Mobile Producers

Every independent agent wants to know what the next big thing will be to help grow their agency into the future. Well, for some, the future is now and agencies that follow technology’s lead today will be the ones on top in another five or 10 years.

Jason Cass, founder and owner of JDC Insurance based in Centralia, Ill., is a firm believer in Internet marketing as well as in the benefits it can deliver to the independent agency system. After all, his entire business model is virtual.

“I am a virtual agency,” Cass told Insurance Journal. “I tell people a lot that I have a 70 square foot office on the 18th hole of a golf course and it’s called the basement of my house. I have a laptop, all-in-one printer, and an extra monitor.” He also doesn’t advertise his services in the traditional sense. He advertises 100 percent through digital communications via social media posts and Facebook ads. And it works, he says.

Cass says people tend to worry about the next available technology that could help grow their business, but the tools independent agencies need to grow are available now.

“Whether it be the smartphone, social media, or cloud based technologies … The tools are already there,” says Cass, who serves as chair of the Independent Agents & Brokers of America’s Young Agents Committee.

The problem is most agents just don’t know how to use them effectively.

Ryan Hanley, an agent at The Murray Group Insurance Services Inc., an independent family-owned insurance and financial services agency in Albany, N.Y., agrees and says agencies that do not implement a strong digital communication presence now may not be around tomorrow.

“You don’t have to have a Facebook page if you don’t want to,” he says, but agencies should have some way to digitally communicate with clients. “If you don’t do it today, then maybe you’ll be in business five years from now but you are not going to be doing well,” Hanley says.

“And if you are in business then, there’s a very good chance you won’t be in business in 10 years. There’s going to come a time when there will be more people that use those tools than don’t,” he says.

Today, plenty of people are willing to forego use of digital communications, he says. “But once those people are gone [in five years], we’ll have an entire generation in the prime buying years of their life — the 28 to 40 year olds — the people that have never taken an adult breath without knowing Facebook.”

These people are going to be starting families, opening businesses, buying homes, buying toys. “Those are the people that every independent agency wants to target,” Hanley says.

These agents are convinced that today’s early adopters of digital communication — such as social media and other forms of digital marketing — will be the ones best positioned in the future.

Mobile Producers

Hanley agrees with Cass that there’s nothing new when it comes to high-tech tools that put agencies on a fast-track to success. But there’s one tool — a tool that most agents already own — that may be the perfect tool. That’s the smartphone.

Almost half of all mobile phone users today use a smartphone device, according to comScore’s August survey of 30,000 users nationwide. Social networking on mobile devices also continues to rise, according to the survey. Social media sites and blogs were accessed by 36.9 percent of all consumers.

The job description for producers of the future will encompass more than it does today, but Hanley has no doubt a producer must be mobile.

“Part of our job description is going to be professional content creators. If you believe in the fact that digital and social media work, you need to have quality content for that presence to get your message out, to allow people to build a relationship with you,” Hanley says.

He says the smartphone is the absolute perfect tool for this.

“You can create audio podcasts, you can create high quality HD videos, you can take HD photos, you can create blog posts, you can post things to every social network, you can share slide share files, you can pull up presentation files, you can do all the things that a producer needs, in addition to being a professional content creator on your smartphone.”

Technology will change, but high mobility will always come first, he says.

“The iPad that we carry today might not be the iPad that we carry five years from now but the idea of easy to use, highly functional, and mobile, we are only going to move more toward those concepts,” Hanley says.

Being a mobile producer means not being tied to an office.

“All principals like to say that you can’t make any money behind your desk but they always want us to be in the office,” Cass says. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Cass doesn’t have a traditional brick and mortar office setting and because of that, his agency’s costs are reduced and efficiency is increased.

Hanley thinks Cass’ virtual set-up makes sense.

“In an agency like mine where we are the traditional agency where each of us has a big desktop and an office, there’s a cost associated with all of that,” Hanley says.

In a perfect world, an independent agency should be completely web-based, according to Hanley. It should able to share all files through some sort of cloud file sharing system and access its agency management system online. Producers should be able to create content using social and visual marketing tools from anywhere.

“And a smartphone and a tablet ensure that you almost never have to be in the office,” he says. “I can work from home, I can work from a client’s office, from a parking lot of client that I’m soliciting. I can almost never have to be in the office and I can be completely functional,” he says.

While the tools are there for agents’ use today, there’s no real solid model for the independent insurance agency, yet.

“There’s a lot of agencies in the country that are starting to go this way, but we don’t necessarily have one yet that we can say, ‘OK, if we do exactly what they do, then we’ll be just fine,'” Hanley says.

While more agencies are moving toward a mobile working environment, many are not.

Cass and Hanley have spent the last three years marketing their own agencies using blogs, social media, podcasts and more that have helped their agencies grow. With this experience under their belts, they have now launched the GROW Program (Generate Revenue Online Workshop), an Internet marketing workshop for insurance professionals looking to generate new business revenue from online activities.

“People started asking us, how are you guys using these tools?” Cass says. “We started to realize that what we have is of value, and not money for our pocket, but it’s of value for the insurance industry to move it forward.”

Their goal is to show agencies how to use these tools to be more efficient and communicate with the consumers who want this type of communication.

GROW will debut at four state association meetings in the fourth quarter of 2012.

Cass says the idea is not to invent any new tool, but instead show agents how to use those tools.

“Ryan’s way is not perfect. My way is not perfect. But that’s the beauty of this,” Cass says. “As long as you know the basic foundation of what the tools are and what they do … you can use your own creative ingenuity to create a new way to market and develop an industry.”