Your insurance and employee benefits producers will stop competing on price when three things are in place: genuine curiosity about the companies they sell to, a working understanding of business economics, and a structured sales process that the whole agency follows. When any one of these items is missing, producers will rightfully drift back to a spreadsheet and a product-and-price pitch because that becomes the only thing left to talk about.
Getting to more substantive sales conversations starts with a deliberate decision to make a shift to consultative selling, which I wrote about in “Why Employee Benefits Agencies Struggle to Adopt Consultative Sales Training.”
Leaders need to own the decision and execution for shifting the agency’s sales approach. But be prepared that while you’re getting out your checkbook, you also need to get out your calendar.
- You have to decide you’re going to train the team to work the “agency way,” and be aware that your producers may not love making a change.
- Leaders must commit to coaching their producers and holding them accountable for learning and using the new system. If you’re not willing to make the time to coach them, your producers may not do the work to learn and use the new system.
Making a big change can have a big impact, but only if you make the time to make it work for you and your team.
Producers who sell on value are curious about how businesses work
Consultative selling depends on a producer who wants to understand how a client's business runs:
- How it makes money
- Where it's growing
- What's straining it
- How the workforce fits into the picture
Business owners open up to someone who is interested in how their company works, and they can tell within a few minutes whether that's the type of person they're talking to.
Curiosity shows up as good questions and the patience to listen to the answers. The producers who do this well enjoy the conversation for its own sake, hear what a buyer says, and notice what the buyer avoids saying. Salespeople use these curiosity-based listening skills to create a client-centered plan rather than a generic sales pitch.
On the other hand, a producer who treats a discovery conversation as a hurdle to overcome will rush it to get to the proposal, focusing on the pitch. For these folks, training won't change that.
Leaders can help develop curiosity and listening in a producer who has the inclination. Curiosity is incredibly valuable in selling, and you should screen every new hire for it.
Producers need to understand business economics, starting with their own book
A producer who wants to talk with an employer about the cost of a benefits program needs a solid grasp of how a business makes and loses money. The clearest place to learn it is in their own book of business. Most books include a mix of profitable and unprofitable accounts, and the producer is likely unaware that they have profitable accounts subsidizing unprofitable ones.
When we sort a book of business, we’re reviewing the annual revenue each account brings into the agency from largest to smallest. When we run this analysis with producers, the smallest 50% of their accounts typically produce just 7% of the book’s revenue. From that one number, it becomes obvious how accounts can be unprofitable.
Then we weigh the revenue against the time required to service the account. Producers tend to leave their account manager's time out of the math. We hear all the time, "My account manager does that, so it doesn't take any time," and our answer is always the same: every minute your account manager spends on unprofitable business is time they can't spend helping your most profitable business.
Producers who get curious about how their own book is structured and see the value in making changes and building their business more profitably can walk an employer through the same kind of analysis.
A structured sales process makes consultative selling the agency's way of selling
Producers also need a defined structure for every sales conversation. Salespeople who are left to figure it out on their own will improvise, and improvising under pressure tends to end in a pitch and a quote.
A defined process works best as the agency’s defined way of selling, the method everyone in the organization uses, account managers included. It becomes an operating system for how the agency brings in and serves clients, so everyone knows how a sales conversation is approached, how it unfolds, and what promises will be made going into the presentation meeting.
When the whole team works from the same process, the account manager knows what the producer is offering before going into the finalist presentation. Nobody is surprised when a producer signs a new client, and the client gets the experience they were promised from the first day.
Leadership keeps all of this in place through coaching and accountability. Coaching sessions with producers should be adjusted to match the new process, with time spent on the questions a producer asks, what they learn from the prospect, and how they’re following the sales process.
How to start moving producers off price
- Build a consultative sales process that everyone in your agency will follow. If you don’t want to build it yourself, you can hire a consulting firm to help you build and train on it, which is what we do with our MORE System.
- Analyze your book(s) of business. Ask each producer to sort their accounts by revenue from largest to smallest and bring their results to their next coaching session. The conversation that follows will show you how well they understand economics and how curious they are about the businesses they serve.
- Get producers and account managers committed to your agency-wide, documented sales process, and rework your coaching sessions to reinforce it every week.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I get my producers to sell on value instead of competing on price?
Producers need to have, or develop, curiosity about how clients' businesses operate and an understanding of business economics. This can start with each producer's own book, and a single structured sales process that the whole agency follows. Leadership then reinforces all three through coaching and accountability, so producers have something more useful than price to talk about in every meeting.
How should a producer evaluate the profitability of their book of business?
Compare the revenue each account brings in against the time it takes to service, including the account manager's time. Every unprofitable account then needs a plan to become profitable or leave the book. The exercise also shows the producer how many profitable accounts cover the costs of the unprofitable ones.
Should account managers follow the agency's sales process too?
Yes. Account managers carry out the promises producers make, so they need to know how sales conversations unfold and what gets committed going into the presentation meeting. When everyone works from the same process, the hand-off to service holds no surprises for the team or the client.
Content originally published by Q4intelligence
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