You know it’s true that technology does pose a real threat to the long-term success of many insurance agencies and we see agencies who are trying to pivot toward a more client friendly, more connected model really as a means of future-proofing their business. But that’s a very defensive approach. I mean building connections with your clientele isn’t new. Successful agents have been doing it for decades and they’ve been reaping the incredible benefits of it. So let’s review some of the benefits that your agency will accrue as you pivot toward building deeper connections with your clientele.

First is more revenue and more profit. Agents who focus on building deep connections with their clients sell more of everything and especially they sell more high-value products like life insurance and financial services.

Second is that you get to shift from hunting to farming, so instead of dialing for dollars with Internet leads for every new policy for your business, you can sit down with customers who have already worked with you and talk about their needs and provide solutions that will make you money and that will better protect them because they already trust you.

Next is your pipeline. As you start to build these great connections with your clientele, you’ll start to develop a baseline of business that’s always available to you. You won’t have to start over every year in January figuring out what are we going to do this year.

Another important benefit that not everybody thinks about is what we call your policy to household ratio. If you’re stuck in new customer acquisition mode and you’re focused on commodity transactions, then you probably have a ratio of policies to households. That is the number of policies that your average household has a 1.5, 1.6, maybe 1.7. Whereas agents who really focus on connecting on building those deep connections with their clientele are usually in the 2.5 to 3 range or even higher, and by the way, the best agents we work with are well above 3 point, oh, those books are always producing more business for the agents who made the investment in building them.

Now here’s another huge benefit quality referral business. You may or may not know this, but you have peers in the industry who have totally discontinued Internet leads because of driving so much high-quality referral business. In fact, we believe this is so important to scaling your agency that we’ve developed some training around how to do it very, very well, but perhaps the biggest benefit is the impact that your agency can have.

As you start to deepen these connections with your clientele and as they start to open up to you about things that really mattered to them. You’ll have opportunities to create solutions to very important problems and to protect them from some of the worst things that life can throw at them, and your agency will have an opportunity to really matter in your community. We see agents enjoying these benefits every day and it wasn’t luck and it didn’t happen overnight. They were very purposeful about how they aligned with their clientele and they believed in the long-term results. And if you will make the strategic decision as the CEO of your agency to begin your pivot, you can enjoy those same results.