Transforming Office Culture

Many brokers and producers think sales training is a waste of time and money. You know what? I agree! As traditionally done, sales workshops or seminars are extremely limited; usually they don’t get the results people are looking for.

For most brokers and producers, attending a one-off sales training seminar is an inspirational thing. They pick up a few tips; they may even be energized when they get back in the office Monday morning. Quickly, however, they get bogged down in the same structure and culture of the brokerage they left. Enthusiasm fades. Resistance to new ideas continues. Old habits kick in.

If the environment doesn’t change, the people in the environment are not likely to change either. What is the solution? Change the environment. There is an opportunity to create a sales culture – we like to call it ‘The Wedge Sales Culture’ – and will truly transform how your brokerage does business.

The Wedge is a sales strategy I developed more than 10 years ago. It is based on one simple principle: in most sales engagements, there are three people – you, the prospect, and the current vendor. To win the business, you have to be able to break the relationship between the vendor and the prospect. If not, you will lose. The Wedge is a simple concept, but many underlying layers will determine how successful a brokerage is in adopting it across the entire company. We realized this when we first started The Wedge sales training sessions.

INTEGRATING THE WEDGE

Certainly, we are happy to do workshops and take clients’ money. But we often found that resistance to change was embedded in an organization’s culture. We wanted to get past that hurdle. Specifically, we wanted to see if any brokerage executives would take all of the tools we have developed and put them together in a company-wide program.

Fortunately, we found several agencies in the U.S. willing to pick up the mantle. To date, we have worked with 50 insurance agencies to go beyond quick-fix workshops and deliver a consistent, concrete and measurable model of sales performance. Two particular agencies, Summit Global Partners and Higginbotham & Associates, both Texas-based firms, were among the early proponents of The Wedge Sales Culture. Recently, we have been working more closely with several Canadian brokers.

Along the way we have learned some hard lessons. The first is the importance of aligning the four major categories of personnel in a brokerage operation:

* Executives

* Middle management, including sales management

* Sales producers

* Customer service staff

We often see just one group of people at our workshops; this is often either executives or sales producers. When they go back to the office, they may as well be speaking a different language to service staff.

Why is buy-in from all four groups so important? Every single individual employed by your firm, full-time or part-time, has some measurable impact on your success. Therefore, your people will feel ownership in your success to the degree their jobs are defined as contributing to that success. Their buy-in will help focus them on the aspect of their jobs that most directly affects sales and growth, making them more sales-conscious in the way they perform their duties.

FIVE STEPS TO THE WEDGE

There is a five-step formula for change:

* Step 1: Three-Year Vision

* Step 2: Strategy

* Step 3: Routines and Habits

* Step 4: Celebrating

* Step 5: Cultural Network

Real change in an organization begins with vision. It involves taking action to become something in the future that you are not today. That may sound elementary, but it surprises to me to learn how few businesses set growth goals beyond the current year – if at all. Often, that means their profitable growth, if any, will be incremental.

A vision is not an esoteric, pie-in-the-sky pronouncement. It is a carefully articulated set of specific goals expressed in dollar terms, extending out at least three years. A three-year vision is important: it will be the benchmark against which your brokerage can measure its performance month-to-month and quarter-to-quarter. Also, it is a unifying symbol that focuses everyone in your organization on your common objective.

Strategy is the next pivotal step in integrating a sales culture. For The Wedge, strategy is aimed at achieving two goals: (1) creating more opportunity for your salespeople to win accounts and (2) involving everyone in your organization in the pursuit and retention of new business. Sounds good, but this brings up several questions and challenges. How can you make the most of your limited time to win new accounts? How many and what size of accounts should you be handling to increase your profit? Which accounts should you over-service, leave to your customer service centre to handle or consider discarding?

The Wedge’s Sales Culture strategy requires your brokerage to do four things to accelerate your profitable sales growth:

* Position your business for profitability and growth.

* Leverage your best clients for introductions to prospects.

* Grow your client base using The Wedge.

* Track results on a scoreboard, so you can analyze those results and reward achievement.

Within these four subgroups, The Wedge has an array of techniques, methods and scripts to ensure you are on track.

FOLLOW-THROUGH

What good is a strategy if you don’t follow through? This is where Step 3 – ingraining routines and habits into your brokerage – comes in. In this stage, you look well beyond your firm’s organizational chart, which really only shows the bureaucratic pecking order. We have found that four key roles are vital: culture creator, coach/mentor, product manager and administrator. Each of the four personality types is important in creating the right kind of sales culture, one that integrates vision and strategy with specific follow-up and tracking of results.

In 2003-04, my firm conducted a survey of some of our clients to study the “soft factors” that can affect business performance. The greatest deviation from the ideal benchmark related to how well, in the eyes of the employees, their management was rewarding and reinforcing productivity. It was not a matter of compensation or bonuses. As they saw it, reinforcement could have been a simple acknowledgement of a job well done, or some other way of celebrating success.

Far too few brokerages take advantage of morale-boosting, team-bonding activity. That is why finding ways to regularly celebrate success is Step 4 of implementing The Wedge Sales Culture. An old proverb says victory has a thousand fathers and defeat is an orphan. It is a wise saying to keep in mind each time your company wins.

Step 5, the final step of the sales culture process, is to establish a lasting cultural network that will be sustained as employees are hired, leave or switch roles within your organization. In its distilled form, the Wedge Sales Culture consists of processes, tools, methods and techniques that can be perpetuated and replicated. When that happens, your company’s employees will share a common network that energizes discussion in the boardroom, as well as chitchats around the water cooler. Your company’s new employees will benefit from tapping into an established sales network, shortening their learning curve as they grow into productive participants in your sales culture.

DOES IT WORK?

These are words we use to describe The Wedge Sales Culture. The big question is: Does it work? Does it result in improved profitability? All of our client U.S. agencies have reported extremely positive results. Of the two agencies I mentioned above, Summit Global has experienc ed a 20:1 return on investment. Summit Global went from approximately US$50 million in annual sales to US$97 million in one year. Now it is among the top 25 insurance, risk management and benefits consulting firms in the country. Higginbotham increased sales from approximately US$40 million to more than US$270 million. Currently one of the U.S.’s 100 largest insurance brokerages; in 2002, National Underwriter named Higginbotham the ‘Commercial Insurance Agency of the Year.’

A sales culture is a long-term investment in making your firm more profitable, plain and simple. We think The Wedge Sales Culture crystallizes this investment into a strategy for ongoing success. More Canadian brokerages may be realizing that in the near future.