10 Ideas for Making Insurance Agencies More Successful … Now

If you’re waiting for a hard market, you’ll be out of business.

The revolution is underway. In the simplest terms, no one wants to do anything they don’t want to do. If this sounds overly innocent, it isn’t. The supermarket delivers groceries, the dry cleaner picks up and drops off clothes and the milkman is back at the door. Most of us rarely go inside a bank and deposits by email are here. Why go to an ATM? Pharmacies are open 24/7/365, and just about any restaurant brings dinner to our door.

The iFood app not only plans customer-rated meals, but it tells the exact aisle where each ingredient is located in the supermarket. There’s someone to walk the dog and doctors are making house calls.

If we don’t want to, we won’t do it. That’s the new mindset. E-mails require too many keystrokes so texting takes its place with no more than 140 keystrokes to tell the story. We ignore online forms with more than three questions.

Whether it’s property, casualty, life, disability or healthcare, no segment of insurance can escape this revolution. It’s time to stop playing “let’s pretend,” as if nothing’s happened or that “things are just a little different.”

When will personal lines sales be mostly online? If Progressive Direct, GEICO and a few other direct writers have their way, the lion’s share will be there before we can figure out what happened. And it’s not just personal lines; term life already lives online.

The message is that we are totally intolerant of anything that gets between us and what we want to do. Americans have never liked intermediaries — like car dealers, retailers, insurance agents and particularly salespeople. Why do you think they call it “BJ’s Wholesale Club,” when it’s clearly a retail outfit? We may need an auto mechanic, but we don’t need a car dealer or salesperson. Life today is truly “plug and play.”

With agency mergers, consolidations and compelling configurations, is there a place for the independent insurance agency? The answer is yes, but with daunting conditions.

Here are 10 thoughts on what it will take to stay in business:

1. Solve something and don’t just sell something. The biggest problem insurance agencies face is that they sell something — they don’t solve anything. That’s why people don’t want to see you unless you can deliver the lowest price.

Bob Seltzer, Steve Stramara and the staff of the Seltzer Group in Orwigsburg, Penn. figured this out. They help businesses solve bothersome problems, whether human resource issues, workers’ compensation or other people-related problems. They’re a resource for prospects and customers. When they changed the way they think about customers, they changed their brand and the business exploded. If all you think about is insurance, you can’t meet customer needs.

2. Ditch the Mexican jumping bean-type marketing. Jumping from one gimmick to another is too many insurance agencies’ marketing story. An e-mail invited the recipient to a seminar on “World-Class Marketing Made Easy.” Who can possibly believe that any marketing is easy? Too many insurance agencies are looking for simple, cheap answers that deliver incredible results. When they don’t get instant results, they jump from one gimmick to the next. Marketing requires careful planning, solid discipline and consistent implementation. Unless an agency is willing to make the commitment, it will never become a marketing driven organization.

3. Use donations prudently.Donating to every cause, joining every club, contributing to every church, serving on every board and attending every meeting is over and done. That’s yesterday’s networking in more ways than one. Sure, a few donations are politically correct, but mostly it’s money frittered away and every agent knows it. Why not identify a need in the community and put your money and agency’s energy into making something worthwhile that becomes your brand? Invest in making a statement that engages people. When the calls and requests for money come in, you can candidly tell the story of where you’re putting your resources.

4. Develop niches. “All marketing is niche marketing,” someone said. It isn’t but it should be. Unfortunately, too many insurance agents didn’t see the memo. They work each day as uninspired generalists who attempt to quote every type of account and miss their greatest opportunities. Insurance agents are like department stores — bland, lacking focus and easily ignored. Today’s customers expect expertise, not just vacuous phrases like “a full-service agency,” whatever that means. If anything, both consumers and business executives want to deal with specialists.

Many agents wait for an insurance company to drop “a special program” for machine shops or the like in their laps. Then for three weeks they chase that until it peters out. Why not figure out several niches that interest you and have a potential for success in your market area? Then, find a carrier that likes your plan for writing the business. An agent with a plan will impress a carrier! Then, become known as the experts in these areas.

5. Stop hoping for a hard market. It’s “in” for insurance agents to talk about helping customers lower their insurance costs, while keeping their fingers crossed that a hard market will magically appear out of nowhere to beef up their revenues. Sure, certain classes of business may “harden,” but the capacity of the global insurance market is such that there will always be carriers on the street driving prices down with their appetite for more market share. If you’re waiting for a hard market, you’ll be out of business.

6. Help customers improve their businesses.After 25 years as a producer, Sam Martin, senior vice president of Lipscomb & Pitts Insurance in Memphis, Tenn., took a year off to figure out if he wanted to stay in insurance or move on. “I came to the conclusion that I wanted to help businesses become more successful,” says Sam. He figured out how he could do that by staying in insurance. He gets appointments with decision makers by saying: “I would like to review your workers’ comp account since at least 50 percent of employers are paying more than necessary.” Who wouldn’t want to see someone who wants to help them recover lost money? A high percentage also asks him to manage their insurance. Providing meaningful assistance creates what works, a performance-based relationship.

7. Make prospecting a plan. Insurance producers are incredibly optimistic or at least that’s the way it seems. They just “keep on quotin’,” hoping that something will stick.

That’s not even looking for the low hanging fruit; it’s trying to get your hands on the stuff that’s dropped to the ground. Then when an agent doesn’t have the lowest quote, it’s back to the underwriter to shave it a little thinner. That’s not prospecting and it’s certainly not selling. It’s begging. Serious prospecting is carefully planned and executed consistently. It’s designed to produce a steady flow of quality business over time by consistent and meaningful cultivation that sends the clear message that the agent is knowledgeable, customer-focused and helpful.

8. Tear down a useless Web site. Some are “fancier” than they were 10 years ago, but 95 percent of agency Web sites have zero value to a visitor. It’s all about the agency — how long they’ve been in business, a kindly nod to the “founder,” and a photo of the agency “team.”

Many feature pictures of the agency office building or some skyscraper-like structure aimed at creating the illusion that this is the agency “headquarters.” And, of course, there’s the inevitable photo of the principals, most of them men. Take a lesson from the home pages of the Wall St. Journal, Yahoo, USA Today and Amazon.com. See what they are doing to get their customers involved.

9. Ask yourself why you deserve new business.Too many insurance agencies just want more business, but they have no idea why they deserve it, other than to say, “We have great people” or something equally irrelevant. The question, “Why should someone do business with us?” demands a thoughtful answer. What makes your agency unique? If you’ve no compelling answer, you’re helping to reinforce the “all that’s important is the price” mindset of customers.

10. Take back your customers. Insurance companies have done an effective job of stealing agency customers. Bottom line, the carriers don’t need you or want you mucking around with customers. Getting all those pesky customers off your back may have seemed like a pleasant idea, so you ceded them to the carriers. Call centers became the solution and you are now the dispensable middleman, particularly at critical moments such as when there are claims. Doing as little as possible for customers may have an appeal, but it also has a downside — you’re no longer important to them. If the customer fails to perceive you bring them value, they won’t value you. And that’s the end. The Seltzer Group, along with others who understand what’s happening, have taken back their clients so that when there’s a claim, the customer calls Seltzer’s claim managers.

There are many more than 10 ideas for meeting today’s challenges and whatever tomorrow brings. However, it’s certainly worth noting that if you think you can just wait it out, you’re out — of the insurance business.