A few steps are required in order to hire the right producer. When paired with the right training program, my clients achieve around a 75% success rate with their new hires, compared to the 75% failure ratecommon at other agencies. These are facts, not just wishful thinking. I'll cover the steps for hiring producers here. 1. Are you hiring for the right purpose? One of the most common and important reasons so many producer hires fail is not due to the producer. It is because

I have seen a few articles recently that have focused on and/or were titled "Hyper Personal" Personal Insurance. Like lots of things, it does not sound that good to me, but a creative marketing person has probably discovered this phrase sounds good to consumers. The idea is that someone or something, not necessarily an agency or even a person as it could easily be a software program, will hyper personalize a consumer's insurance experience relative to identifying their insura

So do I. I'd like the answers to life. I watched Monte Python's "The Meaning of Life" and I still don't have the answers to life's questions. I have read Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hobbes, Mills, Veblen, the Bible, and not least, Calvin and Hobbes. I still don't have the answers. I reduced my goal to understanding certain aspects of the tax code. One part in particular is running to 600 pages now, and I gave up because the lack of logic contained therein could only be

• "The Uncaptive Agent" by Tony Caldwell. This book is mostly geared toward people starting agencies from scratch or coming from a captive environment. If you are in that position, then this book is a MUST read. It's short and to the point. It's entirely practical making it completely useful and when starting an agency, being entirely practical is mandatory. Some people who have run their agencies for years probably can glean quite a bit of good information from this book to

Or else better marketers will convince consumers they are more ethical than you. A recent story caught my attention and ire. The story was a press release from an Insurtech start-up. What first caught my eye was how the start-up measured success in coverage placed, i.e., total policy limits rather than premiums or commissions, to make themselves look successful. For people who don't know the difference, it was impressive that a 12-person start-up agency could place $2 billion

Most insurance is sold poorly. That is not a judgment or an opinion. It is a provable fact, and based on all the E&O audits I've completed and education classes I've taught, the facts are clearly visible. There is little doubt if one looks at the data unemotionally. (Some people confuse an agent’s ability to sell insurance coverage correctly with selling coverage correctly -- two different facets.) Insurance sold poorly, over and over and over again, is evidence of a business

Every agency receives requests for questionable actions from its clients and their advisors, banks and sometimes even governmental entities. The best and most common example of these requests involves certificates of insurance. In most agencies, probably daily, someone requests a certificate of insurance where fulfilling that request would be problematic. The problem is on a spectrum from just slightly not right to downright illegal (legal vs. illegal at a criminal level depe

There are stupid questions, and there are questions that indicate the questioner is not that knowledgeable in an area in which they should already be knowledgeable. In both scenarios, the questioner still needs to learn. But our human egos are so powerful they keep most audience members (except the guy that always knows it all) silent. I see this when I teach classes and when I take classes. People are scared of embarrassment. They are afraid of their boss discovering their d

Increase Sales! Absolutely, each and every sale will increase an agency’s E&O exposures. No question exists about this fact. The more surgeries a surgeon does, the more medical malpractice exposures he/she will have. In other words, to have a thriving agency, one has to accept the risk of ever-increasing E&O exposures. The goal should be that, with practice making near perfection, the exposure on any given account actually decreases with more sales. This decrease is not happe

Over the last four weeks, I've had a series of interesting experiences involving larger and otherwise more sophisticated agency leaders failing. The common denominator was their Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach. Failure is expensive in both money and time. These DIY leaders spent between $100,000 and $500,000, all in, for their failures and wasted a minimum of one year's hard work -- others' mistakes consumed more than a year. On the other hand, the clients I have assisted did n

Credit must go to Bill Wilson at InsuranceCommentary for this great line, "Knowledge by Folklore." These three words sum up, so perfectly, how coverage knowledge is transferred and how underwriting rules are learned. The resulting comedies and tragedies are protected by confidentiality agreements. Otherwise, the Greek comedies/tragedies would have serious challengers for the genre. I am not exaggerating. Some of the stories are so comedic, and others ruin lives. ​ Here are so

Some prospect calls Agency X to insure their home and auto. The CSR gets the data required to determine the replacement cost on the house, asks about liability limits, and hopefully recommends appropriate endorsements (but probably does not in the real world beyond replacement cost). Business A calls Agency X, or better yet, a producer in Agency X calls Business A. Let's name the producer "Joe." Joe solicits Business A and gets the opportunity to quote the account. Joe gets t

The title alone may elicit anger, bewilderment, curiosity and who knows what other emotions. The reason these movements and cultures are similar is they promise regular people some advantage based on an obvious current disadvantage. But then they take advantage of these same people. ​In his writings, Marx analyzed the serious disadvantages existing then that extremely few people could ever break through to achieve a decent life. People were actually shrinking in size, physica

Agents are a good target for the blame. I saw a question posted by an experienced agent: "Does an umbrella policy cover…?" The question indicates such a depth of ignorance any answer is simply wasted. There are about 500 or maybe even 5,000 umbrella forms in existence. Hopefully this experienced agent is not treating all these forms the same, but that is what the question tells me they are doing. I saw another question posted, "Does a homeowners policy cover…?" At the very le

I visit a lot of agencies and have interviewed hundreds of customer service representatives, account managers, account executives and processors every year. I find that 50 percent or more today have a serious lack of basic knowledge about certificates of insurance, binders and evidences of insurance. The lack of knowledge is more obvious at the staff level because these are the people who process these forms. However, a huge percentage of producers also don’t know the differe

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." -- John F. Kennedy What an elegant, profound statement that still resonates almost fifty years later. It inspires. It leads. It causes a person to want to do great things. Today we have politicians stating, "Don't ask, don't tell." What a sad difference a few generations make. And I'm not referring to the sexual preference aspect of this quote. "Don't ask, don't tell" has much more significance.

I overheard a mother angrily arguing with her daughter at the airport a few weeks ago. When I turned to see what was going on, I expected to see a middle-aged mother with her 20 year-old daughter. I was very surprised to see the mother was at least eighty and the daughter at least sixty! I guess it is true that you never stop being a parent, no matter how old you or your children are. Parents are always parents and most parents never stop worrying about their children. Such w

In a November 24, 2006, Wall Street Journal article on page 1, Allstate outlined its new strategy: life insurance. Allstate’s plan is to leverage its great relationships with its current clients to sell them life insurance, annuities, etc. According to the article, they had considerable success growing financial service sales from $334 million in 1999 to $2.8 billion in 2005, contributing to nearly half their growth! So maybe Allstate is on to something. On the other hand, ha

Just because a salesperson is good enough to sell ice to an Eskimo doesn’t mean that person is actually selling any ice to anyone. Plenty of people have the talent to sell, but they do not effectively use their ability. If the underseller is a non-owner producer, the situation is relatively easy to resolve. Address the lack of results, identify the cause of the producer’s poor results, and then determine if the producer is willing to try to improve. If so, design an improveme

A study cited by The Economist (November 10, 2001, p. 75) noted that sellers on eBay with high trustworthiness scores sold coins for 6.8% more than lower rated sellers. Trust can also be valuable for insurance agencies. The more customers trust a producer, the easier it is to close sales and less time is required for each sale, leaving more time for making sales. The more trust CSRs have for a producer, the harder they work for the producer. The more trust companies have in a