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... x No Thanks Loading.. Mentoring For Agency Growth 4/30/2013 by CompleteMarkets Editor , Mona Carpenter This content has not been rated yet. According to Webster's, a mentor is a loyal advisor entrusted with the care and education of a student .. a wise and trusted counselor. In my experience, a mentor without these qualities can't successfully lead a rookie. Whether an agency's mentoring program succeeds and produces financial rewards depends on how it's structured and managed. I'll address methods for setting up a successful mentoring program for agency growth, including: Mentor-rookie matching Training schedule Compensation options Program monitoring and management MENTOR-ROOKIE MATCHING It's key to put together two people who are compatible. Most mentor relationships last 18 to 24 months. If mentor and rookie don't work effectively together or don't like each other, the relationship most likely will fail. An important tool in forming this team to give both participants a personality test. The test should cover communication styles, preferred working styles, motivational needs, and work ethic. The test I like is called Personalysis. The Mentor Let's examine the qualities of a successful mentor. I recommend setting a minimum book size to qualify a producer to become a mentor. The mentor should be one of the top producers in the agency, not whoever has free time to work with a new salesperson. Only the best should be teaching! A mentor must make a long-term commitment, usually two or more years, to working with the rookie. This individual should have a real vested interest, not just in his or her personal financial gains, but in the agency's ...

...le 'deal'. Think back to your mentors. Think how you treasure the gifts of...

...s to do that. Set up coaches and mentors to help people learn and grow. A men...

...tlin's program is that it rewards mentors by paying them 10% of new business ...

... prospect call to get a quote from most often? The CSR. Who's in the best position to sell peripheral coverages to existing clients? The CSR. Who is the least trained salesperson on staff? The CSR. So who's missing great account development opportunities by getting CSRs to sell? You, the agency owner! We pack our producers off to mega-sales seminars for days or weeks at a time. They learn the fine art of needs selling, spin selling, pain selling, opening statements, probing, overcoming obstacles, and surefire closing techniques. We also hold producers accountable for appointment setting, X-dates, quote ratios, hit ratios, and profitability. Good producers observe a situation or hear an objection and immediately select the proper technique from the bag of skills that they learned from seminars, mentoring personal sales experience, and by monitoring results. Why not teach CSRs the same skills? THE THREE T's We become impatient when we see obvious opportunities turn into lost business because the right sales technique was not used. It's time to step back and look at the CSR in a new light — as a professional who can balance technical expertise with organizational skills while servicing the customer's needs. Your CSRs are resolving dozens of serious customer issues every day. As an agency owner or producer, you might not see this because most CSRs consider it part of their day's work. CSRs who do a super job placating a customer with a claim or accounting problem might well have the potential to sell. You just have to give them the three T's: Training, tools, and time. What ...

... must be a capable and enthusiastic support staff to help the producer with the marketing and sales effort. Good technical back-up is particularly important if the salesperson has no  insurance sales experience. Service personnel who are already dealing with a backlog can't respond appropriately to the heavy flow of new business, and the producer will quickly become discouraged. The back office systems and procedures must be running smoothly before you bring a new producer into the mix. The second absolutely crucial ingredient is to make a conscious shift in emphasis from a service to a sales organization. All the principals and producers must renew their commitment to the sales process. This might mean that they'll have to participate in the sales center lead-generation program, writing some additional new business themselves. Or they'll have to volunteer to be a mentor for the new people, spending a substantial amount of time directing opportunities and assisting with the onsite sales activities of the fledgling salespeople. The entire agency compensation structure might need to be redesigned to reward all who help revitalize the sales effort. Most important, many if not all of the principals and employees might have to adjust their attitudes. You can't expect a new employee to concentrate on sales when the prevailing atmosphere is clearly directed toward maintaining a comfortable lifestyle for the incumbents. Everyone and everything in the agency must convey the importance of a high level of sales consciousness. Inactivity breeds more inactivity. The third step to take before hiring a new producer is to develop a program to hire the right kind of people for your agency. There are 30,000 independent agencies in the nation ...

