Who's Your Insurance Agency's Offensive Coordinator?

So who is your agency's offensive coordinator? You know, the one that designs the game plan and prepares the team and holds the team accountable. On today's Agent Leader Podcast, I can tell you the answer for most agencies is I have no earthly idea. The Agent Leader Podcast is brought to you by the Sitkins Network. If you want your agency to become a category of one, visit sitkins.com, s I t k I n s.com to learn more and see if a territory is available. Well, hello there friends. Brent Kelly here with another episode of the Agent Leader Podcast. And yes, if you've missed me, I'm back. I'm back and better than ever. I'm excited. I recently joined the last couple months, as some of you may have known, I've partnered with Roger Sitkins, the entire Sitkins Group team, excited to learn from a great mentor. Roger has 35 plus years of proven industry experience, knows how to help insurance agencies achieve great results, and I'm so excited to learn from him and continue to add value and grow agencies with leadership development, sales, production, all those things again to help agencies get great results. So on the outset of this podcast, I introduced or asked the question, you know, who is running your agency's offense? Who's actually in charge? Because what is the number one job of the offensive coordinator for any football team? Now, whether you're a football fan or not, I think this analogy will apply and make sense to you. But what's the number one job of the offensive coordinator for any football team? Well, it's simply to score points, to put points on the board. You know, an offensive coordinator has other responsibilities as well. And I'm going to talk about some of the responsibilities that a sales leader should have with agencies. But at the end of the day, the offensive coordinator has one main job, one task. To score points, to put points on the board. Every successful football team, of course, at least in college and pro, they have a named and effective offensive coordinator. But what about your insurance agency? Who is the person responsible for putting the points on the scoreboard for your agency? In other words, who's driving your agency's response revenue? My mentor and I mentioned just a minute ago, Roger Sitkins, who's been had 35 plus years of proven industry experience, talks about having a CRO, a chief revenue officer. Who's your CRO? Who's your offensive coordinator? Who's your sales leader? I'm often astonished that agency leaders, they're surprised that their producers are struggling, but the producers are receiving little to no mentorship. Little to no coaching and little to no accountability. Can you imagine, just imagine this for a second, a football team going out on the field with no preparation, no game plan, and no consequences for their performance. It sounds insane, right? Can you imagine a football team. Well, I don't know. We'll figure it out when we get there. It sounds insane. And the reality is that the team with no offensive coordinator certainly is likely to lose, not if not all their games, certainly most of them. So who is in charge of leading growth and revenue for your agency? Has anyone taken full responsibility for this vital position on the agency team? Now, for larger agencies that may be a designated person, who's in charge of this responsibility? You may have one already, a sales manager. Whatever the title may be, for many smaller agencies, the head coach may also need to serve as the offensive coordinator. So the agency principal must also be the sales manager, the sales leader. Recent studies have shown that only about 10 to 15% of independent insurance agencies have a named and effective sales leader. It's no wonder why many agencies are struggling to create momentum and to grow. Now, regardless of your current agency size, whether you're small, medium, big, whatever you want to define that, it's imperative that every agency is intentional about filling this role with someone willing and able to effectively lead the sales team. Whether that sales team is a couple producers or maybe a hundred. So what are the roles of an effective sales leader? Well, there's, there's many roles, many things a sales leader must do and should do. I want to highlight six, just six basic things that are really imperative that an effective sales leader does and does very well. Number one is recruiting. You know, we just did an informal survey with a number of insurance agencies and other industry thought leaders out there, company partners, and you know, asked the question, you know, what's the number one thing that we see that that's a challenge for agencies? And there's no doubt that the most common answer we continue to continue to see was attracting good talent. You know, just like prospecting for new clients for your agency. Prospecting for talent should be an ongoing event. It's got to be ongoing. You don't just suddenly wake up and go, oh my gosh, I need a producer today. So whether you're one month or your one year, maybe several years from hiring your next producer, recruiting for the best talent is a never ending process. You should always, again, just like you're filling your pipeline, your salespeople should be filling their pipelines all the time. So should you be filling your pipelines, looking and Analyzing potential new talent. Number two is