Same Producers. $3 Million More. Here's What Changed.

You've spent real money on producers and they're still not winning. 

Here's the uncomfortable truth: it's not them. 

A Cincinnati agency owner kept the same twelve producers she'd been struggling with, built a system, and went from eight million to nearly eleven million in written premium in eighteen months. 

Randy breaks down exactly what she built and why the single biggest misdiagnosis in this industry is treating a system problem like a people problem.

 Fix this before you post that next job listing. 

If this episode was helpful, share it with a producer or agency leader who needs it. 

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Transcript

 [00:00:00] I was sitting across from an agency owner in Dallas about three years ago. It was a really good agency. Had 12 producers somewhere around six to seven million dollars in revenue. And the owner [00:00:10] he looked at me said Randy I've hired five producers in the last three years. I spent close to a quarter million dollars on that group between base training and everything else [00:00:20] and I've only got one of them left. One. And he goes I'm starting to think I'm just bad at picking people. And I didn't say anything right away [00:00:30] because I was looking at something he had handed me when I walked in. It was just a one-page summary of the agency. It had numbers a few ratios and a few other things. And what I [00:00:40] was seeing on that page, it had nothing to do with the producers. And he had noticed I I'd gone quiet. And then he goes What are you looking at? I said [00:00:50] I'll show you in a second but first I want to ask you something.

Welcome to the Agency Growth Machine podcast, where it's all about transforming potential into [00:01:00] profit. And now your host, Randy Schwantz

Hey everybody welcome to Agency Growth Machine I'm Randy Schwantz author of The Wedge and [00:01:10] creator of Bignition. It's the only sales operating system specifically for commercial insurance agencies. Look if you run a commercial insurance agency and [00:01:20] you want to grow this is your show. And Today we're talking about the single biggest misdiagnosis in this industry. And when agency owners [00:01:30] think they've got a people problem what they've actually got is a system problem. So let's get into it. Most agency owners think [00:01:40] about growth through one lens. They kinda think like if I could get my producers to work harder if I could just find better talent if I could just fire the ones who aren't producing [00:01:50] things will probably turn around. And look I get it I mean it feels like a people problem because people are what you see every [00:02:00] day. But here's what I've learned after working with hundreds really hundreds of agencies. The symptom is the producer. The [00:02:10] disease is the system. Look I grew up on a pig farm in Lubbock, Texas. And my daddy used to say You don't blame the pigs for not growing [00:02:20] fast enough. You have to look at what you're feeding them. And the same thing applies here. If your producers aren't hunting you gotta ask yourself [00:02:30] what exactly are they supposed to say when they walk into a new account? How do they answer the question why should I move my insurance to you? [00:02:40] In most agencies the answer is well we'll take care of you. We're local. We got great markets. So are are you with me on that? I mean [00:02:50] that's what most producers are armed with. And then we wonder well why aren't they winning. Think about it this way. [00:03:00] You wouldn't send a soldier into battle without a weapon. But that's exactly what agency owners do every day. They hire producers tell them to go sell [00:03:10] and never give them anything to actually sell with. No differentiation, no documented service model, no systematic process for getting [00:03:20] appointments or displacing an incumbent. For the most part it's just go get em and then when it doesn't work they [00:03:30] call it a producer problem. So here's the thing when I talk about a system I'm not talking about a CRM alone. I'm not [00:03:40] talking about a pipeline dashboard. Those are tools and look tools matter but a tool in the hands of someone who doesn't know what to do with it. It's just [00:03:50] expensive software. And what I'm talking about is a repeatable process from first contact to signed client, every [00:04:00] step defined, every producer knowing exactly what to do, when to do it, and why it works. And I'll give you an example. I know an agency owner [00:04:10] in Cincinnati 12 producers have been flat for three years at around eight million in revenue and she did something every agency owner will never do. She sat [00:04:20] every producer down and said Walk me through your sales process. Step by step what do you do. And here's what she found. Every single [00:04:30] producer did something different. One guy led with price. One guy led with relationships. One guy just made friends and hoped they'd buy from him eventually. None of [00:04:40] them had anything on paper that said Here's what you will get when you work with our agency. Does that make sense? I mean no system. Just 12 individuals doing [00:04:50] 12 different things that they could hardly communicate to the leader. So she built a system. A proactive service calendar, a documented list of things [00:05:00] clients would receive, at what defined intervals, with accountability built in. And she armed her producers with that document. [00:05:10] Now when a producer walked into a new account and the prospect said Why should I move my insurance to you? They had an answer a real answer on paper [00:05:20] that they could even leave behind if they wanted to. And within 18 months her agency went from eight million to almost 11 million. [00:05:30] It was like $3 million in new organic growth. Same producers, better system. And that's really the whole deal right there. Stay [00:05:40] with me because I wanna tell you about the one thing that agency owner did in her very first sales meeting after building the system and it changed everything about how her team [00:05:50] showed up. The first meeting she ran she put up a flip chart on the front of the room and she wrote two columns. Left side what the incumbent offers. [00:06:00] Right side what we offer. And she called in one producer asked him to fill in the left side. What does the incumbent say when a client [00:06:10] calls? What does renewal look like? What does a client get between renewals? And there was just silence. And then [00:06:20] she asks Well how do we know that And he said I don't I'm I'm I'm just guessing. And that right there is where the training began. See most [00:06:30] agency owners run sales meetings like status reports. Here's where you are on your number. Here's what you need to do now. Now go. But the agencies that are [00:06:40] growing they run sales meetings like film sessions. Nick Saban used to say "We don't celebrate wins or mourn losses We watch film and we get [00:06:50] better every week every meeting." And that's what she did She stopped managing outcomes and started building skills. And here's the [00:07:00] thing about skills they compound. Every week her producers got a little sharper a little more confident a little more specific about what they offered and why it mattered. [00:07:10] And confidence is not a personality trait I mean think about that for a second. Confidence is what happens when you know exactly what to do and you've done it [00:07:20] before. You give a producer a process that works and run it enough times they become a different person in front of a prospect. [00:07:30] Your job as the owner isn't to motivate your producers. It's to build a system so good that motivation's almost beside the point. Are are you with me on that? [00:07:40] Because here's what happens when the system is right. Your best producers get even better, your middle producers start climbing, and [00:07:50] even the ones you've written off some of them will surprise you. And that's what happened in Cincinnati. Three producers she'd mentally given up on [00:08:00] within a year two of them were in the top half of her team. Not because they changed because the system changed. Now back to the guy in [00:08:10] Dallas. What I showed him on that one-page summary was this. His top two producers, his hunters, were the ones who had something to sell beyond price [00:08:20] and relationships. They developed their own version of a differentiation story and they figured it out for themselves over years. The other nine? [00:08:30] Nobody had ever given them that. Nobody ever sat down with them and said Here's what makes us different. Here's how you prove it. Here's how you show a prospect. [00:08:40] Four hundred thousand dollars in hiring and training and not one dollar spent building the system that producers needed to win.

