This could be the most important article you will read on agency productivity and increasing your agency profits.

An Approach To Agency Productivity All Agencies Need To Know… An Agencies Cross-Roads!

As an Insurance Automation Consultant the number one task I’ve been hired to do is help the agency staff to be more efficient. Why?

Bluntly, because increased productivity equals increased profitability. As commission percentages drop and the cost to run a business increases, this becomes even more important today!

When working with an agency the first thing I would do is get a baseline as to how productive the agency currently is. This shows the agency where they’re at before we get started and allows them to have a clear understanding of where they’re at regarding their productivity.

To establish the baseline I’d run some key reports from their management system. I always trusted the reports more than what I was told because people tend to over exaggerate things. It’s never intentional. People just tend to believe things are either far better than what they really are or they think things are far worse than what they really are.

Reports on the other hand gave me a far more accurate analysis of where the agency is at. Even if the agency didn’t maintain good records of the premiums on a policy I was still able to establish how many PL policies and how many CL policies the agency had. From this alone along with knowing how many PL and CL CSR’s the agency had and how much time was spent in the day to service their clients I could establish the level of productivity the agency was experiencing.

How many policies are each of your PL CSR’s and the CL CSR’s managing?

How many do you want them to manage?

Then it was a matter of pulling up the sleeves and teaching workflows and productivity strategies, along with teaching the agency how to more efficiently use their management system in association to workflows and the productivity strategies I teach.

What Is A Cross-Road?

So what is a cross-road, you are likely wondering.

Let me explain.

As your agency grows you hit an intersection, a cross-road as I’ve coined it.

At this point your CSR’s are not able to get all of their work done each day. Clients aren’t being taken care of quickly and promptly, policy tasks like open endorsements and renewals aren’t being followed up on and handled like they should be, and things are slipping through the fingertips.

This is where you have to make a decision and determine which road you’re going to go down.

For most agencies, in their minds, the decision is easy… they need to hire another CSR. They believe this is the only option.

It isn’t at all, which we’ll be discussing.

It’s also at this point where the agency experiences first hand the cross-road of the agency.

The question is, at what point of growth do you want your agency to hit this cross-road? When your PL CSR’s are buried at managing 600 policies each, 900, 1500 or 2100 policies?

A CL CSR will manage less policies because of all of the work that goes into a CL policy, but the premium dollar is quite a bit more offsetting this. In fact, pretty consistently a CL CSR will manage a book of business with a higher agency commission than the PL CSR even though the policy count could be quite a bit less.

Let’s Put Things Into Perspective

Let’s take a look at the following image which is showing you how your productivity affects your agency cross-roads and the profitability of your agency…

When we look at this analysis we see it starts by showing the number of policies per CSR. This is the magical number I strive to increase when working with an agency. It’s an easy measuring stick any agency can track and work on improving.

To simplify the explanation of this analysis I did a detailed video to explain it. You’ll want to make sure to watch this video because here I thoroughly explain all of this…

The video should’ve put everything into perspective and given you a clear understanding of the relationship between your productivity and your profits.

Along with this I shared a few tips I hope you caught.

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to predict when your agency is coming up to a cross-road so you can be pro-active versus re-active?

You can if you just analyze how productive your CSR’s are.

Just remember, like I pointed out in the video, I’m not including taxes you pay for each CSR, benefits and numerous other things. This means the agency profits are actually less than what I showed in the image above and discussed in the video.

Plus, this analysis is based upon CSR’s only and doesn’t factor in other staff you may have.

Also, I just recently talked to an agency in Florida and they stated they couldn’t hardly hire anyone for under $50,000 per year… that can certainly affect the numbers and profits also!

The bottom line is this, you need to analyze your agency’s level of profitability, know your productivity numbers (what I shared here is just a few of them) and then work on improving them.

You also need to accept that management systems are not created equal and they each have a limit to how productive you can become, some allowing you to be more productive and others hindering your ability to create a truly productive agency.

CP Manager Was Designed To Be The Most Productive System Available And Will Offer You The Highest Return On Investment!

Consider this: For Every CSR You Do NOT Need To Hire You’re Pocketing Between $30,000 and $70,000 PER YEAR Based Upon The Going Rate For a CSR In Your Area.

If you haven’t already, watch the video and then you’ll understand why I designed CP Manager to be highly productive and put “increasing your productivity” (along with “easy to use”) as the highest priorities for the system.

Schedule your walk-through of CP Manager now!

P.S. We provide our clients with a very thorough productivity worksheet for them to fill out when they initially become a client of our. We’ll then do this analysis again after they’ve been on CP Manager for 6 months and again at 1 year. This allows them to see first hand just how much more productive CP Manager has made their agency.

The other thing this does is:

• Allows the agency to see if they need more training to help their staff use CP Manager more efficiently which will further increase their productivity.
• Allows us to compare the agency to other agencies like them to see how well they’re doing. If another agency is significantly more productive it shows the agency what they can achieve with more effort and training. Or if they are more productive than the other agencies like them it shows they’re making good decisions on how they’re running their agency.
• It allows us, the vendor, to track our clients to look for other ways we can improve CP Manager whether it’s tightening up existing features or adding new features to help our clients increase their productivity even further. We want to know where the system can be improved so you can increase your productivity even more! Seriously, we want to know!!
• When we add new features to further increase our clients productivity it allows us to see how much of an improvement it made.

We are very committed to helping you massively increase your productivity. This is why we track your results… to see how well we’re doing and to have the information to continue improving CP Manager to further increase your productivity.

No other vendor has ever tracked how productive their users are, or would dare do this. For most it would simply be way to revealing of how unproductive their users are on their system. Plus, your becoming more efficient means you’re buying less additional users and it reduces the support fees a vendor will make from your agency.

Schedule your walk-through of CP Manager now!