hiring. So you found the talent, now we gotta hire them. Well, deciding on hiring the right person is a huge challenge for independent agencies. A sales leader must spend adequate time in researching and listening and screening the right people to bring them on board. Now there's no perfect system for every agency, but too often, because agencies have not been actively recruiting, which I just mentioned, I see them hire out of desperation versus making a well informed decision based on both facts and feelings. Now sometimes it's, well, I just have a feeling. Well, you want to have facts and feelings and maybe that's using a, you know, a personality profile. There's a lot of those different things out there you can use. But being able to combine both facts and feelings. Number three is training. Now here's something really important that I want to share with every sales leader or agency principal listening to this podcast. You, you are responsible for training your sales team. There's no magic fairy dust that you blow on a new producer and suddenly they just become the top revenue generator. Now not only is a training program vital to attract the right talent, but, but certainly it will determine if you will be able to keep the best talent. See, I can tell you from experience, great producers, they want to learn and they want to be led. Otherwise they're going to find someone and someplace else that will provide a better opportunity for them to grow. Now I'll say this. If you don't have an internal agency producer training process, look for outside sources that you can lean on. Now here at the Sitkins Network we provide ongoing training and coaching in four key areas and this includes agency leadership and sales leadership as well, and certainly producer training. Alright, number four. Motivating. One of the greatest qualities of any successful leader or coach is the ability to motivate others around them. I'm sure you've heard the saying, you know, I have many times that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. I do agree that ultimate motivation must come from within and I'll talk about that in a minute. But I also believe that you can make people thirsty for that water. See, motivation is not about telling people what to do. Great motivators tap into others passions and they help them find their purpose. I believe that great motivators do four important things and I want to go through these briefly. Number one, they nurture people. The height of your influence upon others depends on the depth of your concern for them. People want to know that you care. You have to nurture people. That may sound Soft and fluffy. But again, people want to know that you care for them. Number two is faith in people. Great motivators have faith in their vision and they have faith in people. To accomplish the vision, you've got to have faith in people. Again, hopefully you've hired and attracted the right people. Number three, listening to people. Listening builds respect, relationships increases knowledge, it generates ideas and it builds loyalty. And lastly, you've got to be able to understand people. Great motivators understand people. To motivate others, you must first understand them. As Stephen Covey wrote in the 7 Habits of Highly Effective people seek first to understand, then to be understood. People want to know that you understand them before you have to slam your ideas down their throat. And that is truly some ways that you can motivate people to do the best things. Alright, number five. Disciplining. Well, this sounds fun, doesn't it? Now, discipline can seem like a dirty word. No one likes to give or receive discipline, at least not normal people. But discipline itself is much more than verbal punishment being disciplined. Discipline is creating a specific plan to achieve a desired outcome and sticking with it until completion. Leading others effectively is not simply about giving knowledge or information. See, transferring ideas is the easy part. The challenge and reward comes from helping people take an idea and then execute upon that idea. Your job as a sales leader, as the offensive coordinator, is to help your producers develop daily habits, behaviors and maintain consistency. There is nothing more powerful than compounding and consistency, doing the right thing day after day after day. And that requires discipline. Lastly, number six, what is the responsibilities of a great sales leader? An effective sales leader, this one is almost worse than discipline. It is termination. Termination. Unfortunately, one of the most challenging aspects of sales leadership, and this is both personally and professionally, right? I mean, we get to know people even if it's a short amount of time. But one of the most, the biggest challenge certainly is termination. It's been stated that most organizations are way too quick to hire and way too slow to fire. And I agree with that. I really do. While you can motivate people to help them achieve more, it's up to each individual producer to grow, develop and get results. Again, I talked about motivation. You can make them thirsty, but at the end of the day they do still have to drink. Not only do poor performing producers suck out profit from your agency, but they also can be a negative influence to other producers on your team. They can model not good behavior, poor behavior, poor discipline. You owe it to your