Practical Resolutions – and tips on how to keep them.
As we turn the corner into the New Year, everyone seems to be making a resolution of one sort or another. Some want to lose weight, others want to cut out sugar,quit smoking, exercise more, spend more time with the family, … you name it. Ironically or not, many make the same resolution year in and year out and never keep them past February or March. Instead of same old, same old (or maybe in addition to same old, same old) in 2013 think about streamlining business processes and get your office organized for the year ahead.
Here are a few suggestions to get you started…
Improve your renewal processes.
- Create custom reports to bring the information to the forefront.
- Look internally. Get your team together and collectively figure out if there is a better way to handing the large amounts of policies that are downloading or being manually renewed.
Get your house in order
- Update workstations and old equipment
- Set new goals for going paperless and, if you haven’t already, document your plan to do so. (For suggestions on how to move to a more paperless work environment, read Best Practices: Go Paperless )
Beef up agency security
- Keep data in a password-protected, encrypted space
- Create “strong” passwords and keep them secure
- Keep User Permissions Tightly Controlled
- For more practical suggestions on how to improve the security of your agency data read Keeping Agency Data Secure
Invest in the future
- Take the time to review, document and share internal Best Practices
- Make continual improvement and training of all staff members a priority. (For additional insight, read Steve Anderson’s Training Pays Big Dividends
Focus on Marketing Strategy and on Setting and Meeting aggressive sales goals.
- Identify the marketing channels that your customers and prospects will respond to. There are numerous ways to attract new business. As Steve Anderson wrote in Create A Balanced Approach to Marketing, “go where your prospects and customers already gather.”
- Set a plan and stick with it.
