High Performance Teams

Welcome, welcome and thanks for listening to the Agent Leader podcast. My name is Brent Kelly, your host. It is an honor, my pleasure that you are with me here today. And as always, the Agent Leader Podcast the focus, the goal is to help your agency gain clarity, to build consistency and make a commitment to become your best version possible. I want to introduce a series that I'll be sharing over the upcoming weeks. In this podcast I may have a few interruptions, interruptions with guests, but I'll be going through a seven part series that are based around the seven core strategies of Sitkins, the Sitkins Group. If people say what do you really do? What's it all about? These seven podcasts that I'm going to be doing are going to give you a very holistic view of the Sitkin 7 core strategies. Also want to make sure that I invite you to our upcoming event, the Profit Net that stands for professional fitness Networking. It's at Cape Coral, Florida, March 11th through through the 13th. And this is our absolute premier event. In fact, if you are a non member of Sitkins Network, I know many of you listening to this are not members of our private client group, the Sitkins Network. This is really your one opportunity to come to an event with other agency leaders that are part of our network. Here's some of their stories to network. We have some really important outside speakers that we're bringing in, but the entire focus of this event is that we share an idea, an important idea. Then we roundtable and we specifically look at how we're going to execute the idea. So it's a true workshop networking event, not just hey, here's some cool stuff and go have some fun. We have a lot of fun. Definitely we have some fun. But this is a premier event and if you want to check it out, go to sitkins.com profitnet so sitkins.com, profitnet, we would love to have you as a guest at this event, a really exciting event. So with that being said, one of the things that we're going to talk about at the event is kind of going through our professional fitness review or checkup. And so I want to highlight of our seven strategies. I want to start with our first strategy on this podcast which is all about high performance teams. High performance teams. And really as an agency, I mean all of our strategies are important and they're all connected. In fact, you really can't have, you can't execute one really well if the other ones aren't working at all. But I would say foundationally, if you don't have a high performance team in your agency. And I'll talk about this on today's podcast. If you don't really understand and execute a high performance team, the rest of the things that I'm going to talk about, which is around pipeline development and talking about relationship management and having a continuation process and the selling system in your agency and points of differentiation and future ideal clients, none of those can happen at the level it needs to or should if we don't establish what a high performance team is and begin to move to doing a better job of executing a high performance team in our agency. So first of all, what is a high performance team? Well, if you haven't heard me talk about this before, it's really pretty simple. One of the things that we see with agencies, and this is true, and really, I hate to say the word most agencies, but it is, is that our sales and our service team don't communicate very well together. And I think many of you listening right now may be nodding, do we have a really good communication level? Sales and service. Now there are some, and there are some agencies and producers and service teams that work really well together and I applaud you for doing that. But agency wide, this is probably one of the biggest struggles we see with agencies and why they're not getting the results that they want is that, you know, sales is equipped to do sales stuff. In fact, if you are a producer, the definition of a producer is one who produces, right? So if we're going to be one who produces, we need to do producer type of stuff, which is sales activities, pipeline, relationship management, proactive continuation with our clients. To be a true risk advisor, we have to be thinking and acting proactively, outwardly in the marketplace. The service team, on the other hand, is doing reactive work which is critically important to the agency. If we have service needs and clients all have service needs, we have to make sure that our service team is equipped and empowered and ready to handle those incoming service needs. But in many agencies, these lines get blurred. It's not that one is necessarily more important than the other, it's that we have specific duties and responsibilities and roles to do. To do roi. And you think roi, what does that mean? Return on investment. Well, sure, that's one acronym, but what about roi? In this capacity, your agents should be focused on retaining and obtaining ideal clients. It really doesn't get much simpler than that. Right? Retaining and obtaining ideal clients. Well, how do we do that? Well, retaining for the most part right now, this is an all around process from Beginning to end. But the reactive side of retaining is the service side. Obtaining clients is the production side, the sales side. So retaining, obtaining ideal clients is really what it's all about. So how do we do this more effectively for an agency? What is it really all about? Because I think the idea perspective, if I went to most agencies, I'm sure if I was talking to you, whatever your role is as an insurance professional or agency leader, and I said it's really important that we get people on the right seats on the bus, right? As Jim Collins would say, in good to great or the right roles and responsibilities, it's really important that our sales team sells and our service team does great service work. And everyone would say, well, of course, but what does that really look like? And what are some things that you can do as an agency to begin to implement some of those? And so to me, I'm an alliteration guy. I like to keep things simple. So there was three E's. So if you're taking notes, if you're driving in a car, by the way, don't take notes, but listen. But there's three E's, the letter E that I think will help you remember basic ideas around a fully functioning high performance team. And the first E is the word educate. Educate. Now, there are a couple different