Management and growth are essential to the survival of an insurance team.
While this may seem obvious, what is less obvious is the most effective means of maintaining growth both individually and corporately within the organization. Want to establish a pattern of success for your team? Develop a series of goals.
Setting goals
Using goals to help your team perform better gives you measurable markers on your team’s success. Within the insurance industry, there are many avenues that can be goal oriented. You can track both new and renewed business. Establish a goal for both personal and commercial business. Break down the commercial goal into business size: small, medium, and large.
Set goals that reflect each aspect of the insurance business, and monitor progress regularly. Adding goals that correspond to each type of product sold can help to generate a more balanced book for the team member, and increase company performance. This is also an excellent way to target specific areas where the company may need to generate additional revenue.
Team goals
One of the best ways to promote team unity and success is to set large goals for teams. This allows everyone to work together to reach the targeted sales goal, and allows for everyone to share in the success of reaching the goal. Use the larger, team goal to focus attention on overall corporate goals.
These goals can be based on any aspect of the business that needs to be improved. Want to increase sales? Set a target sales goal. Need to improve customer satisfaction? Establish a goal to increase the number of satisfied clients. Customize the goal to accommodate whatever is a priority for your team.
Individual goals
To correspond with the team goals, establish individual goals for each member of the team. How will each member contribute to the overall success of the team? Break down the larger goal into manageable chunks that correlate to each individual. Have a high producer? Give them extra incentive and recognition for reaching their huge goal. Have new members on your team? Motivate them by celebrating every milestone reached in their individual goal.
Production goals
Instead of focusing solely on generating income, make sure your goals focus on production, as well. While it is important to monitor sales figures, it is equally as important to set goals that focus on improving customer retention, handling customer issues in a timely manner and tracking closing ratios. Ultimately, these will all lead to increased revenue for the company, but will also lead to increased customer and employee satisfaction.
Monitoring goals
Once you’ve established both team and individual goals, establish benchmarks to help track the company’s progress. Meet regularly to assess progress towards the goals. Weekly team meetings can be an effective progress report of how well the company is doing on the overall goal, and individual status report meetings can provide insight into each employee’s success. Make adjustments and changes as necessary to individual goals, and offer assistance in developing strategies for reaching those goals.
Not only will setting individual goals improve productivity, they help to demonstrate the importance everyone has at the organization. By tying the individual’s success into the overall corporate team goal, each person can get a sense of how they support the work of the company.
Unsure about using goals with your team? Start with one area you’d like to improve. Monitor the effectiveness of your goal setting plan, and see how a strategic goal can increase your company’s success.