... the magic bullet' answer to staffing woes, but there's a problem-not many young people entering the insurance industry. This diminution is reaching epidemic proportions as many principals approach retirement age and discover their firms aren't worth what they used to be. The industry is in a four- to seven-year glut of agencies and brokerages that need to be fine-tuned and adapted to new ways of thinking, and carriers who seize on that opportunity are the players of tomorrow. If you don't grab this particular bull by the horns, you're going to be left with an agency whose affairs you're forced to manage. As an insurance company representative, your greatest challenge is to develop a systematic approach to helping your agents and brokers identify and hire talented salespeople. Currently a handful of carriers are working with their agents to put mentor programs and sales campaigns in niche-market areas, and assisting with interviewing, testing, and selecting future producers. Most of us stop short of our goal. Johnny Pitts of Libscomb & Pitts, Memphis, TN, says that he hires only one out of 100 applicants, but that the commission numbers justify his care in picking the chosen few. Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on printing, marketing, and developing. The end result is an agent with a brochure all about a new program, and four more brochures from other companies telling all about their new programs. The agency response is positive, but agents and brokers don't have time to put out their current fires, much less deal with several new sales pitches. If you want to succeed in your agency relationships, develop ...

... recognized and this reinforces your firm's commitment to the electronic world. Design Internet scavenger hunts to promote electronic research. Once you've implemented point No. 1, this is a fun way to motivate employees to learn their way around the cyberworld. Establish an electronic suggestion box. This offers the more computer-aware members of your company an opportunity to expand your technological horizons. Many of them were born into the computer generation and can offer you excellent ideas. Publish an electronic version of your employee handbook. Again, this reinforces your commitment to automation and promotes paper-free, efficient operations. Honor an electronic employee of the month. It may be the person who offered the best suggestion, the winner of the scavenger hunt, the person who gained the most ground in learning new technology, or the in-house automation mentor. Whatever the reason, acknowledge major efforts. Publish an electronic newsletter. Make it the joint effort of all your employees by asking them to submit articles of interest electronically. Investigate computer-based training programs and classes. Formal learning sessions are proving to be highly efficient and cost-effective for training and earning CE credits. Put your employees in your contact-management system. As you already do with your clients (I hope), use your database to help you remember birthdays, special events, anniversaries, and other appropriate moments of contact. Have employee pages on your Web site. Make each employee responsible for content about themselves, their families, their hobbies, and their interests. This gives your clients a chance to know your employees better. What's more, the employees will be attracting their friends to ...

... of topics from management to social marketing. Use company-wide e-mail to honor employee performance. Everyone likes to be recognized, and this reinforces your company's commitment to the electronic world. Establish an electronic suggestion box. This offers the younger, more computer aware members of your company an opportunity to expand your technological horizons. These people were born into the computer generation and can offer some excellent and creative ideas. Publish an electronic version of your employee handbook. Again, this reinforces your commitment to automation and ties in with the "paper-free" concept of efficient operations. Honor an electronic employee of the month. This might be he person who offered the best suggestion, the winner of the electronic scavenger hunt, the person who learned the most about new technology, or maybe the in-house trainer or automation mentor. Whatever the reason, acknowledge their efforts in expanding their technology horizons. Publish an electronic newsletter. Make this a joint effort of all your employees by having them submit articles of interest. Investigate computer-based training programs and classes. This provides a highly efficient and cost-effective method for both training and CE credits. Again, this will help make your personnel more computer savvy. Add your employees to your contact management system. Just like your clients, let your database help you to remember birthdays, special events, anniversaries, and other appropriate points of contact. Provide each employee with a personal page on the Web site. Employees provide the information, pictures, or other items that go on their page. This will help your clients get to know your employees, creates a sense of self-esteem ...

... money, and energy trying to get non-producing producers to produce; so once an agency helps these people find a different position that fits their skill set better, it can focus more resources on people who can sell. Once the production team consists entirely of true producers, what resources does an agency owe its true producers? Good customer service representative (CSR) when the producer's production is sufficient to earn a CSR, but not before. By "good," I don't mean a CSR who will do the producer's work for him or her. A fair wage for honest, good work. What is fair work? A true producer must generate at least $300,000 a year of self-produced commissions. An agency with a good reputation. An effective IT system. Quality training and mentoring. This is not only fair, but it is also smart producer management. That's it. Agencies don't owe their producers anything else. They don't owe them an expense account, a car or even a lead list. These items can arguably make producers more successful, but that does not mean the agency owes them these perks. These items are truly perks. What would happen if these perks increased as a producer's book increased? When an agency increases producers' perks as their books increase, it's focusing significant resources on its most important assets, which makes of sense. Agency expenses will decline if managed well because the value of the perks need not increase at the same rate as sales. Limiting these perks to reasonably sized books, minimizes these expenses. These are all aspects of ...