The Preeminent Producer Podcast

For Insurance Producers: Strategic Planning For The New Year

• The Preeminent Producer

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To be a Preeminent Producer, strategic planning is a MUST! That is what we are diving into in this podcast. Get ready for some hot tips and insights from our insurance leaders and coaches on how to grow your book of business in 2024! 

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Are you a commercial insurance producer struggling to stand out from the competition? Do you find it challenging to grow your book of business and create a fulfilling career?

Then welcome to The Preeminent Producer Podcast! Each week, we'll be tackling important topics, sharing proven strategies and insights from successful producers that are in the trenches and have traveled the journey to becoming a Preeminent Producer.

You'll discover what it really takes to become Preeminent & build your book of business, in a way that isn’t being taught anywhere else. Our hosts are experts in the field and have built thriving businesses by becoming the most trusted adviser to their clients. Welcome to your journey to becoming a Preeminent Producer.

Let’s dive in!

Ready To Grow Your Book Of Business?
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Speaker 1:

Welcome everybody to another episode of the Preeminent Producer podcast. First and foremost, let me wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a happy New Year. We are just weeks away from Christmas and just a few more extra days after that to New Years, and it is insane how fast this year has flown by. But as a producer, and more specifically, a preeminent producer, we cannot, we can't be the ones that are in reactive mode in January. We need to be the ones that are strategically planning in November, in December, in setting ourselves up for success in the New Year. And that's what we're going to be diving into in this episode, where the coaches are talking about what they do and what they've done and what they continue to do to prepare for the New Year. We are talking about strategic planning and I've put together some clips from a recent coaching call where they're going to dive into some really good stuff. Get your pen and paper ready and let's dive in.

Speaker 2:

Are you a commercial insurance producer struggling to stand out from the competition? Do you find it challenging to grow your book of business and create a fulfilling career? If so, then welcome to the Preeminent Producer Podcast. Each week, we'll be tackling important topics, sharing proven strategies and insights from successful producers that are in the trenches and have traveled the journey to becoming a preeminent producer. You'll discover what it really takes to become preeminent and build your book of business in a way that isn't being taught anywhere else. Our hosts are experts in the field and have built thriving businesses by becoming the most trusted advisor to their clients. Welcome to your journey to becoming a preeminent producer. Let's dive in.

Speaker 1:

As you know, we're in December and with that, I think, always comes the thought okay, new Year's is right around the corner. This is an opportunity for new beginnings, new goals, all that kind of stuff, and I think the coaches will agree and they're going to dive into this more. If you don't have set goals and set targets, you're really setting yourself up for failure, and today we're going to be diving into. If you want to continue to grow in this journey of becoming a preeminent producer, becoming preeminent doesn't happen on accident, and what you do matters, and having a proper plan in place matters, and so this isn't about and I want to clarify some terminology real quick this is not about setting a New Year's resolution, and I'm going to let the coaches dive in this more. I want to give you a stat that I thought was kind of interesting. This is supposed to be up to date as of 2023.

Speaker 1:

It's just 38% of people make New Year's resolutions, but only 9% stick to them all year long. 80% of New Year's resolutions are forgotten by February, and this is why being preeminent is not about setting resolutions for your professional life and career. We want to move past resolutions and come up with a strategic goal targets. It's about being laser focused, sniper focused, looking through the site, rather than the shotgun of hey, I'm just aiming and it's going to hit something eventually. Now we want to be laser focused and have a strategic plan and having the steps to get where we want to go.

Speaker 1:

So today we're going to dive into a bunch of cool topics and categories. We've got some tools Christian's going to be on a little bit to show a tool that he uses, but the coach are going to dive into this topic where you guys really hopefully and if you're not, you will be using this month, the remainder of this month, to really start planning, as Rick said I think it was last, I think it was on the last call, rick you said or maybe it was on the podcast, but you said it recently that if you're waiting until January to start planning, you're already too late. So, with that being said, do you want to elaborate on that?

Speaker 3:

Oh yeah, absolutely. I call it getting ready to sell, that we're gonna get ready to sell. We have to do this first, and then we have to do this and we have to do something else. And the next thing we know, weeks and months have gone by and we're still getting ready to sell.

