Two Vital Questions for Sales Leaders

Foreign welcome to the Agent Leader Podcast. My name is Brent Kelly. I am your host. I am so excited that you're with me today. And if you are a sales leader, if you are a leader of salespeople, producers, this podcast specifically is for you. Now, if you're a producer or an agency leader in a different role or different capacity in the agency, don't turn this off, at least not yet, at some point. Hey, if you want to turn it off, you have every right to do that. But I'll tell you that what I'm going to be talking about today in particular for sales leaders are the two vital questions that every sales leader should be able to ask and of course, get answers to. And if you're an agency leader, obviously this is important because, you know, sales culture and agency is always important. And I think it's important for you to hear this message. If you're a producer, well, guess what? These are questions that you could be asking and should be asking yourself and having your own personal accountability in becoming a great sales professional, a great producer. So this really applies to many of the roles that are sales focused in the agency. But I am going to be directing this particular to the sales leader. Now, one thing that you know, I've mentioned this before in the podcast, the role of a sales leader, whether that is your defined role, your main or only responsibility, I know there's some sales leaders that that's their main job. And some larger agencies, we've got some agencies that are player coaches, meaning you've got your own book of business and you built a nice book of business, and now you're doing sales leadership as well. We have some agencies that they don't even quite know who the sales leader is, but someone's sort of taken that role on because, well, someone needed to. I think this will be very helpful for you. So again, if you're a sales leader, this podcast is for you. And before I get into these two questions and some conversation around these two questions, I want to. First of all, thank you. If you're listening to me now, thank you. I appreciate it. Whether you're a new listener, whether you're a longtime listener, this podcast and why we do this podcast is all about you. It's the Agent Leader Podcast. And the purpose is always to help you gain clarity, to build consistency, and to make a commitment to become that best version possible. That is our theme, that is our focus. What is the best version possible of you? What is the best version possible of your agency? And if you are an agency Leader a leadership team. And you want to learn more about what we do at the Sidkins Network, how we work with private clients, how we structure our process, which is the best version possible. Experience. Go to sitkins.comexperience sitkins.com experience and love to have an initial conversation, just a short phone call to learn more about your agency and see if there's a fit for us to have future conversations moving forward. Now with that being said, let's get to the stuff, let's get to the questions. Hopefully you've got a pen and paper ready. Unless you're driving, please don't do that. But these are questions that are so important for agency leaders, for sales leaders in particular. And you know, something that I believe to my, you know, to the, my core being is that your number one focus and role as a sales leader, your number one goal is to develop your salespeople, to develop your producers. And whether you've got one producer or if you're, again, if you're a producer, how do I develop myself? Whether you've got a team of 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 producers. I was just recently with a great private client member that we work with. I was out of their location. We did a sale at a sales Summit and about 40 or 50 of their producers, they're all in one room and it's just, you know, and sales leaders as well and just some of the conversations that we have and the importance of that can't be understated. And listen, you've got to be a sales culture and part of this is just true belief in what it is you do, the impact you have in your community, the impact that you have with your clients, the impact that you certainly have with your team responsibility. You know, we can't, we can't pay more money to anybody if we're not growing as an agency. And so it's fun to get out there and have some of these important conversations. And as I was thinking and preparing for this and some of the teaching and training and coaching that we do around sales leadership is really based around these two vital questions. And the first question that I'm going to share with you today really can't be asked without some work up front. And I want to make sure that's known. Right. This is a question that you can ask. This question, but more importantly than this question, I guess, I mean questions are always important, is some of the pre work and conversations and diligence that agencies and sales leaders do prior to this question. Because you really can't ask this Question with effectiveness as you'll see in a second, or here in a second, if you haven't done some of the pre work and here's the question, I'll start with this. The question is this. I thought we agreed on blank, blank, blank. I thought we agreed that blank, blank, blank was important. I thought we agreed upon blank, blank, blank, this process. Right? And of course, blank, blank, blank means what that agreement was up front. And one of the things and why I want to share this is that it's really hard for you as a sales leader to lead or manage air. Let me say this again, this may be something you may want to write down and if you're a sales leader, you could say, you could personalize this. It's really hard for me as a sales leader to manage air. Now, what do I mean by that? If nothing has been defined, if nothing has been documented upfront and we don't understand what we are going to agree upon to deliver both internally and externally as a sales professional, how do you lead or manage that? Is it just. I thought, I hoped, I think you said in the past, this is what happened in the past, this is what happened to me. Right. Obviously there's no clarity. And I, you know, I mentioned the purpose of this podcast. Clarity, consistency, commitment. This is true in all phases that we work with agencies. Clarity, what are the expectations? Consistency, what are the few things that we've agreed to, you're going to do really, really well. Commitment, what do we do if we don't do it? I mean, those are the central themes around everything that we teach and train around at Sitkins. And they're pretty basic. But I will tell you, in many agencies, they're not clear, they're not understood, they're missed. So this question is this, Hey, I thought we agreed on blank, blank, blank. And so let's go back to this because some of you going, well, how do I ask that question if I don't have