A new year is around the corner. It’s time to start thinking about the goals for your agency, and how your team is going to help you achieve those milestones. But before you can start thinking about your goals, there’s something else you should consider: Are you enabling your producers to make as much of an impact as they possibly can?
If you have any doubts, before you set your 2025 goals let’s take a step back. Look at your processes. Consider where you can make improvements. Figure out how you can make the most of your investment in your producers. And then you’ll be in the best place to reach the goals you’ll set.
Alright, are you ready? Let’s take that step back together. Here are four steps to get you started on ensuring that you are maximizing your producers’ effectiveness for your agency.
Validate Your Producers
On average, it takes almost three years to validate a new producer. But even after a producer has been validated, their success rate is still less than 50%. There are a whole host of reasons that lead to low validation rates – but just a few include a lack of training, poor mentoring, loosely defined goals and a lack of insurance acumen.
Whether your team is filled with new producers or seasoned industry professionals, having a solid foundation in place is the only way that they will succeed in the long run. Investing in your onboarding, training and validation process will give your producers that foundation and allow them to hone their skills as their tenure increases.
Where should you start? There’s a lot that goes into an effective training and validation program (and we wrote a whole guide with all the details) but here are the basics:
- Foster a strong sales culture
- Establish specific and realistic goals
- Leverage the right tools and technology
- Provide regular support and mentorship
But proper validation is just the first step. Next, let’s talk about technology.
Have the Right Tech in Place
Just like having the right tech in place is essential for validation, it’s also essential for continued growth and effectiveness.
The insurance industry has typically been slower when it comes to adopting new technology. But in a business environment where technology helps organizations of all kinds thrive, it’s important that agencies, no matter their size, invest in technology that will help ease the day-to-day tasks that often bog down their producers.
There’s a variety of technology that can help producers be more effective. Technology that can help producers be more effective and efficient includes:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Agency Management Systems (AMS)
- Digital marketing tools
- Client portals
- Quoting platforms
- Data and analytics solutions
What works best for one organization may not work best for every organization. Reach out to your producers to discover their biggest pain points and identify the tools that can help alleviate those struggles.
And this goes beyond implementing new technologies. Evaluate the technology that you already have in place. Is it helping your producers, or is it hindering their productivity? Identify technologies that are either causing additional pain points or just being underutilized because they aren’t useful to your team.
Enable Continued Education
Once you have a foundation in place for your producers with an effective validation process and technology to help producers succeed, now it’s time to think about what you’re doing to help producers continue to upskill.
We all know that the insurance industry is complex – especially if you work in commercial insurance. Yet according to a 2024 LinkedIn report, less than half of organizations have mature career development initiatives. If your producers are effectively growing their books of business, they’re most likely coming across industries and new risks that they’ve never encountered before. Without a solid continuing education plan in place, how are they going to properly educate themselves on these new challenges?
There are a variety of ways you can tackle continuing education. To start, look for ways to ensure that your producers have access to the courses and information they need to upskill themselves. That could mean investing in on-site training courses, finding a learning management system that allows your producers to upskill on their own schedule, or having access to resource libraries that allow producers to research new and complex problems as they arise.
Streamline Daily Workflows
The final step in maximizing the productivity of your team is probably the most obvious. It’s time to ask your producers – what are the processes that are slowing your team down the most? Where are the opportunities to save time, streamline complex processes, or eliminate unnecessary tasks?
Streamlining workflows can often involve an investment in technology. Consider Zywave’s P&C OneSource. This tool aggregates forms, guides, and reports from some of the leading insurance organizations including A.M. Best, IRMI, ISO, NFIP and Rough Notes with Zywave’s Content Cloud. Within a single platform, producers can find over 250,000 commercial resources to help streamline submissions and improve acceptance rates. It’s all the commercial lines content your producers need, in a single, convenient location.
But streamlined workflows can also come down to an evaluation of your current processes. Look at the way your team operates. Are there inefficiencies that can be addressed? Outdated processes that can be updated and streamlined? Or are you leveraging the unique skillset of each of your team members? The processes that need to be addressed are going to be unique to every organization. Change isn’t going to happen overnight. But starting the conversation is what counts – and it will lead you to increased producer productivity, and more profit for your bottom line.
Learn More
Zywave has a variety of solutions in place designed to help producers maximize their impact and grow their book of business. To learn more about these tools, connect with your Zywave account team by emailing [email protected].