entire agency to do what's best for the long term. Health of Your agency and sometimes that requires termination. Alright, so what do the best agencies have? What do we see with sales leadership? What are the best agencies have? Well, the agencies with the best organic growth, possession. Three common characteristics from the sales leader, right? This is comes again. Whether you're the agency principal or the name sales leader, whatever your role, it doesn't matter. But we see this with the best agencies. Number one is they have a process. So let me ask just a couple questions with a process. What is the, what is the named sales process for your agency? What is your agency's way of doing business? If I ask you right now, hey, what is the, what is the name sales process for your agency? Now if your answer depends or your answer is it depends or I'm not really sure, you don't have a process. Now we'll go back to the football team analogy. Imagine a football team, they go into the huddle to run the very next play. But instead of running a play where the team works together, right? Everyone's kind of the moving parts. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to try to advance the ball forward. So you guys go here and you guys go here. Instead of doing that play that is called and been practiced, everyone just does their own thing, right? You get in the huddle and say, hey everybody, just do what you want, figure it out. What would happen in a situation like that? Obviously it's chaos, complete and utter chaos. But that's what happens to many independent insurance agencies. They don't have a process, they don't have a plan. As a sales leader, you must plan, you must prepare and you must execute your agency's set offense. Otherwise you're going to have chaos. Maybe you're dealing with chaos right now. What else do the best agencies have from the sales leadership? Well, training. How do your producers prepare for the next big game? Even with a well crafted game plan, every football team works on the basics and they go over those plays for the next game, the entire week leading up to that game. And great teams practice just like it's the real game. As a sales leader, your responsibility is to train your producers to be ready for the next appointment, the next sales meeting, the next, next networking event, whatever it may be for them. And I can tell you at the Sidkins network we often talk about being relentlessly prepared. So how prepared are your producers? All right, so we talked about firstly the process and then training. Lastly, what do the great agencies have the most effective agencies have? Well, accountability. How are your producers held accountable? When they fall short of a team or an individual goal. Better yet, do they have named goals that you have discussed together? What if there was no stats for the starting quarterback? No statistics at all? We didn't track completion percentage or, or interceptions or how many yards they got per game. Instead, we just went by a feeling. I think they played pretty well today. I think the performance was. It seemed pretty solid to me. I don't know what they did. I don't know anything about the stats, but it seemed to be pretty good and the people were happy and they seemed okay. Now, obviously I'm being kind of smart here, but how could you provide accountability for that? See, as the sales leader for your agency, you must determine what metrics are most important for your producer's success. Now, there's some general ones that most people agree upon. We use some at the network here. But you've got to understand what it is. You and the producer must agree on those most important stats and then help to hold them accountable. We all need accountability to reach our full potential. It's easy to set goals. It's easy to talk about what we want to accomplish. I mean, I do it myself. It's easy to set a goal. The challenge comes in sharing these goals with others and then being held accountable to the final results. And that's your job as a sales leader. Well, here's the bottom line. Here's the bottom line. Producers need leaders. Let me say that one more time. Producers need leaders. Leaders who model excellence. Leaders that develop winning plans. Leaders that maximize talent. Leaders. And if your agency doesn't have a designated sales leader, an effective sales leader. Regardless, again, if that's the agency principal or name sales manager, you're simply not going to get great results. So ask yourself two vital questions. Two vital questions. And be honest with this. Who's your agency's offensive coordinator and what's your game plan? Hey, thanks for listening to another episode of the Agent Leader podcast Again. My name is Brent Kelly and I'm an executive coach with the Sitkins Network. Now, just so you know, the Sitkins Network works directly with sales leaders to help their team install a set offense for their agency. As I talked about on today's podcast, we conduct ongoing training programs and we help build a culture of accountability. Now, if you're curious, the Sitkins Network is a territorial, exclusive community. High achieving agencies that desire to become a category of one to transcend commoditization and defy comparison. If you're interested to learn more about the Sitkins Network and see if a territory is available in your area, go to sitkins.com that's s I t k I n s dot com.