have heard this story, Roger, but I. It always reminds me, because if you. If you don't have data, what are you really discussing? Theory, ideas, error? My feelings versus your feelings. And I'll never forget this goes way back when I was in high school, and there was a guy on our team, and he thought that he was performing pretty darn well. Just ask him. I'm good. I'm great. I do everything right. And I'll never forget a practice he had. He made a turnover. And when I wasn't talking about coach, that's not my fault. And the coach says, hey, come over here. And I just was standing close enough where I could hear this. He said, hey, let me show you something. And he's pulled out the stat sheet, and he goes, do you see this number? It's like, yeah. He goes, that's a sis. You don't have very many. Do you see this number? Yeah. Because those are your turnovers. They're way too many. What do you think about this? And, you know, the point isn't to pick on this kid years ago or whatever. The point of it was is that without data or stats, it would be theory, ideas, my feelings versus your feelings. And so I just want to. I want to highlight, with my silly example there for agency leaders, that when you have some of these performance stats, you're able to identify. And here's the most important part. This isn't to beat someone up. This is to help them reach their true level of performance, which I think every agency leader hopefully wants. If not, you're probably not listening to this podcast. So, Roger, my rant's over. But I did want to ask you, what are some other potential performance gaps people should consider?

Well, before you go there, you may. You reminded me of something that I don't think I've ever shared with you. I was very fortunate to have a phenomenal football coach in high school. And then three of the four years I played in college, he was there, and then he got onto the pros, and he was coaching. Coach Dick Mosley loved the man. He was a mentor in my life for 50 years. He was coaching with Green Bay packers, and they were playing Tampa Bay. So a bunch of the guys that knew him, we went up to see the game in Tampa Bay, and the packers lost to Tampa Bay. So, and we didn't get, obviously didn't get to see him before the game. Afterwards, we were down by the locker room. He came out, some guy walked up and said, here's the stats, Mose. And he looked at us. The first thing he said is, you know what, we lost this game because of third down conversions. Boom. Just like that. He knew why they lost the game. Now he wasn't happy they lost, but he said, that's below our season average. Man, I'm gonna have to really analyze that.

Yeah.

And so this is what the great coaches do. They, they, they know there's a gap there. And I can't remember the percent, it doesn't matter. But he knew that that wasn't up to. And you just talked about this in your last podcast. I love it. It wasn't up to their standards. It wasn't up to their standards. So some, some of the other ones that just will drive this so much. This is going to sound very basic, but what percent of your clients are full time clients? What percent of your clients buy all of their products from you? Whether it's personal lines, small commercial, large commercial? Do you do the whole package? Do you have their benefits? Have you sold them life insurance? And this is one I always still hear. Well, it's about, look, in today's technology it's really easy to know that. But then more importantly, if there's a performance gap. But let's say our goal is 80% full time clients and we're at 62. What are we doing wrong? Well, number one, do we have a true process in place to round out the customers? Do we have a process to cross sell them? I'm going to get my benefits producer and my commercialized producer together. By the way, if we've got a life insurance gal, we're going to bring her in too. Okay, but if we don't know those numbers, we can't go back and say behaviorally and strategically, what are we not doing? One that we kind of mentioned already, but it's one that drives me crazy, is what percent of the A and B customers gave you a referral? Because we know strategically part of our business plan is that we want to replicate the top 20 or now 25% of our customers. What percent gave us a referral? Well, 12%. What percent should have if we're doing a good job of a client experience, having a process and holding people accountable? Well, 80%. 80%. And by the way, studies show your best customers want to give you a referral. If you Ask, but we're not even asking. We don't have that in there. So there's a tremendous performance gap on not having a process or if we have it, we haven't trained it, we haven't held people accountable. Things that a lot of people seem to have forgotten is because so many people, and believe me, we embrace technology to the nth degree, but sometimes I still think people have forgotten the personal part of it. So how many centers of influence does a producer have? How many events did the producer go to this quarter? Whatever. I shared this with you before that. One of the best agencies we ever worked with, and they were up about 50 million of commission when they sold. They were here in southwest Florida. I remember working with the sales leadership team there that I'd like to take credit for this. It's not me. They had already done this. Every producer had to have two events per week they were at. Whether it was their service club, whether it was a chamber of commerce meeting, whether it was an association meeting. Okay, breakfast club. I don't care what it was. But they had to do that. And believe me, the producers did that there. Even though it's an area that we don't personally work in a lot other than we embrace it. Just the technology itself, what percent of the system is being used? So if I'm a chief operating officer in a company and I'm concerned about capacity, which we all should be. Agency capacity, both sales and service capacity. And I realize that our service team, when we look at revenue per CSR or whatever title they're using now, okay, I look at that and it's too low. And then I realize, well, yeah, but they're always backlog. There's always a problem. They're not using the technology. Right. And we've talked about this before. We ask Angela Adams all the time. She says they work with hundreds of agencies. Average agency nationwide uses about 50% of the technology they've got available. And so they're handling everything one, two, or three times versus one and done. You get paid once, handled at once. One of the most important ones from a pure sales perspective, and let's face it, sales is going to drive everything. Is our producers, are they in the green zone? 80% of the time. And we've talked about this a lot here, but of everything I've ever done, maybe it's the stickiest is there's a red zone and a green zone. Red zone is when the producers are in the service trap. Green zone is when they're doing only four things and it's their job. They make sales, they manage relationships, they continue relationships, not renew policies. And they build their pipeline. Well, our goal is the producers are in the green zone 80% of the time. Performance gap. What percent of the time were you in the green zone last week or this last quarter? Last month? And the producer says, well, and they look at their, they look at it and they go, I'm being honest with myself. My response would be, I would hope so. If I'm being honest with myself 40% of my time.