Then he just said [00:08:50] Okay so it's not a hiring problem. And I said It never was. See here's what I want you to do after this episode. Pick your three most [00:09:00] consistent middle producers. Not your stars. Your middle ones. And ask them this question. When you walk into a new prospect and they ask why they should move [00:09:10] their insurance to you what do you say. And listen to what they say. Don't correct it just listen. And if what you hear sounds like we take care of our [00:09:20] clients, we've got great markets, or we're relationship focused. I mean you don't have a producer problem. You've got work to do and it's good work [00:09:30] the kind that fixes things for good. See the system is fixable and when you fix it the growth follows pretty dead gum [00:09:40] automatically, in fact. So subscribe share this with others who could benefit but before you leave think about this.

Commercial insurance [00:09:50] selling has gone through three eras and right now today you and your agency are living in one of them. Era number one I I just call selling 1.0 and that's how your daddy or your granddaddy did it. [00:10:00] 3x5 cards. Yellow Pages. Metal box on a wooden desk. And the strategy, You know give a quote and then hope you win it. No system no process no [00:10:10] differentiation, just whoever had the best number on that renewal day probably won. And then era two came along and that's when Salesforce and HubSpot and Pipedrive all had big promises. [00:10:20] Big beautiful dashboards, enterprise-grade everything. But do you know what it actually produced? A pipeline [00:10:30] report your manager could pull on Friday. And that's it. The training lived in a binder somewhere else the technology lived in a browser and they never [00:10:40] talked to each other. Meanwhile the incumbent already had the relationship, already knew the account, and always got last look. Selling 2.0 was about relationship building [00:10:50] consultative selling along with generic technology that slowed things down more than it sped things up. What it never gave producers was a system to win and grow a huge [00:11:00] book of business. And now era three selling 3.0. And frankly that's what Bignition is. It's one [00:11:10] integrated sales operating system where the methodology is the technology and the technology is the methodology. What do I mean? Seven steps to [00:11:20] seven figures for producers in one platform where the goals are tied to real life differentiation you can prove. It's tangible it's black and white it's concrete it's real. Appointment setting that's [00:11:30] systematic it's not random. Pre-call strategy that's built to displace an incumbent not just give a nice conversation. A selling process anchored on one brutal truth that nobody else wants to talk [00:11:40] about it and that's that the incumbent has to lose for you to win. And retention backed by documented deliverables not vague abstract [00:11:50] promises. And results well measured at every level. So there's three eras three tools and three completely different games. [00:12:00] 1.0 is beat the price, 2.0 is build the relationship, 3.0 and listen to this is engineer the displacement run the system [00:12:10] and win the account. The agencies stuck in 1.0 are being commoditized. The agencies stuck in 2.0 are working harder and wondering why nothing sticks. [00:12:20] And the agencies running 3.0 they're compounding every year every producer every account. That's selling 3.0. That's Bignition. [00:12:30] Come find us. Hey if you like this leave a review I'm Randy Schwantz. Go lock it up and I'll see you next week.

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