How to develop data-forward brokers

Everyone wants to be at the top of the leaderboard — Olympians, gamers and insurance brokers. 

That’s why gamifying the sales process could help incentivize brokerages and develop salespeople who are driven by numbers. 

Such an outcome is being seen by Sutherland Insurance following its development of a visual dashboard, which aggregates the brokerage’s production numbers in real time by pulling them from their BMS’s production report.  

Staff can see how the brokerage is performing overall, as well as their individual performance in relation to their peers. 

“That’s created its own internal competition [in] which, naturally, the highest-performing salespeople are always going to have a sort of competitive edge,” says the company’s president Zac Sutherland.  

 

Fun and games…and sales 

One feature of the dashboard, which Sutherland created using Microsoft Power BI, is a staff leaderboard.  

Reminiscent of an arcade-style ranking system, the leaderboard displays the initials of the top five sales team members and shows their aggregate premiums or policies in force for the entire month, quarter, and year.

It also displays their rank for different revenue streams — new business, production or policy retention.  

The first three staff members’ initials are accompanied by gold, silver and bronze medals respectively. The fourth- and fifth-place staff members have their ranks displayed alongside a number icon. 

The leaderboard visually motivates employees to maintain, or improve, their numbers.  

“We’ve seen the kind of returns of people being really excited and really fired up about what they’ve accomplished, and everybody else being able to see it too,” Sutherland says. 

But the brokerage also has found ways to motivate staff towards its larger goals by incentivizing growth through reasonable target-setting.  

This year, the brokerage made a 15% organic growth target, but initially set the standard-to-beat at 7.5%.  

Then, they told staff that for every dollar earned above that 7.5% target, 95% would be profit-shared back to them. 

“We’ve never done more than 12 on an annual basis. And growing as much as we have in the past few years, the percentage goals get harder and harder,” he tells Canadian Underwriter. “So, I laid it all out and reverse-engineered a new business goal, a retention goal, a rate goal…And we’re currently sitting at 16.7%.” 

 

Effects of increased transparency

One side effect of having a platform prioritizing data transparency is that it can push away people who want to fly under management’s radar.  

Conversely, though, it can motivate those who want to be held accountable for their performance.  

When the brokerage started reporting daily results in April 2023, the firm saw an “exodus of staff,” Sutherland says.  

“At the time, we were 36 staff and we had just under 10 leave in the first year, because we were being far more transparent and holding people accountable through data.” 

It wasn’t all bad news for the brokerage.

“The nice part was, because we had data transparency and data standards — and [they] understood the expectations, at least in terms of performance — we were able to hire people who knew what to expect coming in and weren’t surprised or shocked by it.” 

All in all, Sutherland says the brokerage has gained more traction by being transparent with its data.  

“Since we’ve been able to provide that information to our team, bring in people who were driven by that information and knew what the expectations were from the start, it’s really allowed us to kind of capitalize on what we have existing and then grow truly organically.” 

 

Feature image by iStock.com/Ilya Rumyantsev