Yeah.

So what were you doing the other percent of the time? And we find that you talk about this too. When there's a hole in their calendar, they think it's a blessing. When it's a curse because now they go, jump in the red zone.

Yeah, Rod, jump in. Just for a second, something. I was smiling because it hit me. I don't know if you'll find this funny, but I just, it hit me as you were saying this because you talked about closing ratio earlier. Here's one stat I can, I can predict for all agencies when your producers are in the red zone, their closing percentage is zero. So just, just, just, just keep that in mind. All right, continue.

No, I mean, it's so perfect. But we look at this and again, Brandon's. It's simple. Keep it simple. Kiss. Right. It's just not easy. It takes discipline. It takes somebody driving this saying, hey, look, our goal and, and we have coined this the world's greatest producer recruitment program. Get your current producers in the green zone 80% of the time. There you go. Okay, what percentage? It's something that's talked about in every sales meeting. Another one that's crucial. And you talked about this in your last podcast also, what percent of the high performance team meetings are being held? Sales and service, Whether it's a one on one relationship or it's where we've got a producer, a couple producers sharing, I don't care what it is, but I want them to have that meeting every Monday morning driven by an agenda that the service leader has put together the previous week. And what percent of those meetings are held and how good of a job are we doing? Debriefing last week, pre briefing. The next two, three, four weeks, including what percent of the time are we looking at? The relationship management calendar. So all of these things are performance gaps. If I'm not holding those meetings, I'm going to guarantee you something's falling through the cracks. If I haven't done the work to know how to create a full time Client and then trained people and then held them accountable. They're going to have a huge performance gap. If we're not using our technology, we're going to have a performance gap. So we look at this all the time and say, you know, it comes down to saying to ourselves, what are our standards? And again, you just mentioned it, and I love the quote in there, that only 8% of people hit their goals, but 100% of people meet their standards. In our business, we can meet lower standards but still do pretty well, but it won't get us to a best version possible organization. So I look at this and say, okay, in all of these areas that are behavioral and strategic in nature, what percent of the time are they happening? Another one that we preach low risk practice. What percent of the A and B proposals, presentations you went out on in the last month, did you rehearse ahead of time? I didn't. What? How about this one, Brett? Maybe this is a new one. We should measure what's the closing ratio when a producer has done a rehearsal at least 2 times or 3 times versus a closing ratio when they don't rehearse.

That would be interesting. Yeah, it'd be interesting there.

