Be honest, do you experience any of these fears? If so how are you responding?

PROSPECTING FEAR

We see agencies that are so afraid to pick up the phone that they pay outside firms to do their prospecting. This might be fine if it was done effectively, but that is rarely the case.

The high cost of this fear – Empty pipelines and inadequate growth rates.

Overcome the fear – Prospecting is the scariest and most difficult part of a scary and difficult job. However, producers are paid extremely well to do that scary and difficult job and must be held accountable for performing. And if you’re not going to hold them accountable and choose to outsource the prospecting for them, then adjust their compensation accordingly. But don’t even consider this unless you take the time to create clearly defined processes and messaging to ensure the effectiveness of the lead generation firm.

REFERRAL FEAR

Not only do we see agencies afraid to call strangers, we see agencies afraid to call their own clients for referrals. It’s not that they don’t see the value of referrals, but they are either uncomfortable asking or not prepared to do it successfully. In fact, agencies so clearly see the value of referrals that many actually pay others (e.g., benefits agencies with P&C agencies) to bring them the referrals they themselves are afraid to ask for.

The high cost of this fear – The high cost here is two-fold. The first is an opportunity cost when agencies won’t ask their own best clients. They lose the opportunity to put high-quality leads in the pipeline, and they lose the opportunity to enhance an already strong relationship (people really do like helping other people.) The second is a literal cost. A one-time referral fee would be fine, but we often see agencies paying new and renewal commissions to the referral source indefinitely; we’ve seen the split as high as 50 percent!

Overcome the fear – It is human nature that we want to help people who have helped us. Your best clients are more than willing to help you if you make it easy for them. Do a little research to identify other businesses they know to whom you would like to be introduced and simply go ask. If you will ask them for referrals and make it easy by already having the list of who you want them to call, you will get referrals. With a full pipeline, you won’t have to worry about paying someone else to generate referrals for you.

RETENTION FEAR

To me, this one may be the most mind boggling of all. We have seen agencies who are so afraid of being able to retain an account in the absence of the producer that they continue to pay commission to the producers even after the producer leaves.

The high cost of this fear – What was probably a marginally profitable account to begin with becomes even less profitable.

Overcome the fear – Make sure that every client has a relationship with the agency rather than with the producer. This fear doesn’t simply manifest itself when producers leave. Because of this fear, agencies allow producers to remain overly involved in the servicing of the account, which takes them out of new production activities and actually leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy of depending on the producer.