Moving beyond sales skills to build a great agency

The following is based on one of The Covenant Group’s clients. All of the names and telling details have been changed.

We first met Pat Chandler while delivering a seminar at a conference for insurance managers. We had stayed behind talking with members from the audience when we noticed a well-dressed, broad-shouldered man lurking nearby. When the circle of people we were talking to broke up, the man approached, stuck out his hand eagerly and introduced himself as Pat Chandler, owner of The Chandler Agency. He told us he wanted to start working together, right away. He wanted all the agents in his office to hear what we had to say, and he offered to fly us out to his office the next week. We were flattered by his eagerness, but before I made a decision I asked him to tell me a little bit about his agency.

Pat had entered the life insurance industry twenty years ago and quickly established himself as a hotdog. In his second year, he qualified for the Million Dollar Round Table (MDRT), an achievement that often takes many years. He continued to excel, qualifying year after year. He was a natural salesman and a quick study, a deadly combination back in the old days. He was a conference junky, sponging up the latest sales tips and implementing them immediately. The results came fast and Pat could hardly have been happier. But as the years rolled by, Pat grew restless. Something was missing. He wanted more, but couldn’t at first identify what that was.

Pat spent some time on his apparent problem and realized that his frustration came from the fact that he felt trapped. He was from Texas, and he liked to think of himself as a Lone Ranger type. He was wildly successful, but he had, like many entrepreneurs, built his business in such a way that, unless he hopped on the horse, he never went anywhere. In other words, he made the sales, and he made the money.

This was an exhausting lifestyle. He was getting older and he yearned for more flexibility, more freedom, but was concerned. Without him, the horse would stay put. His income would stall. As he put, he realized he wanted others to ride the horse for him — agents that could work for him while he took time off to pursue some of his life dreams, such as spending months on end travelling Asia with no worries in the world. In other words, he wanted to start a business. And that’s what he did. At first, he hired one sub-agent, then another a few months later. And another, until five years later, he had forty producers. The operation was reasonably successful. There were a few stars, like himself, a few slow producers, but the majority were a steady lot. He was concerned about the agency’s growth, which had been slowing down the larger it got. Not what he was looking for.

As Pat saw it, the problem lay in the sales skills of his agents. A sales skill was an area he focussed on heavily. In the early days, he lead most of the training, doing his best to impart his wisdom; but with more and more agents, he simply couldn’t lead the training anymore, and the slackening business results were a reflection of this fact. Pat figured I had great sales ideas and he wanted me to come in there and juice up the sales skills. He was looking for someone to train his agents on things like how to get referrals, how to open up interviews, and closing techniques.

From what Pat had told us, we realized Pat couldn’t have been more wrong about how he viewed his agency. People tend to look at the world through a window that is based on their own personal experiences, and Pat’s experience of the insurance industry was that you lived or died based on how well you did face-to-face with your clients. He was convinced that building superlative sales skills was the key to success. To Pat, a successful agency was full of hotshot agents like him. But, as he was beginning to realize, trying to find or create forty hotshots is like trying to find forty winning tickets at a single lottery booth. This is not a business plan. Rather than inundating his agents with a barrage of sales tips, Pat needed to implement a clear plan for developing his agents.

The next afternoon, Pat came to our booth. We talked with Pat about the revenue tracking system we had developed and how it could be used as part of an aligned process to increase effectiveness.

Pat’s problem was that he saw improved agent sales skills as the miracle cure for his business. But, while sales skills are a key success factor, his agents’ sales skills alone wouldn’t get Pat where he wanted to go. Sales skills have to be part of a program that aligns: intention, process, and measurement.

We explained what he meant by these terms: “Intention” means being clear about what you want to achieve; “Process” is your method for achieving your goals, and “Measurement” is about providing feedback on where you are in your journey toward your goals. As Pat had explained, when he first entered the business his goal was to reach MDRT in two years. That’s a clear intention.

Before we even tried to further explain measurement, Pat jumped in. When Pat’s old company issued him his monthly statement, he used to plot his commissions on a piece of graph paper he kept in his drawer, to see how close he was to MDRT. That’s the measurement, he said — and he was right. We explored how the revenue tracking system could do something similar for his agents — only far more effectively.

Later that evening, we went out for dinner to discuss a solution. In the end, we decided that Jim would run our program for Pat’s top twenty agents. The program was designed around the intention-process-measurement methodology, so Pat’s agency would no longer be mired in a welter of sales tips.

The intention part of the process was addressed in interviews we would give Pat’s agents before they enrolled. These interviews established clear goals for each agent. The self-study and the workshop portions of the program focused on the 8 Best Practices. And during coaching sessions, measurement would be applied in the form of Jim’s tracking system.

Lessons Learned

A few months into the program, Pat called us. He was ecstatic. Revenue had grown 30% since the program began. His awesome results were the result of an alignment of three things: intention, process and measurement. “Intention” helped his agents clarify where they wanted to go. “Process” helped them implement an effective sales and marketing plan. And “Measurement” allowed them to be coached towards their goals.

One of his agents, during the intention phase, indicated that he wanted to do $20,000 of business in the third month. When the third month rolled around, his revenue tracking revealed he’d only done $16,000. During his coaching session, we asked him what happened to the missing four thousand. At first, the agent didn’t have much of an answer, but after further exploration, a number of sales skills were identified that needed work. It was through the act of measuring, that the missing ingredients become apparent. Without this process, this agent may never have known what he needed to work on.

Working on sales skills that are randomly presented to you won’t work. You have to know exactly what isn’t working. With guidance, this particular agent was able to develop the right skills over the next few months, eventually making up the lost four thousand, and then some.

One year later, that agent is doing $30,000 per month on a consistent basis. The Chandler Agency has broken through $10 million in first-year commissions from its 40 agents.

Pat has even found the time, money and peace of mind to travel to Asia for a couple of months each year.

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The Covenant Group is referred to by many as the place entrepreneurs go to become Business Builders. They are considered to be thought leaders and have authored the best-selling books, The 8 Best Practices of High- Performing Salespeople, The Entrepreneurial Journey, and The Business Builder.