Our core service is helping insurance agents better leverage the relationships they have with their clientele and we can break those relationships down into two categories, transactions, and connections.

A lot of insurance agencies, especially those who are desperately focused on acquiring new customers, spend a huge amount of their time prospecting via Internet leads and initially this can be a great way to accumulate new customers and get business on the books. However, these same agencies start to struggle when they decide they’re going to have a review appointment program because they are still approaching their clientele as if they’re prospecting. They’re just tapping their existing relationships to get more transactions. Clients hate that, especially if they already know you and they’ve already bought something from you and they’re willing to talk to you again, that means there’s some trust there and that trust is shattered when you make them feel like you just want to sell them something.

By contrast, agents who have really successful review appointment in programs focus on the connection, not on the transaction. Instead of depleting the trust that they’ve been able to incur in order to just to get a transaction, they focus on deepening and strengthening the trust that’s already there. Now, will they get the transaction in that meeting? Maybe, but over time they get more transactions and higher value transactions even though that’s not the objective that they set out to accomplish when they sat down with the customer today, and that’s not a paradox, it’s human nature. We all know this as customers, but for some reason, we forget about it as providers. Our need for the transaction makes us shortsighted and we develop what I’ve heard referred to as “commission breath,” and once customers smell that, the connection is over.

So if you’re serious about starting to pivot your company, just remember connections beat transactions every time.