StartUpSelling CEO Alan Blume recently posted an article to ProducersWeb:
Should you hire a producer without an insurance agency leads program?
The title of this article poses a question that many insurance agency owners, executives and producers ponder: Should agencies hire a producer without first implementing an insurance agency marketing and lead generation program? After all, whose job is it to fill the top of the funnel? And has the answer evolved over time, requiring a different response today than it did 10 or 20 years ago?
Some insurance agency owners think that insurance agency leads should be generated by producers. They expect them to pick up the phone and cold call their way to a robust pipeline, join networking groups, stop by businesses, drop off brochures (canvassing) and send out information via the U.S. Postal Service. This may have been an adequate strategy 20 years ago, though it did result in a high producer failure rate. But today, there are better tools, technologies and methodologies available to help ensure the success of new agents, many of which can and should be used by the producers themselves.