BHBCo Blog

Can the Military�s Way of Thinking Help Your Agency?

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I have often threatened to write about what I think the military (the U. S. Navy in my case) does well that the corporate world, and specifically the insurance industry, could learn from to become better at what it does. Well, I am finally putting my experience where my mouth is, and I hope what I share provides some fresh insight to what you�re doing at your own organization.

By far, the agencies with whom we have worked that have the smoothest operations are those that are organized well to meet their objectives and have had a clear picture of where they are headed, what they want to accomplish, and what they need to do well day-to-day in order to reach their goals.

This is a clear parallel to the way that military operations and planning are structured. Without getting too deep into it, I will say that this can be broken out into three levels: Tactical, Operational, and Strategic.

Tactical. This is what you do on a daily basis, on the front lines, in a manner of speaking. Answering calls and emails, servicing accounts, and handling clients� issues are good examples of Tactical work. The daily specifics of these tasks may be a little hard to predict, but I�m sure you have a good idea of the general volume of work you need to do on a daily basis. How well you train your staff and prepare for this type of work directly affects how you handle it and how quickly, competently, and effectively you get it all done.

Operational. This is the area of work that rises above the day-to-day activity � things that need to be done well on a longer-term basis, but are not necessarily a part of the immediate must-do tasks. Consider what an effective Personal Lines (or Commercial or Agency) Manager thinks about in performing his/her job or what the successful management team focuses on regarding the overall running of the agency. These are Operational concerns. A specific example of this level of work is the renewal workflow, which should be a continuous and planned exercise in which account reviews, re-marketing, and client conversations take place, but not necessarily on a daily basis.

Strategic. This is the long-term goal that the organization as a whole (whether the nation, the Navy or your agency) is driving toward. It sets a direction, and ideally everything that is done at the Tactical and Operational levels leads to the Strategic goals of the agency. If you are focused on becoming the largest agency in your town or the best employer with the best client service in the area, these are the Strategic goals you�re working toward.

(By the way, BHBCoVisioning^SM is our way of guiding clients so they can effectively look at their agency, and its direction, at Strategic and Operational levels.)

Usually, those agencies that find themselves constantly working on the Tactical (daily) tasks and not getting out ahead to think about the Operational or Strategic level will have a difficult time growing and reaching their goals. Those that are able to focus on and manage to all three levels will be the most successful.

So, where does your agency fall in this spectrum?
JHH

Sales Management at the Independent Agency

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 00:00:00 GMT

This blog entry is excerpted from the March 2011 Burke Ink, which can be found in its entirety in the Articles section of our site (http://www.websolutions.com/Articles).

Virtually all independent agencies need, and really benefit from, effective sales management. Few of them, however, will get that by naming a single sales manager.

To sharpen their sales-management performance, most agencies will need first to view the function as having two main parts: Sales Admin and Sales Leadership.

The most important duty in the Sales Admin part of the function is information production. Information about the activity and results of new and veteran producers; new and lost business; hit ratios; business mix; retention rates; carrier placements; carrier programs and specialties; marketplace and competitor intelligence; and more.

We�ve seen a lot of so-called sales management conducted with really thin data and faulty assumptions. Most of our client agency principals are capable of making good decisions for their firms if they have good information. But there is reason to be concerned about faulty management decisions (or lack of decisions) caused by lousy information and bad assumptions. Think of how crazy most agency principals would get if you took away their phone or their car! Well, to someone with sales-management responsibility, their info should be just as important. It�s an attitude thing. And where that attitude is lacking, it�s usually explained by a legacy of not having good data and just not expecting to have it. (This is intertwined with a decades-long habit of accepting the standard menu of reports generated by the dominant vendors of agency management systems � another story.)

The Sales Leadership part of the sales-management function has a few sub-parts:

Setting direction � elementary but critical.
Setting standards � for activity, results, and conduct.
Exhibiting versatility � knowing who needs what (like mentoring for some, technical help for others, and a kick in the pants for still others).
Fostering teamwork � particularly between sales and service.

Most agencies do not have, and should not seek, a single person who can do both the Admin and Leadership pieces. For one thing, there is usually not enough time in the day, but also those skills don�t usually reside in the same human body.

You need to embrace the idea that sales management in the independent agency is a team sport.

For the Sales Admin piece, someone in the agency, preferably not a principal with a large book of business, has to own the function of providing good and timely sales-management information to the sales leader(s) and producers. He/she does not decide on the content alone. That�s developed over time in conjunction with the sales leaders and some consulting help. And it will take time to get it right because it requires a change of attitude and a change of expectations.

Who performs this function will differ with agency size and make-up. Ideally, it�s not the bookkeeper or the IT person, but instead an insurance type who relates well with producers and �gets it� in terms of the agency�s sales and service culture. The Sales Admin job will typically not be a full-time job.

The Sales Leadership piece can be a team sport within a team sport. In larger organizations there can be a producer council, designated mentors, new-producer coordinators, and a variety of players. In smaller firms Leadership might be shared by a couple players. If you are seeking our input on who should be the capo di tutti capi (the boss of all bosses), it would be an agency principal (i.e., an owner) with demonstrated success and credibility in insurance sales.

Compensation, you ask? Incentive compensation is usually part of the picture too. We have a lot of experience on that score. But it works only if it accompanies good management (Leadership and Admin). It cannot replace it. � BHB

You Talking to Me?

