I recently spoke at a meeting for Mid South Association of Health Underwriters (Memphis). Before I had even made the five-hour drive back to St. Louis, I received the following email from one of the attendees.

"I wanted to thank you for speaking to our Mid South Chapter of the Health Underwriters today. It was very informative and brought a new way to look at doing business today. I used to work for a major corporation in my past career and was constantly getting sales training. Being an independent Broker, I have to go out and find the training now. That is why I enjoyed your presentation."

You might say to yourself, but he said he is "independent," so finding that training is up to him. You might think he's also the business owner. You might be wrong. Actually, you would be wrong.

He's one of those salespeople I mentioned above, recently hired by an agency owner to come in and help grow and maintain revenue. Like too many in our industry, he's in a huge position of responsibility within his company without any level of training for delivering on that responsibility.

Not training sales people is a catastrophic failure on the part of leadership!

I use the term "leader" here very loosely. These business/agency owners are jeopardizing their own ROI and the very future of their business. Worse than that, they're being unbelievably irresponsible and unfair in asking the salespeople to commit to the success of their business without a reciprocal commitment to the success of the salesperson.

Why don't agencies train sales people?

How can it be that this ridiculous scenario plays out time and time again in agency after agency? It happens for two basic reasons:

First, agency owners have convinced themselves that their salespeople just want to be left on their own and don't want to be "told how to work." If that's true of your salespeople, you've done a poor job of hiring. The best talent in any field needs, expects, and demands to be given the tools to be successful (as evidenced in the email above). This starts and continues with training on how to use those tools.

The second, and probably biggest, reason is that very few agencies have any type of sales process around which to train. And, don't try to tell me that quoting insurance and negotiating with the carriers is a sales process; it's not. It's nothing more than part of the job function we perform as brokers.

Not only is having a sales process and training around that process critical to ensure your ROI as an owner, it's a fundamental responsibility you have before you ask someone to be on your team.

Are you meeting your responsibility as a business owner? Once you do, you will be on your way to becoming the feared competitor in your market.