All of these gaps are things that ultimately affect what the results. So if my behaviors and strategies are not in place, I have underperformed on that strategy. When I underperform on a strategy, it's guaranteed that'll have a negative impact on my actual results. So now I go back to, well, we didn't have the growth we wanted, okay? Our operating profit was not as high because we didn't maximize both sales and service capacity. And if our salespeople can't handle more and our service people can't handle more, capacity drops. Thus, guess what, our expense ratio goes up and we're in trouble. And ultimately all of that drives what's the performance gap on increased value of the phone agent. Principals care about valuation because everybody eventually leaves their business at some point. And whether it's internal or external, you should be care about valuation tremendously. So we look at this and say, hey, you know what? We only had an operating profit of 17%. What should it be? It should be a minimum of 30. Okay? If we don't have that, that's numeric. That's a number that's lagging. Let's go back. Why didn't we have it? Where do we. This is a question that I would challenge the listeners to have in their leadership team all the time. Where do we have a performance gap in our organization? Today. And what do we have to do to make. Get movement, positive movement on it? And you won't get it overnight. You won't go from a 24% closing ratio to an 82% closing ratio overnight. But you can make progress on it if you get focused on it and hold people accountable.

Yeah, well, it leads to really kind of. I want to wrap this up because I'll speak a bit on behalf, I'm sure, of listeners, because you went through a whole bunch of stuff, and that's really good stuff. And there's part of. It's like, oh, my gosh, Roger. Like that. Okay, yeah, Roger, I'm with you. I get you. But, like, you know, I. I run an agency here. I don't have time to look at 47 performance stats, and I think it's a very fair thing. But it also hit me, too, and you already kind of teed this up, so I want you to take it deeper. Another silly analogy. In my mind. It's like, you know, you're driving on this long trip in your car and there's smoke coming out of the engine, and instead of going, okay, let's pull over and address this. It'll be fine. It'll eventually go away. Right. And of course, which means you're broke down on the road somewhere, and now you're really stuck. So here's how I want to phrase this. How do agencies begin to pinpoint. Right. Their specific performance gaps? By the way, teaser and a promo. If you go to sitkins.com podcast and you'll see again, we'll have a number of downloads. One of the things that Rogers created for you is a performance gap analyzer, which is going to help you in this to really kind of see where you're at. And, you know, Roger, like any of our tools, it provides you a really good visual perspective to go, oh, now I see this clear. So now that I teed that up again, what are some things an agency they can do to filter, Roger? How can they make this more tangible, to know what's really important?

Nobody we know looks at all of these. But you've got to figure out for your own agency what are first looking? What are the outcome stats? What do you want as far as gross revenue, organic growth rate, and operating profit? That's the vision. That's the journey we're going on. That's our desired destination. Okay, then we've got to go back down. You don't have to. I strongly suggest you do look at some of those things we've talked about here. And for some of the listeners, it could be as simple as what percent of our clients gave us a referral? What percent of our A and B clients gave us a referral? What can we do about that? What percent of the time are our producers in the green zone? What can we do about that? Okay, so I would say pick no more than three to focus on because everybody's going to be a little different. They'll have the big impact. For some agencies, Brent, it could be a technology issue. You know, our team's not using it. We see it all the time on the CRMs with sales, you know, they're just not being followed properly. Find out the things. Talk with your leadership team. Talk with your team. What are the two or three things we could track that would have the greatest impact for the organization itself? And if that's all we did, and we talk about the ultimate growth strategy, round out, retain and replicate your A's and B's and some of our very best private clients, that's where they focus to all their efforts. The number one thing we're going to focus on as an organization, we're going to take great care of our clients. We're going to clients, we're going to round out, retain and replicate the A's and B's and the ones that are doing that, as you know, the producers that are doing it, because not everybody's going to do it, it's not a perfect world. The producers that are doing it are averaging over a 20% growth rate. And all they say, I said, what do you do? We round out, retain and replicate A's and B's. Now what percent of the time are they in the green zone? How many high performance team meetings are held? Are we using relationship management calendar? Those are all subsets. But pick again, two or three that you say, you know what, that's the most important thing for our organization. And then the key is get everybody to buy in and get everybody reminded on a regular basis. This is what we're focused on. Did we do, did we hit this number this week, this month, this quarter? So that's a starting point. Keep it simple.

