Insurance is a competitive industry. To truly thrive, it’s important that independent brokers and agents have a solid overall business foundation supporting their agency. It’s easy to get caught up in a cycle of implementing the latest tactic to drive sales or build morale, but most successful agencies have key fundamentals in place including the following:
Defined Agency Culture
Your culture is the first thing that will help to improve your more quantitative analytics. If you go into every relationship looking for the profitable venture and teach all of your employees the same, then you will certainly cultivate an air of profitability. A customer service culture will go a long way in the modern business environment as well. Approach your clients as well as your suppliers with a holistic mindset and you will already be outperforming 90 percent of the competition in your industry.
Efficient Marketing
For marketing to be truly effective in the long term, it needs to be cost effective and operationalized. Digital marketing has made this easier to accomplish, yet public relations tends to be an underused discipline within many industries. If you are looking to grow your agency, finding a way to create content that helps to link you to your community can be very effective.
Sales Process
Many of the best agencies have made their sales flow and revenue predictable. In order to accomplish this, you can take note of various analytics, most importantly your customer conversion rate. You can also gain a great deal of knowledge from dissecting your cost per prospect rate and the rate of return that your business expects to get on each prospect.
Target Markets And Products
An in-depth knowledge of the conditions within your target market will go a long way in helping to grow your agency. Many of the top agencies are adept at understanding and serving their clients. Offering niche products to a narrowly defined audience can also help to differentiate your agency from a potentially crowded overall market.