Speaker 3:

So I think January 1st is always a date that we wanna use for resolutions and of course, a resolution is a personal thing. It's my resolutions I'm gonna lose weight, I'm gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna drink a little less, I'm not gonna speed in my car quite as much. Those are just resolutions and those are fun and, as Paul just said, they're hardly ever falling through on. Goals are something different. Goals, as you men and women know that have been in this industry, are measurable. They're realistic but still a stretch. And you go back to that old adage when you're setting goals if you can't measure it, you can't improve it, and I believe that very much that you've gotta have a goal that is measurable. I'm going to get a 20%, I'm gonna raise my personal income by $20,000. And these are the steps that I know I need to take to do with those kind of things. So again, starting now, so that by January 1st, everything is in place and you hit the ground running, the first day of the new year in 2024.

Speaker 3:

So that's it, one of the other things that I wanted to talk about. This is a good time to start doing some other things Certainly setting those goals, trading accounts down. In other words, we all have a whole bunch of accounts and we need to establish a minimum account size that we are going to write, and we're not gonna write insurance below that amount of revenue, and it's gonna be different for each one of you, but it should be established that I'm not going to write an account that pays me less than $2,500 of revenue, or it could be $5,000. It could be $25,000, whatever your number is. You guys are probably newbies and it's a smaller number. I get that, but each year that minimum account size needs to increase. That is the way you write larger accounts and get more revenue per account. So that's what they do.

Speaker 4:

Yes, Rick, as far as trading those accounts down, do you have your producers typically do that at the renewal date of each of those accounts, or do you do it at the first of the year, even if it's midterm?

Speaker 3:

We kind of do it at the first of the year, Matt. The reason for that? We want to get that out of the producer's hands as quickly as possible, and I think you guys probably all have that small account.

Speaker 3:

That takes an extraordinary amount of your time. They're very needy and you don't make any money with those guys, and it's something very important for you to know how much your time is worth. How you build a book of business, how you become a preeminent producer, or one of the ways is you work on larger size accounts. Year after year after year. You're always increasing your average account size and to do that, you need to establish a good minimum account size. Okay, pipeline, show me your pipeline and I'll show you the success of your career. Your pipeline needs to be highly qualified people that are real prospectors. A prospect is someone who knows you and you know them and they know what you do. That is a prospect, and you were researched each one of these people that are in your pipeline, so you know that they will be above your minimum account size. They are someone you want to do business with. They fit into the mold of what a good client is for you. Now it's okay to have suspects Also. Suspects are people that don't know you. You know them and you want to make them clients. Those are fine too, but don't confuse the two and have two separate lists.

Speaker 3:

We'll talk a lot more about this. When we talk about just pipeline specifically, we knew hours on pipeline. But really to pre-qualify these people, to know, to build your dossier on who they are and what they do, you need to know them better. You need to know more about them than their current insurance broker. And in this world of online, of all of the things that we have, it's pretty easy to research people and find out what we're doing. Also, recommit to or commit to. If you haven't done it yet no practice quoting. We don't quote. We simply don't quote. We believe that there are two independent decisions that every prospect makes. That's the right insurance carrier and the right broker, and they are independent. Just because somebody brings you information from travelers doesn't mean that you should stay with that insurance broker. You need to find out what those brokers are gonna do for you the next 364 days. That's how you should make your decision if you're a prospect on brokers. Hey, rick.

Speaker 4:

Yep, rick, do you articulate that to your prospective clients and, if so, do you do it generally the way you just said it and do you do it during that first?

Speaker 3:

meeting with them. We really do. We preach that because one of the other things and thank you for the lead in that we're going to talk about is BOR selling. Okay, the book of records selling is the way of the future. It is something that saves you time, it saves your prospect time, it saves everybody time, and we do discuss that map right away that there are two independent decisions, which leads us into the conversation about BOR only quoting, not quoting, but BOR only.