concepts of educate that I want to share. One is internal and one is external. They're both important. And we dive really deep with our private client group in this. We have some forms and roles and responsibilities and we can help customize that and some agendas and things like that. But the education part should be internal and external. So let's start with internal internally. Education simply means having a conversation internally about what we're learning and working on with our clients, what we have upcoming with our clients, what are some status on things? What do you need from me? What do I need from you? How can I help you do better at your role? How can you help me be better at my role? It's having a conversation, really. Education could also be titled communication, right? These come together, but to educate each other. Now let me just share a quick analogy. When it comes to high performance teams and having meetings every single week, which I'm going to talk about more, you know, my wife and I, we've been married for 16 years and I am nowhere perfect at this. But one thing that I've learned the hard way, many weeks, certainly with my travel schedule, and we have five kiddos and we have kids that go from high school to a toddler. So it's true. Our household is crazy. It's crazy. And instinctually, I am a free spirit. I just like to do things as they happen. As things come to me, I'm a quick start, and let's do this and that. What I've learned is I have to have guardrails. And I think this is certainly true with many producers out there because we're kind of aligned similarly. And I spent 15 years as an insurance producer, but if my wife and I, if we don't have some type of proactive educational meeting, whether it's Saturday, Sunday, or before the week starts, right. And we actually have this schedule in our calendar, it doesn't always work at the perfect time, but we talk about the upcoming week. What are some of the big rocks that we have? Where am I going to be? Where are you going to be? Where are the kids going to be? What do you need from me? What do I need from you? And we plan the week out proactively. If we don't do that, it is absolute chaos during the week. And it seems like common sense, right? Oh, I didn't know you were doing that. And then we get frustrated and we don't. We're not as productive and there's anger and all those kind of things that happen. Right. The same thing holds true with an insurance agency. If sales and service are really going to work together harmoniously. Not perfectly, but harmoniously. We're aligned on the same goals even though we have different responsibilities. We need to have a educational conversation. Here are some things that I'm going to be doing this week. Here's some things I need from you. Are there any red flags that we need to be aware of that I wasn't sure of? And this works both ways. We call this a high performance team meeting, and you as an agency should be having a weekly high performance team meeting. Sales and service. Now, I'll talk about executing this in a minute, but the role, the idea behind is simply we must communicate better as sales and service. And you go, oh, dub. Or. And I know that. But as a question, I always ask anybody, whether it's a live training or coaching call, it's not about. Do you know that my question to you is, how well are you doing that? How well is your agency team doing that? Because not only does it separate in terms of alignment and trust and credibility, but affects our clients if we're not communicating internally. I've had situations where producers come to me and said, man, you know, I talked to my service team finally, and they were like, oh, I knew that client was gonna leave. What? Why didn't you tell me? Well, you never asked. Right. Because we have such a low level of communication. So education internally is the first part. The second part is external communication. Now, this is mainly the role of the sales team or salesperson, the producer. But it goes both ways. But let me just share a quick idea. If I go out as a producer, as a salesperson, advisor, whatever role title you give to the person who is producing, and I'm talking with a future ideal client, and I never mention my team, what they do, why they do it, why they're important, how this will help serve them in any part of the conversation. Why would I ever expect that they would contact, call anybody besides me? Well, we shouldn't. And then we get frustrated. In fact, there's an acronym we love to share at Sitkins called Saku S A K U. It stands for source of all knowledge in the universe. I've shared this before, but producers for the most part are very just inclined to say, if you need anything, and I mean anything, you call me because I'm Saku. Now, maybe we don't say that out loud, obviously, but internally we're thinking myself, if they have an issue, if they have a problem, you call me, I'll solve it. I want to make sure I'm your guy or I'm your gal. Yet the high performance team and the agencies that function really well from the beginning talk and describe about their team and why their team is important and say things like, listen, just like we're having a conversation right now. I have clients that are calling them a service needs. That's why I've got a great team. So let me make sure I introduce you to my team and we talk about them and talk about them again and more and what they do. So it's education internally and externally to our clients. If we're going to do a high performance team, we can't expect our clients just to figure it out on their own. We've got to educate. Secondly, my second E is empower Empowerment. Empower really means to give authority to. And again, for the most part, I'm talking about producers empowering their service team. It can go the other way, but typically it's the producer not empowering their service team. Well, what do I mean by this? It kind of goes along with the first E educate that I described. These all go together. But the idea is this is that if there is a question or an issue that comes from an insurance client, there are many times where the producer may know the answer, but the service team isn't sure. And so what happens? The producer just says, hey, give it to me, I got it. And I make the call or I have the conversation and we move on. It's over. My question to you as a producer, if you are a producer, is how did your server, what did your servers