004: How to Make Sure Your Producers Pay for Themselves in 18 Months

03/15/21 • 26 min

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

On this episode of the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast, Todd tackles a question he gets often: What should a producer’s daily tasks look like? The answer is key to your agency’s success. Getting your producers working on the right things—with the right systems in place—makes the difference between stagnant sales and a skyrocketing agency!

Tune in to learn:

The #1 mistake sales agents make when hiring producers.
How many internet leads you need to close one household.
What should you do when your direct mail contact rate is low?
The peak times to reach prospects and maximize your contact rate.

Todd gets super tactical in this episode—don’t miss it!

Links & Resources

Insurance Agents Think Tank on Facebook

Episode Transcript

Todd: [00:00:00]
The moral of the story is you have to have a system set up in place. You have to know what the statistics are. You have to be willing to commit, to invest in a marketing plan and payroll in order to see scale that generates the returns. They’re not hiring a producer without a marketing system in place, and really wasting their time trying to get it to work with a new producer without statistics.

Hello and welcome to the Insurance Agents Think Tank podcast. I’m your host, Todd McLain. And this podcast is all about how to grow and scale your agency. Today’s topic is a question I get often: Todd, what do your producer’s daily tasks look like? What do they do on a daily basis? And don’t forget, you can check out this podcast and all our other podcasts on our website AgentsThinkTank.com.

Be sure to search for our Facebook group on Facebook. It’s the Insurance Agents Think Tank. So let’s dive into our producers’ daily tasks. This is a really complex question, right? It’s there’s so many variables and it all depends on what is your producer do. Okay. Meaning, do you already have set up marketing in place or did you hire a kind of producer slash hybrid?

Meaning, are they going to also produce their own marketing? Because this is probably the number one issue I see agents make when they hire producers, you don’t already have a marketing system in place that’s generating a set amount of quotes.

So you don’t know what your closing ratio is on average and your contact rate is on average for that marketing type it becomes impossible, or you make unrealistic expectations from the get go, because you might be having that producer generate their own leads.

And in reality, what you really created was a position where somebody is not only a producer, but they’re also a marketer. And when you give somebody that much responsibility, You have to rethink what their goals need to be and what their daily tasks look like. So, I mean, back in the day when I started my agency, I also had a producer/marketer until I got to the point where I realized, okay, I just need one marketer and they’re going to generate leads for me because now I can statistically find out, all right.

If I have them on a dialing system and they’re using these scripts and I’m coaching them on those scripts, they can generate. You know, out of a hundred calls, they contact 10 people, they generate one quote, Then I quote it call it because I’m the producer as the agent. And then what I ended up doing is then building out departments within my office.

I built a sales team, which is my producers. I built a service team, my CSRs, and then I have a marketing team. And by departmentalizing that I was able to really dive into numbers to help me understand how to scale. Who needs, what type of training, and really dial in on what things I need to look into.

So first and foremost, for this podcast to really help you, is, do you have marketing in place or are you making your producer also be a marketer now?

What kind of leads is your marketer, or I should say producer calling is really important too. And I’m going to share my screen here. If you’re on YouTube, if you check us out on YouTube, you’ll be able to see my notes. If you want to, it doesn’t really matter. You don’t need them to go to YouTube. You can listen to the podcast, but the first thing I want to make sure we do before structuring a producer’s Day, we’ve got to figure out how many calls they need to make to make the sales that they need to make, to generate the premium they need to generate.

So, first and foremost, you need to figure out what are their goals. How are they going to pay for themselves? How’s your marketing structured. Okay. In order to do that, we need to look at, for each marketing type, what is the contact rate of that lead type...

Tune in to learn:

The #1 mistake sales agents make when hiring producers.
How many internet leads you need to close one household.
What should you do when your direct mail contact rate is low?
The peak times to reach prospects and maximize your contact rate.

Todd gets super tactical in this episode—don’t miss it!

Links & Resources

Insurance Agents Think Tank on Facebook

Episode Transcript

So first and foremost, for this podcast to really help you, is, do you have marketing in place or are you making your producer also be a marketer now?

Previous Episode

003: Craig Wiggins - A $40M Agency’s Key to Growth

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

Craig Wiggins scaled his agency to $40,000,000/yr, and he knows a thing or two about hiring! In this episode, you’ll learn all about how to hire the agents you’ll need to scale your agency, and how to avoid the “hiring emergencies” that push you into bringing on the wrong people.

You’ll learn how to cut the guesswork out of your hiring process, so you can bring new agents on with confidence. Along the way, Craig shares interview techniques from his years of experience, so you can understand who you’re really hiring.

Should you be looking for a specific personality when you hire? Craig has the answer. He’ll also share the #1 question to ask before signing a new agent!

Links & Resources

Craig Wiggins’ Links

Episode Transcript

Craig: [00:00:00]
When you make hires, it’s not just the interview. It’s not just the pay plan. It’s not how you search, how you recruit. It’s how you onboard and how you truly develop these people so that they accomplish what they need to accomplish. If you will do that, you know, and Zig Ziglar said it before, right?

You help people get what they want and get everything that you want. I’m a firm believer in that if I take their goals and I look at the agency goals, chances are those things intersect and everybody’s good.

Todd: [00:00:32]
All right. Welcome to the Insurance Agents Think Tank show. I’m your host, Todd McLain. And this podcast is all about how to build and scale your agency. Today’s topic is all about hiring. That’s a big topic. It’s a hot topic right now, especially with agents trying to scale after this last year and a lot of changes going on in the industry.

