For many independent agencies, sales and marketing are a continual sticking point. Excellent service and friendly faces are abundant, but teams struggle to bring the same enthusiasm they have for service to their insurance agency marketing and sales.

How can you motivate your team to put the same efforts into sales and marketing that they do to service?

Discover ways to make your independent insurance agency service stand out

Set Boundaries

For many, sales and marketing are intimidating because they require significant time. When it comes to service, your team could solve a problem in a day, but fostering the relationship to make a sale takes weeks, months, or longer. Burnout is prevalent among producers, and, once burned out, it’s difficult for them to get back in the game.  

Combat the daunting task of time and potential burnout with actions like enforcing set sales work hours and realistic goals. Ask your producers to focus on selling during a specific time during the day or week (i.e., 10 am-12 pm on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays). Come up with achievable benchmarks to make it easy for your team to feel accomplished and take a break from work once they’ve reached their daily or weekly goals.

Foster (Healthy!) Competition

The distinction between healthy and unhealthy competition is essential here. You want your producers to challenge each other, not cut each other down. Avoid pitting team members against one another or having a “dog eat dog” atmosphere. If your team thinks missing a goal means a demotion, they’ll only be motivated by fear.

Inspire positive competition by celebrating monthly successes, even if it’s as simple as a 10% increase in time on the phone. Provide non-performance related outlets as well, like a competition around steps per day to encourage mental and physical health.

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Define Best Practices and Tools

If your team is at a loss on how to market, they’re doomed to fail. Understand elements like outreach cadence, how to produce and use marketing content, and CRM benefits and uses. Train your producers on how to use your CRM and marketing automation tools and interpret results to improve tactics. When you give your team the right training and tools, you set them up to succeed.

Gain outreach power with the CRM and Marketing Automation combination

Communicate More

It’s important to have a grasp on how your team is doing, overall, and on an individual level. Have someone on your team dedicated to tracking and analyzing data, providing insights on things like the most effective contact time, and the best time to set meetings. This support role should work with individuals, meeting with them one-on-one to see where they’re struggling and provide non-judgmental support to improve their performance.

Share what you see in your sales and marketing reports, and individual insights, with your team as a whole. Host lunch and learn sessions, frequent “all hands” meetings, and a push for weekly communication between individuals and their manager, supervisor, or coach. Be clear and transparent in your conversations when it comes to guiding your team. Tell them what you know, what you don’t, and what you plan to do about any impending issues. Then, sit back and listen.

Make Space for Connection

You may think communication is the same as connection, but it’s possible to communicate with your producers without fostering a real connection. If you’re spewing information without listening or providing little space for conversation, you lack the connection needed to keep your team healthy and successful. Provide time before or after meetings for more open-ended, non-business talk: host virtual happy hours or trivia events. Give your team time to “get together” the best you can to keep that feeling of support that drives success.

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Get the Tools and Support You Need from Partner Platform

With leadership and teammates that have experience across a wide variety of industries, the SIS Partner Platform team has the sales and marketing insights our agencies need to grow. We’ve put that insight into helpful sales and marketing tools, like our Producer Results Manager CRM and Marketing Automation Manager, giving our agencies one Partner Platform system to manage both prospects and clients.

Find out more about our sales and marketing support here, and get in touch with us at [email protected] or 800.747.7005, Option 6 to schedule a demo today.