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 00:00:00 GMT

We have seen a consistent root cause of many productivity and teamwork problems at independent insurance agencies over the past couple years � A LACK OF CONSISTENT INTERNAL COMMUNICATION.

Take a step back and put yourself in the position of a consumer, or better yet, think about your investment advisor (or financial management firm) for a moment. If you called with an issue one day and then called back a few days later to continue the discussion, you would expect the person to whom you were speaking, even if it was a different representative, to know what you had talked about in the first call. If you had to start over or if the second person had no idea who you were or what your issue was, that would cast a pretty negative light on that investment advisor in your mind, wouldn�t it?

So why would you tolerate the potential for that kind of treatment of your insureds?

In contrast to the example above, a customer-focused firm most likely has a system in place by which notes from calls (including who took the call and how the problem should be resolved) are available to every employee who might interact over the phone with customers. This is a reliable and efficient way to keep everyone at the firm on the same page and to ensure that clients perceive a seamless and well-integrated operation.

Wouldn�t it be great if anyone on your service team could take a call, pull up an insured�s information, and see all the previous communication and policy adjustments on that account? I hope a lot of you right now are thinking, �Wow, Jason, have you ever heard of our agency management system?!� Of course! And that is exactly one of the main ways it should be used. But I do have to say that at a fair number of agencies with whom we work, taking a call from an insured and answering questions or resolving issues immediately is still not a smooth process when the employee taking the call is not the regular account or service representative. It becomes even worse when there is a dedicated sales staff gathering information and communicating with a prospect or new client. There seems to be an inherent communication gap between sales and service. This is not good for business! Of course, the functions of the two are quite different, but easy communication between them is crucial to writing new business � and keeping it � especially at the time when the prospect or new client is handed over from the sales team to the service team.

So think about how well your teams communicate. Do they meet regularly? Are they exchanging emails, applications, and other forms? Are they putting relevant notes into your agency management system? If not, they are hurting your productivity and your ability to function as a team, and when the client experiences the communication gap, it could very well hurt your bottom line.

Tell us how this works at your agency, or if you see it as a problem too.

What Works and What Didn't

Wed, 5 Jan 2011 00:00:00 GMT

The marking of the New Year is an opportunity, and I hope some of you already have been doing this, to look back at what worked well for you over the last twelve months. And, you should also be looking at the other side of things � what things did not work well for you. These two criteria are very important in making the coming twelve months better than the last. And that should be the goal, making things better than they were, in keeping with a continuous improvement mindset.

From your use of agency technology to your marketing and relationship-building efforts, take an honest and deliberate look at what worked, what didn�t and how you can use the results of both to make this coming year more successful for you and your agency. It could be something as simple as figuring out if that new functionality in your agency management system can make your workflows more efficient, or it could be a much more elaborate effort such as creating a new marketing strategy that reinvigorates the relationships you have with your clients (and I swear I did not pick these two examples to mirror some of the work I have done with agencies over the past year, really!)

In either case, the most important part is to do something. You have a year more of experience. Unless you went through it with your eyes closed and your iPod cranked up, you learned, observed and had successes and failures. The only thing that would negate any of that would be to do nothing differently moving forward.

I, for one, will continue to look at most new technologies as they come out (or become more mainstream) and evaluate whether or not they are something that an agency could leverage to make their day-to-day work easier, more effective or help them to improve their bottom line. Just because a new technology may promise some great results, it is always worthwhile to gain perspective and understand if it really is worth the time and resources to implement, train and utilize when it comes to the gains it may provide your agency.

From all of us at BHBCo, we wish you a productive, exciting and rewarding � both professionally and personally � New Year! - JHH

I Want the Truth!

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 00:00:00 GMT

Lieutenant Kaffee (Tom Cruise) bellows, �I want the truth,� and Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) bellows back, �You can�t handle the truth!� Those two lines probably single-handedly put the movie �A Few Good Men� into blockbuster territory. Frequently, our clients say to us (sans the bellow � most of the time) that they want the �truth� and sometimes they actually can handle it.

Now substitute the word �facts� for �truth�. Whether you own an agency, all by your lonesome or have partners, how you individually or collectively handle the truth/facts is a fairly strong indicator of success. We happen to believe how aggressively you pursue the truth/facts is an even stronger indicator of success.

Your people need to know that you want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

We suspect you would agree that the truth can be pretty elusive. In the business world practical types like you and me know that the �truth� is like beauty � it�s in the eye of the beholder. That is because data (aka truth, facts) are frequently manipulated to support a hidden agenda or a poor decision.

Most businesses include integrity in their list of values, and typically the staff will interpret that to mean �thou shall not steal�. Stealing is bad, but frankly your biggest risk isn�t people stealing � it�s people avoiding the truth. Let your staff know how desperately you want to hear the truth. And to build this into your culture, you need to allow people to make mistakes. They will, you will. And don�t we all know that old song �the cover up is often worse than the crime�?

In business the truth is really getting the facts straight or identifying the real problem.

Nobody can control the economy, or the whim of a client, an underwriter, or an employee. And heck, s_ _ _ happens, so when it does, pursue the truth. Once you have the truth, solving the problem is so much easier.

If you want a great agency (growing and profitable), if you want a great perpetuation plan, or if you want to make great acquisitions, make sure you (and your staff) know that when you bellow �I want the truth� that it is ok to give you the truth � because they know you can handle it. - TDM