Beware of Setting Too Many Goals for Your Agency

The agency business has a love affair with goals. Some focus on sales, while others deal with company volume demands and operational and financial ratios.

It’s a lot for any small business to establish and monitor, much less achieve. So, focus first on producer and personal lines representative (CSR) sales-related goals. Successfully hit these numbers and many other targets will fall into place. Plus, by concentrating on only a few, you avoid aspirational burnout.

Producer Goals

For outside producers, goals focus mainly on prospecting and production. These targets are often established for multiple time periods: weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually – but if you go this route, your producers have four sets of goals to achieve, which is far too many. To minimize overload, use calendar quarters as your producers’ interim objective. That’s only four goals a year. Combined, they equal your desired annual total, with target terms long enough to allow for some slow time and short enough to maintain urgency. Goals for each quarter don’t have to be equal. They simply have to add up to your annual amount.

Set these numbers with input from your agents and recognize they expect you to provide marketing, sales and tech support.

Prospecting Goals

These goals represent actions needed to feed and ultimately generate the desired sales. They might feature the frequency and views of social media posts, plus other digital and traditional marketing efforts, including emails. There can also be goals for the resulting contacts made, expiration dates collected and proposals delivered.

Sales Production Goals

These numbers are fairly straightforward, as they mainly relate to the number of sales made by the producer, premiums booked, and commissions written or earned. As such, they’re simple to set and track, but not always easy to achieve.

CSR Goals

Focus primary personal lines goals on cross-selling activities and retention. Others to consider include upselling, new personal lines sales, and prospect identification for commercial lines and financial services.

Cross-selling goals are set to achieve the desired number of policies per insured. Not everyone needs every policy, so these have to be flexible.

Retention goals are easy to establish and track when one rep is responsible for a specific book of business demarcated by an alphabetical allocation of clients. It’s harder to hold CSRs responsible when the agency follows a “first available” service format.

Agencies that compare their own numbers against benchmarks for P/C firms often find their operations wanting. This disparity can motivate improvement.

But consider what’s important to you and your office. If, as agency principal, you want to enjoy more personal time, your numbers may be impacted. Think of benchmarks as guideposts instead of absolutes.

If your firm is growing, your agents are hitting their numbers, and your carriers are satisfied with your organic production, you aren’t doing badly, even if some similarly sized agencies are doing better.