GREAT PASSERS! IMPROVE TWO-WAY COMMUNICATION
by Michael Manes
You might be passing along great ideas – but are your listeners receiving them?
Who are Joe Montana, Terry Bradshaw, Steve Young, and T-Boy Boudreaux? By the title of this article, you’d assume they’re all great quarterbacks — but with one exception. Hardly a soul has heard of T-Boy Boudreux, yet he could throw longer, harder, and more accurately than those three more famous passers.
The only reason T-Boy never made the Hall of Fame was his receivers. Great passers must have good receivers. Joe Montana and Steve Young couldn’t have gone as deep without Jerry Rice. Without Lynn Swann, Terry Bradshaw’s Pittsburgh Steelers would have been cellar dwellers on a par with the New Orleans Saints.
If either side of the relationship fails, you don’t have a completion. You don’t go anywhere. You might even lose possession of the ball and end the fourth quarter with another defeat.
Communications requires the passing of ideas to enable the exchange of meaning. A successful play involves the transmitting and receiving of an idea. Without the pass and catch, your efforts are incomplete or intercepted.
The Insurance agency business revolves around communications. We don’t manufacture anything, since we’re a service industry. We sell knowledge, information, and solutions to problems, and meet expectations. Our insurance products provide peace of mind.
Our agency team is on the field every day passing ideas, feelings, needs, and other messages back and forth between our customers and prospects and the companies’ personnel (underwriters, claims persons, etc.). Within this communication triangle, the better we connect with our receivers, the greater our score. The more “incompletes or interceptions” we send, the more ground we lose-and our possibility of failure increases.
Test the effectiveness of your passing game today. Interview each of your employees. First, ask them about their “people skills.” Most, if not all, will include “good communications” skills somewhere on their list of assets. Agency principals and producers will usually list these skills at the top of their list, because everyone wants to be a quarterback.
After you ask employees to list their frustrations in dealing with others, they’ll probably complain that other people don’t listen. “Others” are the ones who don’t get it. Your employees are suffering from the T-Boy syndrome: They’re great passers, but they’re burdened by bad receivers! As T-Boy would attest, this is not a winning combination.
Tomorrow’s world is a world of choice. Every consumer has unlimited sources of products and services. Turn the clock back several years and recall the big three television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) the big three automakers (Ford, GM, and Chrysler) and the big three magazines (Time, Life, and Look). Compare these limited choices to tomorrow’s reality of 500 cable channels, nearly 50 auto manufacturers with hundreds of models, and specialty magazines for any niche – not to mention e-mail, blogs, etc., etc.
In the past, good independent agents succeeded because of what they knew and the companies they represented. They offered products and services that were in demand to a marketplace with limited knowledge and limited sources of distribution. An agent could be in control.
Technology, a global economy, and competition have created a system with nearly unlimited products distributed through multiple sources. Comparative rating has opened the closet door on pricing. Regulators and consumer advocates have exposed product differences, and technology has allowed the product to be delivered at a minimum of cost to the consumer. The agent no longer enjoys control.
From now on, customers will rule. They’ll understand their needs and be able to buy their products whenever, however, and wherever they please at a minimal delivery cost. This trend is bad news for many agents, but others see this development as a challenge for the future.
The good news for agents is that traditional customers will be buying more products and services. New and emerging markets can be targeted by independent agents.
The one absolute in this new, competitive world is that agents who add value to their customers’ lives will prosper. You have to know the meaning of value to supply it. In yesterday’s world, we could tell customers what they needed. In tomorrow’s world, we must know what they want!
To uncover this secret of success we must know our customers intimately and be great communicators. We must target a market. We must be able to create a niche of one. We must penetrate the minds of our customers and companies to understand customer wants and needs, identify the carriers and products that meet these needs, and shape our systems to ensure profitable delivery.
You’re ready to hit the field, improve your play, and move to concrete results.
Your goal is to become an efficient and effective communicator. You’ll throw passes that are caught.
Practice these drills to prepare for the game:
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Focus on relationships: Be committed to developing the communications skills needed to improve your relationships.
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Establish a new reality: Determine the communication strengths and weaknesses of your organization and individual employees. Capitalize on the strengths and work to erase your weaknesses!
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Commit to a communications program: Dedicate as much time, money, and energy to making your employees better communicators as you do to making them better technicians. Teach your employees about behavioral styles, values, and cultures.
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Learn to listen and listen to learn: Teach others to listen, catching what your customers are throwing and throwing your ideas that they’ll catch.
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Read Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Incorporate Covey’s techniques into your workplace.
Keep in mind that we all have two ears and one mouth, which means that we’re designed to listen twice as much as we talk. Only our mouths can be closed.
Michael G. Manes can be reached at Square One Consulting, 625 Weeks Street, New Iberia, LA 70560, (Cell) 337-577-3885, or e-mail [email protected].