So. There’s a lot about this topic, especially, you know, back in the day when I started, I would just like throw up an ad on Craigslist because I thought I needed to hire somebody. And I didn’t really go through all the befores and afters about, you know, the consequences of not thinking through hiring somebody.

And I noticed as a new agent, I was churning staff less than right. And so I, I think this podcast is really important to have somebody like Craig Wiggins. Who’s our guest, you know, an expert in all things hiring and scaling agency. So Craig, thank you so much for being on the program. And if you want. so if you want to check out this podcast and see all of our other podcasts, just go to www.AgentsThinkTank.com and you can see all the episodes and download all the episodes. So again, thanks again, Craig. Now can you tell the audience, for people who might not know you tell us a little bit about yourself.

Craig: [00:01:46]
Yeah, well, Hey, thanks. First of all, I appreciate the invite. I appreciate being, getting the opportunity to come on the podcast with you. I’ve started the insurance business about 25 years ago. Started scratch. really had no clue what I was doing. I scored low potential twice on their, on their entrance exam.

Had no movie, no education, no experience. I went to college, but as soon as I found out that you could leave whenever you wanted and they wouldn’t call your mom and your daddy. That that was pretty much college for me. So I don’t know how I even got into this deal. I don’t know how they, they approved me for contract, but they did.

And, you know, I got started in and, Didn’t take me long to figure out maybe they were right about that assessment. Maybe I was low potential. Cause it was really hard. And you’re talking about, you know, the struggles that you had. I had all kinds of struggles, especially with people, you know? So

Todd: [00:02:36]
Well don’t feel bad because I dropped out of college my first semester. So we did something right.

Craig: [00:02:42]
It took me a little longer. I’m like I’m sitting in classroom and this guy just gets up and leave. And I’m like, dude, that guy just left. He didn’t ask him. He’s like I said, in high school, you can leave. If you want to leave. I’m like, well, it’s like 75 degrees outside....

Next Episode

005: The Insurance Dudes - Multiply Your Revenue, Even on Vacation

Craig Pretzinger and Jason Feltman are The Insurance Dudes, host of The Insurance Dudes Podcast, the best resource for agents in the industry. They help agents compress their learning curve to achieve exceptional results.

Craig and Jason built the #1 podcast in the industry from scratch by dedicating their time and energy to delivering episode after episode of actionable content.

Today they talk to Todd all about a hot topic: telemarketing. Tune in, and you’ll learn:

• The biggest mistakes to avoid when telemarketing.
• How to reduce turnover in your agency.
• Tactics to turn normal agents into superstars.
• Keeping your agency going (and growing) even when you’re on vacation!

Links & Resources

The Insurance Dudes’ Links

Website: TeleDudes
Podcast: The Insurance Dudes Podcast
Facebook: The Insurance Dudes Group - Facebook
Instagram: @insurance_dudes_podcast
LinkedIn: The Insurance Dudes Podcast

Episode Transcript

Jason Feltman: [00:00:00]
Here’s the thing: the old school of cracking the whip, coming down on people, it doesn’t work. It de-motivates. You’re the coach. You have to coach them into it. The most expensive thing in an agency is turnover, and then the retraining. So that would be the skill that I would get good at before constantly hiring and firing.

Todd: [00:00:27]
All right. I am here with the Insurance Dudes, right? That’s what you guys call yourselves.

Jason Feltman: [00:00:33]
We are the dudes.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:00:34]
That’s what they call us.

Todd: [00:00:36]
Well, Hey, Jason and Craig, really glad to have you on. You guys are listening to the Insurance Agents Think Tank Podcast, I’m your host, Todd McLain. You can find us at AgentsThinkTank.com to listen to all our podcasts.

Again, Jason, Craig, thanks so much for coming on. Today’s podcast is all about telemarketing. It’s a hot topic, right? And over the years we’ve slowly been getting hit with TCPA, with different kinds of calling laws, it just feels like it’s getting more and more difficult to telemarket. So I’ve been getting inundated with people asking, how are you doing it?

How, what are you doing? And so I thought it would be really good to have a podcast on telemarketing and you guys are experts way more experience than I have in telemarketing. So I’m really glad that you’re here. Thank you very much.

Jason Feltman: [00:01:28]
Thank you. This is awesome.

Craig Pretzinger: [00:01:30]
Thank you, Todd.

Todd: [00:01:31]
Tell us a little bit about yourselves, Jason, and then Craig, can you tell the audience who you are and what kind of agency you have? A little bit of background.

Jason Feltman: [00:01:41]
Yeah. So my name is Jason Feltman. I live here in Huntington Beach, California. started, in the insurance industry about a little over four years ago, bought a struggling book. didn’t know how to sell anything. At first and really try to figure that out my first year, towards the end of the first year, realized that we could actually maybe even bonus.

So, took some money out and invested into some live transfers, that was able to get us into bonus territory, which could make this thing actually, give us enough capital to, to, to start rowing the boat here. So once, once, we were able to do that. we realized real fast that live transfers were expensive.

They were in short supply that the, super inconsistent I would pull out my hair every time one didn’t work out or, you know, one dropped and, and my, you know, the agents didn’t get it or something. And, so it kind of freaked me out. So, as I was talking to some of the, Some of the lead companies, they were saying that they basically buy these leads, right.

They buy internet leads from, from all these aggregators and then they, they have a pool of them. They can’t sell them all. There’s more supply than demand, but they’re also there. No, they’re not only selling to seven other agencies. They’re also calling on them, generating live transfers to the leads that they’ve already sold and then transferring them to the agents for, you know, sometimes over a hundred bucks a transfe...