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Are you on a production plateau and you need a little nudge to get going? Most advisors are because they’ve never learned how to create the perfect campaign to grow their business; as a result, they leave their success up to chance.

Benjamin Franklin said it best when he said, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

I believe that is true. The best way to plan is to design a campaign, an organized course of action to achieve your goal, and take the right steps to do so.

Do you ever feel like your pipeline is stuck? You know why prospects need to take the next step, but for some reason, they don’t seem to have any urgency to want to meet, send you their statements, or even make a decision on the recommendations that you’ve worked so hard on to help them reach their financial goals.

Kevin Brady, a former U.S. Representative said, “Urgency creates action.”
Therein lies the problem; most advisors/agents don’t have a well-thought-out process for creating urgency in their sales pipelines and for maintaining the momentum!

Let’s take a look at just a few examples of creating urgency, in each stage of the pipeline and how one advisor did just that.  

Like most businesses, your workload will ebb and flow depending on the season. With summer approaching, many clients and prospects take a step back from their financial focus to take advantage of the warm weather. Between kids having the summer off and vacations to the beach being at the forefront, advisors tend to be a little slower between June and August. Here are a few suggestions to keep your business moving forward during this quieter season.

Have you noticed that you get more emails now than you ever did before?  After constantly being interrupted by emails you most likely have become conditioned to feeling obligated to view each email the minute it arrives.

David Allen, the author of the book Getting Things Done writes, “There are no interruptions, only mismanaged inputs.”

In many respects, this is very true­, in that the emails that you receive all day are merely as important as you perceive them to be and the way that you react to them can either be a positive or a negative depending on what type of time management boundaries you establish.

Business wisdom said, “The customer comes first.”

Terrible idea. Unless you’re a solopreneur, your customers are dealing with your employees. If your employees don’t feel valued, customers won’t have a good experience.

So the wisdom evolved: “We put our people first.”

I bought into that idea for a long time. It worked pretty well. But something about the either/or proposition never quite felt complete.

Then it came to me: the mindset necessary to produce satisfied, loyal employees is the same mindset necessary to produce satisfied, loyal customers.

It turns out that employees and customers are people. We’re in the people business.

How often do you hear about the importance of customer satisfaction?

And how hard do you and your team work to deliver it?

And how many customers leave anyway?

Way too many, I’m guessing.

The truth is that customer satisfaction doesn’t translate into growth and profitability the way the gurus say it will. Why? Because the customer sees a better price and assumes that the service will be good enough. And if they’re wrong, by the time they figure it out, it will be too late for you.

Have you ever run into the same business challenge repeatedly and you just couldn’t get past it? If so, you are most likely on a production plateau and in need of a tool or technique to create a transformational moment. In other words, you need a Game Changer! 
 
Mickey Mantle, who had an impressive 536 home runs during his baseball career, said, “It's unbelievable how much you don't know about the game you've been playing all your life."

Let’s take a look at a few Game Changers that can have a lasting impact on your business.

Profit is virtuous.

Yes, it is.

And profit—not revenue, not headcount—is the key to everything you want in your business.

By the time this article is finished, you’ll be thinking about profit all the time. You and your insurance agency will be much better off as a result.

How do you convey your message to a client without seeming “needy” in the process? By understanding how clients think!

Clients give referrals for two possible reasons. First, they want to help you grow your business. Second, they want to help friends and loved ones. Of these two reasons which one do you believe is a strong reason to give you a referral? If you said to help friends and loved ones, then you are right!

If you are like most advisors and agents you know that there are only three ways that your production can go: rise to a new production peak, backslide to a production valley, or cruise control onto a production plateau. Two out of three of those are not good states to be in your business and most people that reach a production peak don’t remain there for very long.

So, where do you currently find yourself? Most of us need a strategy (or several) to move from where we are to where we want to be.