This post is part of a series on insurance marketing and training sponsored by Astonish.
After personally helping install hundreds of marketing systems in insurance agencies across the country, I can’t express enough the value of effective leadership and the impact it has on an agency’s success or failure in selling to the modern consumer.
Without effective leadership or an effective leader, agencies struggle to communicate the importance of becoming a more sales-focused organization. They struggle to find solid, measurable goals. They struggle to rally their whole agency behind a goal.
In this post, it’s my goal to explain what effective leadership is and how it can help your agency sell and keep the modern consumer.
What is Effective Leadership?
Effective leadership is the act of being able to clearly define your insurance agency’s mission and goals and get your whole agency to buy-in and become passionate about that mission and those goals. Without effective leadership you cannot implement a marketing and sales strategy, which means you’re letting your competitors capture valuable new business.
In order to become an effective leader, agency principals need to awaken their own passion for their business. When was the last time you sat down and defined your agency’s mission or the vision you have for your agency?
That’s a good place to start. The next step is writing down why your staff should care. How will the mission benefit the agency and, in turn, benefit them. If you can’t communicate the benefits of having a mission, it won’t be successfully implemented by the staff.
Principles of an Effective Mission
Your agency’s mission should define what makes your agency different from similar agencies within a 50-mile to nationwide radius. Defining what separates your agency from the masses can help insurance agents understand and utilize the mission in everything they do.
It should also be brief. A mission statement should define your agency and its purpose in 30 seconds or less. Here’s a generic example of an insurance agency’s mission statement:
“Our Astonishing Agency’s mission is three-fold, with each being as integral to our success as the next.
Product Mission – Provide customers with the highest quality insurance coverage in the most efficient time frame.
Community Mission – Provide community support through charity-driven initiatives.
Economic Mission – Operate and grow at a profitable rate through sound economic decisions.”
Defining a mission or vision for your agency is the first step in becoming an effective leader. In part two, I’ll share why effective leadership is important in more depth and begin explaining how to implement effective leadership.
About the Author: Tim Sawyer is the Co-founder, President, and Director of Client Services for Astonish. His company offers a complete digital marketing system that includes coaching and insurance sales training for local agencies. Showing agencies how to harness the power of company values and sales goals is just one of the benefits of working with Astonish coaching. Many successful local agencies are seeing extraordinary growth and profitability by incorporating the Astonish system into their marketing plan.