6 Organization Tips to Get Your Insurance Agency in the Best Shape!

The day-to-day life of an insurance agent is hectic. Clients come and go throughout the day. You have policies to write and finances to manage. Staff members pop into your office with questions. Needless to say, the organization of your organization can quickly become unorganized, leaving you stressed. This stress is preventable with careful planning and minimization strategies. Here are 6 insurance agency organization tips you need to know:

1. Have a Plan

First, you may have once heard the phrase, “a failure to plan is a plan to fail.” This saying is as true in the insurance business as it is in any business. To stay on track, create weekly, quarterly, and annual goals for you and your agency. For individual goals, set aside time before the start of each week to write down your tasks and goals for the week. In fact, neuroscience says that you’re more likely to accomplish your goals when you write them down. Then, be sure to cross them off as you go. It may be easier to break agency goals down in order to make them more manageable to tackle, especially by utilizing the SMART goal technique. Be sure to have weekly meetings with staff to touch base on the progression of goals so that everyone is kept accountable.

2. Keep a Clean Desk

Next, it’s time to eliminate the appearance that a tornado tore through your desk. Scattered papers all over your desk surface create a few problems. For one, it leaves you scrambling, trying to find a paper you need. Also, when clients come to visit you, it makes you look unorganized, which will make them wonder why they should trust you as an advisor. Also, it can be a legal liability if you have sensitive client information laying around. Put papers away in drawers or consider going paperless as much as possible. Do your research; there are tons of applications out there that can help you go paperless and maintain a clean desk.

3. Where Are Your Prospects?

Third, over time, prospects accumulate. They can be lead lists you’ve purchased, direct mailers, or even past client spreadsheets. This leads to a prospect organization nightmare which will cause you to see less ROI than you could have or even lose money. How do you enhance your lead ROI? The answer: lead organization and management. To assist, many insurance professionals use sales software like Blitz daily to organize and manage all prospects they are working with. If you’re not using sales software, chances are that your producers aren’t reaching out to prospects as much as they should be. The truth is that it takes anywhere from 5 and 20 touchpoints to generate a sale. With automated emails and reminders, sales software helps producers be more organized than with traditional manual organization and follow-up alone.

4. Create a Referral System

Fourth, everyone knows referrals are integral to driving sales into your business. But how often are they generated? Do your CSRs and producers have an organized plan to follow when generating referrals? It starts with you, the agent, to make sure they have the tools and guidance to succeed! Develop a referral rewards program that is incentivizing to your clients AND employees. For example, you can have a leaderboard in the office with everyone’s name and the number of referrals they have generated for the month. Reward the winner at the end of each month.

Also, be sure to reward your current customers as well with, for example, a gift card for every referral. To generate the most referrals possible, many insurance agents use a web form that allows clients to submit a referral to your team directly from your website, social media, or even from an email campaign. With this well-tuned referral organization strategy, your book of business has the opportunity to boom.

5. Organize Your Customers

Fifth, be sure that you have a policy management system in place to hold all of your current customer information. If you’re captive to an insurance company, you probably already have one. If not, that’s okay. A policy management system will help you to reduce the paper trail by keeping all your customers organized, reminding you of X-dates, and allowing customers to compare their current policies. However, don’t make the mistake of using your policy management system as a database for your prospects too. While a policy management system is great for customers, it’s not for sales follow-up. Sales software like Blitz has many features like duplicate checking, automated emails, and automatic reminders throughout many different points in the sales pipeline. Having your customers and prospects separate keeps you organized and allows more time for sales activities.

6. Develop Sound Marketing Strategies

Once you understand your market, you can organize sound marketing strategies. Is your community mainly senior citizens? You may want to consider advertising in the newspaper or sending out direct mailers. Do you have younger citizens in your area? Turn to social media like Facebook, Twitter, or event Snapchat to promote and advertise. If you’re a captive agent, seek out your marketing manager or other industry leading experts to consult with on creating a sound marketing strategy to grow your business. In the age of technology, marketing is changing so rapidly that most people can’t keep up with it unless they’re an expert in the field. Click here to schedule a consultative conversation with an industry expert and learn about the different options to grow your agency.

These Tips Sound Good, Now What?

Consistent organization skills aren’t developed overnight. It takes sound repetition for organization to become a habit. Start with one of the tips above and implement it into your daily routine. Write the step down each day so you don’t forget. We at the Blitz content team suggest starting with the first option of ‘having a plan’ above because it will get you in the habit of writing down your goals and tasks to form more self-accountability. From there, you can focus your time and energy on implementing any of the other five organization tips into your life.

Hey, One More Thing!

Finally, we want to hear from you! What organization tips do you utilize that were not mentioned in this post? Leave us a comment below. Then, be sure to click here to schedule a free live demo of Blitz Sales Software and see how sales follow-up organization will drive more sales in your agency than ever before.