When I was a kid we walked uphill to school every day at least 5 miles and in the snow.
We also had to go to the library to do research; thumb through index cards to find the book; ask the librarian for help to locate the book, and even worse, scan the book to find what specifically I was looking for.
Today, most of the information I want is online, searchable and attainable in seconds, not minutes, hours or days.
If you're a producer you've probably got one of these attitudes:
1. I sell myself, it doesn't matter who my competition is, what they do, how they do it, what services they provide, how old they are, where they are located, which carriers they represent, what clubs they belong to, or anything else. I sell me and researching my competition is mostly a waste of my time.
2. I sell me, I sell my firm, I sell differences. The more I know about my competition, the easier it is to develop a plan, a strategy to differentiate myself and win the business.
With that said, I've asked a lot of agency principals:
1. Who are your top competitors?
2. What accounts do these top competitors control?
3. What capabilities do they have, i.e. Loss Control, Claims Management, Wellness, etc.?
4. Where can I see a copy of their proposal?
5. And equally important, if I work at your agency, where can I put my hands on that info and how long would it take me to get it?
Most of the times the information was in the heads of the producers or agency principals… This meant you'd have to track down who knew something about this competitor and if you were lucky they had
something in writing and could find it for you. In some cases it took hours, days, weeks or even months to find the information wanted.
Is that really good enough? It's fine if you want to brag to your children how you had to walk to school in the snow, but if you want to be a "selling machine", don’t you need or want quality information on your competitors quickly?
Wouldn't you want to have your own competitor database at your fingertips that you could easily search?
I would, so I created it. Let me know if you want me to share with you what it looks like...