Yeah, it's super important. And great feedback there. And you know something, Rod, you talk about all the time we talk about is, you know, replicate victories and learn from your losses. And I would just add on to this. I think part of that, you know, again, outside of, hey, get that, you know, go get that free tool and resource and take a look at, it'll help you get clarity, which I want to get to in a minute. But, you know, part of it too is, hey, look, last year when you had, when you had some big wins, why? And are you doing enough of that? And when you had some big misses, why? And I think, you know, again, part of that success leaves clues, but we can learn from our failures as well. And I know my conversations with agencies, Roger, I know you're the same way. Is that all of a sudden you talk through something, they go, oh, my gosh, this was the thing that when we're writing these accounts, we were doing, but it hasn't been consistent. We didn't have a standard or we weren't measuring that, so we let it get away and we lost sight of it. And, you know, I want to get some final thoughts from you as you wrap this up. But you already said we say it all the time. Beliefs, behaviors, results. You think about the outcome stats. Again, those are the results and that is the destination. Hey, I want to achieve X. Great, Wonderful. But what are those behaviors to be consistent around as we talk about? And here's the kicker and why this analysis and this conversation is so important is to get clarity. You know, one of the things I see with leaders, if you don't have clarity on what's important, it's really hard to be consistent because your mind goes, maybe it's not a big deal or maybe it's not important, or maybe I'm doing the wrong thing. And that's where you get to frustration. And emotionally you feel like you're spinning in circles. So those are my final words. Roger, any final words from you as you wrap up this podcast? And again, thanks for being on. Great, great conversation.

I love doing these. As you know, have a conversation. And the goal, of course, is the impact agencies overall. What's most important is such an interesting question. And think about this. All the agency leaders listening to this, go to your team members and ask them what's most important here. Go to your partners, ask them what's most important. Okay? Because if there's not clarity about that, then we're all doing stuff and we're busy and we fall into something that we've talked about occasionally, probably not as much as we should stress it with people. There's a good results trap out there, okay. And you don't have to do much of this. You're going to get good results, but you'll never increase the capacity of the agency sales and service and get your values up where they need to be. And if this is about valuation, this is about having a great team that's cohesive and consistent, then everybody better know what's most important. What's most important, and when you can answer that. And then you ask people literally every week, what's most important, guess what that becomes? What's important, what's, what's normal in your agency. And you get an organization that's all going in the same direction. That's a lot of fun.

Yeah. Amen. Well, Roger, I think that because this conversation, I may just invite you back again for some other conversation. So, you know, I'd love to do it. No, in all seriousness, thanks so much. It's been, it's great and I love having you on here and sharing your wisdom and your experience in this. And listen, the bottom line of this, and I know Roger, you feel the exact same way. Why we do what we do as an organization, why we have this podcast, is absolutely to provide value, to help you achieve the things that you want to achieve and to be a partner and be an advocate. Because running an agency, leading an agency we know is not easy. A lot of things we talked about, we might even say simple but not always easy. Want to help you in that way. So again, there's a number of resources and tools. I know there's some cut ins in this podcast about how you can take some next steps. But in all seriousness of this, if you're looking to really get a grasp on your agency, you're looking to say, hey, I know we're doing pretty good, but I don't want any good results. Trap get in the way, reach out and start the conversation. If it makes sense, we will absolutely run an assessment, a full assessment on your agency and provide you a plan to give you some clarity on how to win. So again, we don't take that for granted. We have a mission and a passion to help independent insurance agencies succeed. We love doing this and we'd also love your feedback. If this podcast has added value to you, leave a review. I know every podcast person says that, but I mean it helps. It helps us get the word out. It helps us impact more agencies. So Roger, thanks again for being part of this and with that, I wish you all the best and your success. Thanks for listening. The Agent Leader podcast is brought to you by the fine folks, the Rough Notes Company. They are publishers of the insurance industry's leading magazine and technical insurance content. Rough Notes magazine profile successful agencies plus keen insights from respected experts on a host of must no topics. Rough Notes Advantage plus provides the tools to help your agency grow, providing authoritative information on complex coverage issues. Visit them and learn more@roughnotes.com wait, you're still here? Hey Agent Leader Podcast listeners, Brent Kelly Again, I want to first of all, thank you for listening to the Agent Leader Podcast and your continued support. If you would like to see have more content come your way, please help us by sharing the podcast, subscribing to the podcast, telling people about the podcast, and if you, as an Agent Leader, are truly ready to take that next step in your agency, you're committed and want to be that best version possible. Agency. Don't wait. Go to sitkins.com bookacall sitkins.com bookacall we want to provide the blueprint for your agency to help you create more impact with less effort. And it all starts by going to sipkins.com bookacall all right, now you can actually go. Thanks.