anything that's, that's said before? This one again, you can't. So the three things that I want to share with you, and I've used these words before in different podcasts, but the three words, and I said them earlier, you maybe caught, maybe you caught them, maybe you didn't define document deliver. One of the things that we have as a resource and our private client members use, and this takes some time. This is a process, this is some work. There is no doubt. But as I say all the time, if you do some of the hard work up front, it makes your life Way easier long term. If you don't do any of the hard work, you do the easy stuff, everything's harder at the end. So there is some hard work in this, but really important, impactful work. And one of the things that we train and teach around is a producer performance agreement. Does your agency, do you as a sales leader have some form of agreement? And this doesn't have to be a contractual agreement, right? This isn't part of an employee agreement. This is a producer performance agreement. Hey, listen, listen. What are some of the expectations that are important for us to be successful together? I mean, that's. Listen, a producer has a lot of personal freedom. We understand that. But they. They're ME Inc. And if you're a producer listening, you're ME Inc. The company you own, which is your book of business, so to speak, within the WE Inc. Which is the agency. Right? ME Inc. Is part of WE Inc. But you have to think and act like an entrepreneur. You have to think and act like a business owner. But that ME Inc. Is part of WE Inc. So we're having these initial conversations. How do know if ME Inc. Wins? How do we know if ME Inc. Is successful? What are the few things that ME Inc. Must do, the producer must do to be successful, to. To earn results, to know that they're on the right path? And what are some of the things. What are the discussions we're going to have and next steps we're going to. We're going to need to do if that doesn't happen. So a producer performance agreement. And we have a template that we use with agencies to help them do this. You know, first of all, talks about some of the annual planning and goals. That's where many sales leaders do a decent job. But that's where it stops, right? What are your goals? What are your numbers you want to hit next year? And we can talk about revenue or growth or retention or some of the closing ratio, right? Whatever numbers you want to use, it is important to have stretch but realistic goals that we're just. We're not making up numbers, but based on past experience, based on current performance, based on some of the things that we're working through. What are those goals and objectives for. For the next year? Right. Or you could use whatever defined point of time that you want. But what are those. I think we do need to know what those numbers need to be. But there's much more than that, right? The next part of this is, okay, what are some of the key strategies, behaviors and habits that must take place for you to hit those metrics. And by the way, a great producer performance agreement, however you design it is done together. Now you should have a template. You know, our agencies have templates and things you use. You want to lead that, right? It's not like, well, yeah, whatever you think, I don't mean it that way, but I do believe there's some questions that we ask. Because listen, if you say it to that person, listening to that producer, if you say here's exactly all the things you're going to do, no matter what, it might register, it might be true for them. But if you ask questions around it and you design it together, it is definitely true. Because not only are you saying that they are too. So certainly you can lead this conversation, right? There's certain expectations, there's certain non optionals that you're going to have hopefully in your agency and we talk about those. But we want the producer to truly buy in by asking questions, by having conversations, you know, how important you think that's going to be? Well, that's going to be really, really important. We agree, we've seen that with our producers, it's been very, very important. This is something that's going to be critical. Your success and our expectations. You do it. Guess what? This isn't to micromanage the producer. It's not at all. It's to help them, set them up on a path of success that they can win, that they can make more money, that they can earn more revenue, they can have more freedom. Right? This conversation, yes, we want to help us as a sales leader. But you know, as Zig Ziglar says, if you help enough people get what they want, you can have everything that you want. So this is really designed with the conversation in mind of, hey, I really want to help you. My goal is to help develop you as a sales professional to achieve all the things you want, achieve how the success you have. And part of that is defining the key things that we need to do and that you need to do every single week to hold you accountable to get those things you want to get done right. And everybody's going to be looking at this differently. But you as a sales leader need to drive that conversation and ask some great questions. So that starts with having some form of agreement. Now you can keep this really simple at the beginning that we've talked about some of the goals, we've talked about some of the key specific behaviors and habits that the producer needs to do. We give a number of ideas for agencies, you know, they can look at and they don't have to use them all. In fact, they shouldn't. But find the key areas and then part of it becomes like, well, what happens if you don't like these things, you know, are important to you? They're important to us. What, what are some of the next steps that would happen if you don't achieve this? Now, by the way, you need to talk to your attorneys and your human resource people, right? Of all these kind of things, every state's different and all the legalities. I get that. The point of it is there needs to be some discussion of consequence. And it doesn't mean, hey, if you don't do this, we're going to fire you. Right? What it means is there's going to be some important conversations to be had, right? Or there's going to be some type of, I hate to use this word, but some type of probation or we're going to do a deeper review on things, but we're going to talk about this up front. This isn't a surprise. And by the way, if it's a brand new young producer, it's going to look different than maybe someone who's been in the game for 10, 15, 20 years or whatever, right? There's going to be some differences. You got to have some flexibility here. But the biggest thing that I want you to hear me say is right now, could you ask the question to your production team, your producer, or could you ask this to yourself as a producer? Hey, I thought we agreed. I thought I agreed that I was going to do this.