The 2027 Q4i Annual Planning Guides give everyone in your employee benefits agency a structured way to plan the year. There's a separate guide for producers, agency leaders, marketers, and your team members who aren’t in outside selling roles.
They're free, and they walk each person through reflection, goal-setting, and a step-by-step plan. It's the same process our member agencies use to turn their ideas and intentions into trackable habits and targets.
Start with the producer planning guide
New business is the lifeblood of the agency, so we recommend getting the producer plans started early using the Producer Annual Planning Guide.
Our guide helps the producer focus on a better approach to goal setting, using our gold, silver, and bronze goal templates to establish minimum and target account sizes.
The producer guide builds the plan from three angles:
- An assessment of the current book
- A projection of the ideal client, with revenue and conversion goals
- An action plan built on the daily behaviors that produce those results
Have your producers create a first draft and review it with the sales leader.
Wrap the producer plans into the agency planning guide
As your producers are drafting their plans, leadership should be working on the Agency Annual Planning Guide to create a vision for the whole organization. You’ll work through agency-level KPIs (key performance indicators) and five areas of the business that need your attention to create a solid operational foundation:
- Net revenue you're targeting
- Marketing that will feed new business
- The sales process the team will run
- Service standards your clients can count on
- Leadership that makes sure every person knows the plan and their role in it
Owning an agency often splits your time between selling and leading. As a salesperson, this leaves a gap in leadership, which is the crucial component for moving from a plateau to growing and scaling the business. Our guide gives leadership a structure to work from.
Note: If you run a single-producer agency and feel overwhelmed at the prospect of working through both the Producer and Agency plans, we’ve got you! We offer a combined guide that merges leadership and sales into a single plan. A small shop gets the same structure as a larger firm without filling out separate documents.
Bring in the personal and marketing planning guides
A plan works best when everyone has one, so the suite includes guides for the roles that aren’t responsible for front-line sales:
- The personal planning guide walks non-selling team members through self-assessment and skill-building, tying their individual professional growth to the agency’s vision.
- The marketing planning guide moves through a crawl, walk, run progression, focusing marketing activities to support your salespeople’s prospecting and selling efforts.
Put the plan to work all year
A plan only changes your year if you keep using it, so the guides are built to help you do just that. Get started and change your outcomes next year:
- Block the time
- Create the vision
- Share the finished plan
- Revisit it quarterly
Sharing the plan is almost as helpful as the work you put into creating it, because the team knows it and can help you keep it on track. Do not underestimate the power of your people to hear a vision and want to get there.
In our nearly two decades of coaching agencies, the very clear winners are those leaders who carve out time to create plans and use them as a guide throughout the year. The more they talk about them with their team, the more the team gets on board, and the more progress they make.
When the owner does all this in a silo and keeps it to themselves, the less progress they make. 🤷️
Download the 2027 guides and block the time
Let’s go!
- Download the 2027 Q4i Annual Planning Guides.
- Send the Producer Annual Planning Guide to your producers and the Personal Annual Plan to all non-selling team members.
- Put a two-hour planning block on your own calendar to start the Agency Annual Planning Guide (or the combined Producer/Agency Annual Planning Guide).
- Give your team a deadline for first drafts and a date to review them together.
The guides are free, and the process is the same one our member agencies run. Block the time now, and get mentally prepared for a different result in 2027.
Need support to achieve your plans?
Goose, our professional development platform, is the wingman you need to make 2027 your year. We host peer accountability and roundtable groups where producers and leaders get together regularly to share ideas and support one another in their commitments.
And if you have producers who would thrive with the consistency of a sales process, we teach the MORE System sales training through our Goose platform. Check out the resources and options for your agency development.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's included in the Q4i Annual Planning Guides? The suite has four guides: an agency planning guide for owners and leaders, a producer planning guide for salespeople, a personal planning guide for non-selling team members, and a marketing planning guide. There's also a combined guide for single-producer agencies that merges the leadership and sales plans into one. All are free to download.
Who should fill out each planning guide? Producers complete the producer guide, with their leader reviewing and coaching it. Owners and agency leaders own the agency guide. Non-selling team members use the personal guide, and whoever runs marketing uses the marketing guide. In a single-producer shop, the selling leader uses the combined sales/agency plan.
How often should we update the plan? Revisit it quarterly. Blocking time every quarter to check progress and talk about it as a team keeps the plan useful throughout the year. A quarterly review also gives you room to adjust goals while the year is still in front of you.
Photo by tatomm.