By Susan Toussaint, WorkComp Advisory Group
Despite an agency's efforts to educate and groom top producers, we often end up with reluctant producers. Last week we explored the reluctance to cold call, work on larger revenue accounts and charge fees for services that improve an employer's outcomes. Now let's talk about what happens after you've engaged with a potential customer who just won't sign the deal.
A prospect isn't a prospect unless the company is ready to do business with you within 90 days. If you don't reach a commitment after 90 days of assessing and dialoging, it's time to walk away and possibly re-engage at later date.
You must take three essential steps to make the decision to stay or walk away.
- Assessment: Is this truly a prospect? Determine if there is a need for your offerings through an assessment process. Assessments answer questions like: Are our business objectives aligned? Does the client truly want a consultative relationship or do they only want the lowest price? Assessments bring clarity to the situation. What we do with these answers is an indication of our level of conviction. If the prospect is looking for "apples to apples" comparisons and we want to work in a consultative manner, will we take the bait? Or will we walk away? If the prospect doesn't commit to the work necessary to improve the outcomes, are we going to commit our resources to them anyway? Or are we going to walk away?
- Dialog: Dialog is defined as an exchange of ideas. It is a conversation, not a monologue. It is amazing how many producers think they are facilitating a conversation when they are actually asking the prospect to listen to a "who we are and why you should do business with us" presentation. When we try to be understood by the prospect, instead of trying to understand the prospect, we can never determine if there is a good fit. We assume that they want what we have because we know it's good for them. This false sense of security often causes us to stay in the sales process too long, when a meaningful dialog would have shown us if a mutually beneficial business relationship was feasible.
- Commitment: An effective sales process requires commitments from both the buyer and producer. To obtain commitments from the buyer, producers must prove they have the ability to deliver capabilities. Likewise, for the buyers to commit, they must have clarity and confidence in the producer's ability to deliver.
Producers often make the mistake of trying to gain commitments at presentation. Presentation is not a time for discovery or for gaining commitments. If a commitment to a business relationship hasn't been made prior to presentation, we should have either walked away or postponed presentation.
Cross-selling reluctance
Perhaps one of the most interesting producer reluctances is the fear of cross-selling. For our purposes let's define cross-selling as the selling of services or additional offerings within an agency. A common example would be a property-casualty client becoming a benefits client.
There is a scary dynamic at play in many agencies: the fear of sharing business among producers and departments. There is a fear that one department will make such a horrific error on an account that it causes a ripple effect and the insured will take all their business elsewhere.
It is interesting that agency leadership does little to intervene in these matters, and in many instances, actually assumes this behavior is typical and thereby acceptable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What's really at play here is agency profitability versus producer profitability. In many cases agencies must cross-sell to achieve profitability. They can't afford to deploy resources to accounts that aren't working with them in multiple business units.
What do sales and agency leaders need to do to facilitate cross-selling?
o Assess: Is there a basis for these beliefs and behaviors? If there are service issues preventing cross-selling opportunities, you must develop a recovery plan.
o Set goals: How many of your property-casualty accounts place their benefits with your agency and vice versa? What process do you have in place to ensure that cross-selling opportunities are being discussed?
o Set expectations: How will you address client issues? How will communication take place within the agency?
Addressing producer reluctance is challenging. But everyone wins when producers are successful. You serve client needs, grow agency revenues and identify and capture opportunities. Most importantly when producer reluctance is overcome in one or all of these areas, nothing can stop the agency's success.
# # #
Susan S. Toussaint is the co-founder of The WorkComp Advisory Group, a sales training and consulting organization that works with agencies to leverage technical knowledge and sales strategy into successful new business development. Contact: susan@myworkcompadvisor.com or 888-496-1117.
© Arc, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.