Speaker 3:

Now, yes, there are situations where you're going to need to quote an account. You don't write for the incumbent carrier and we can talk about how you get around that a little bit without quoting or by quoting and setting up some rules of the game of how you're going to do this. They may be with a direct writer and obviously we have to quote that. So every now and then, or a situation where I know that the client is, or the prospect is, with the wrong insurance carrier and I've got a program in my company here that will do a better job for them, but I haven't quoted an account for four years.

Speaker 3:

The other thing that I commit to every year are quarterly meetings with my clients, with my A and A clients and an A client. That's the other thing we want to try to do and focus on is making sure you know who your A clients, b clients and C clients are. A clients are those. It's the 80-20 rule of Wilfredo Pareto. It's like 20% of your clients are going to pay 80% of your income after your book gets going and you want to focus your time and effort on those A clients a little less on the B and the C clients are borderline If they don't have the ability to become a B client. Those are the folks that I try to trade down.

Speaker 4:

Here's the five things that we go over without fail. We review the current year, how it's gone, what worked and what didn't, and do we want to make some adjustments of that. Then we review our marketing plan marketing meaning reaching out to prospects, not to carriers and what kind of worked, what didn't work, what should we continue, what should we discontinue no-transcript. Then we talk about, in reference to our marketing plan, any new ideas that we wanna implement or try. And that's where mind mapping, for example, really comes in. What we do is we sit down together and we just throw the ideas out, and no ideas too crazy, I mean, we even throw ideas in there that we'll never do, like TV advertising, you know. But the idea is just be creative, get everything down really fast. And one thing I guess I should have mentioned about mind mapping is you know, in the Western world we're used to outlines, right, we go one A, one B and then two A, b and C, and if you try to do planning that way, it's just super slow, whereas if you use a mind map technique guys, if any of you haven't used it you get the ideas down kind of without any structure, but you get them down in no time flat. In 10 minutes you'd be amazed how much creativity you come up with. Then you can take the time to go back and now organize it sequentially. The other thing we look at is well, as part of our marketing plan, we always try to revisit our referral source strategy and are there areas like a new CPA or somebody that we wanna get involved? We look at our classes of business. Rick, I think you mentioned that. Do we need to refocus, go after any new classes of business? That might be a new opportunity. And as Christian, I always mentioned what classes of business fit well with our carriers. I mean it's necessary.

Speaker 4:

We look okay, here we go account size and the way we do that is we set a minimum commission size for ourselves per account and we just simply back into it by. We know take workers comp, for example. You know for a given class code what the base rate is. You know. So how many employees do you need to generate? You know 5,000, say, in commission. So we just back into it. And then we build our various lead lists, the cold lead lists by number of employees, because that's easy to find.

Speaker 4:

And then, lastly, we look at we've always had in our agency. I think really nice looking proposals, I think it's really important. And so we look every year at hey, are there ways that we wanna change the physical look of our proposal, any rink we wanna add or change or whatever, and then how do we present it? So we practice with each other a little bit as far as what we say. But those are the five areas you know that we look into every year and, as I said, it probably would make more sense to start that maybe in mid-November, because you know we get to crunch time in December here. But we do it. There's never been a year that we failed to do that.

Speaker 1:

Alright, guys, I wish I could show you more, but again, that's for members only. But I hope you guys got really some good takeaways there. And again, I cannot stress this enough we're not setting resolutions because statistically we know those don't last very long. We want to be sniper focused, laser focused, not doing the shotgun approach. We want to be very intentional and very focused on our goals, on our targets, to really ensure that we are setting ourselves up for success. So hopefully you have thought about some work that you need to do, some planning you need to do, some maybe steps, processes, whatever it might be, that you need to put into play, or even skill sets you need to sharpen before this coming year so you can enter into January, enter into a new year on fire, ready to go. If you've enjoyed this and like more information, definitely visit us at thepreeminentproducercom and look into the different coaching programs where you can get personal coaching from the coaches that you heard on this podcast. Again, guys, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Speaker 2:

Thanks so much for joining us on this episode of the Preeminent Producer Podcast. If you're enjoying the show, please feel free to subscribe, rate and leave a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. That helps others find the show and we greatly appreciate it. Once again, thanks for joining us and we'll catch you in the next episode of the Preeminent Producer Podcast.