team learn? And how could they learn? Because if we never sit down and talk about empowering our team, here's a situation we're facing. Let's walk through this together. What this means or what this looks like. How would you ever expect your service team to get better or understand certain areas if you don't coach them or work with them? And by the way, there are certain areas. I've seen this many times as well. The service team knows all kinds of stuff, right? And not sharing back with the producer. But typically what we see is the producer isn't spending the time or energy. Because guess what? It takes time and energy. If I'm going to, it's no different. I mean, I use parenting and being a husband and a lot of my analogies, but it's so true. If my older daughters or any one of my kids doesn't know how to do something and I just simply take it from them all the time and do it, they will never learn and grow. It seems pretty common sense, but we often miss it. Well, I got it. I'll take it. I'll just do it. I mean, I've done that. Yet when we say, hey, listen, here's why I'm doing this, let me explain this, let me show you how to do it, or let me, you know, let's dive deeper in this area, whatever it may be, that's empowering your team. And by the way, there are so many service teams that are underutilized, really smart, intelligent, capable people who are working at a fraction of their capability because they never get the chance to shine. And by the way, I can tell you with most service people, they want to shine, they want to do deeper type of work, right? But if I don't have the authority or capability, my team has never empowered me. Well, then I'm scared to do anything. And I don't know this yet, and whatever the case may be. So educate, empower. Which leads to my last e. This is pretty straightforward. Execute, execute. We could talk about ideas. This is true of any strategy. But certainly high performance teams. We could talk about this till we're blue in the face. Oh, yeah, I know we got to do better in sales and Service, communication. And I know we should have more meetings together and actually have proactive, intelligent meetings. Not just a meeting to have a meeting, but a true proactive, pre planned meeting, but got busy this week. This week was different. She was on vacation, I was on vacation, he was here. I had an appointment here. I had this. My execution is pretty simple. It should be mandatory in your agency that you have a high performance team meeting each and every week. Now let me preface this. Are there exceptions? Of course, duh. We know that, right? There are going to be vacations, there are going to be emergencies, there are going to be things that happen. But if we don't make this a priority, what becomes a good idea will become a lost idea very quickly. Yeah, we had one and then we got busy next week and the week after. We forgot. And so just forget. It's not working anyway. And that's the problem with many agencies. We don't execute because we don't actually commit to that idea. It's a good idea, but we never actually execute. In fact, at Profit Net, the event I mentioned again, March 11th through 13th, love to have you there. I am doing a keynote on execute. It's actually called Execute Turning ideas into Execution because it's one of the most missed things. How do we do that? Now part of that is we have too many ideas, right? We try to execute too many things. But the other part is that we don't have any culture of accountability. There's no follow through. If there is no, hey, we're going to start doing high performance team meetings, okay? And then nothing ever gets followed up on it, why would they continue? And they won't. So to execute, you must make a commitment. To do this, it must be a priority. It must be communicated again and again and again and again and again. How did that go? What did you learn? What's happening? Because I will tell you, your team will resist this. Like any change. Now, we've had agencies that embrace it pretty quickly and they go, man, this is great. I fight, feel so much better. I feel so much closer. I feel like I know what's going on. I love having this communication. And there are others that go, I gotta have this meeting again. Well, you're gonna learn. It's a process. It's like anything else. It's gonna be harder at the beginning, but when you start to do it, you go, man, this was the best thing we've ever done. Cause we're on the same page. We're aligned, we're understanding our different roles and responsibilities and we are getting results back to roi retain and obtain ideal clients. So this is the strategy number one. And I can tell you it may seem crazy. We have agencies, we have been working on this. Again, it's a never ending process, right? It's continuous and never ending development. But agencies have spent really a year just trying to get this stuff right because they know how important it is and we start to get amazing results when we begin to implement it. High performance Team strategy number one. I want to thank you for being a listener of the AgentLeader podcast. Thanks for your time today and if this podcast or any of the podcasts previously have added value to your agency to your life, love for you to give me a review and rating of your podcast listener device of choice. And also again, one last time, I'm going to continue to preach this because I can tell you our profit net event March 11th through 13th we've had agencies who have come to us who are our private client members who are already paying and already investing a lot to be part of our program and saying these two days was worth every penny of my membership. I don't want you to miss that opportunity because I can tell you agencies have changed by getting some of the ideas and taking them back and starting to move forward. And it's not just about the ideas I shared, it's about the execution of the ideas. And we're going to spend a lot of time not just with here's some things that you can go back and take your notebook and stick in a drawer. It's what specifically are you going to do as an agency moving forward? And by the way, it may just be one thing, but you got to find it. As it said in what was the movie City Slickers, it Curly said to find that one thing. We're going to help you find that one thing. Or maybe it's two things in your agency to begin to implement and to execute. Wish you all the best in your success. Talk soon.