Professional Insurance Agents (PIA) Magazine Articles
Customer Loyalty: A Strategic Advantage in the World of Insurance
What can make your agency unique or different? Why should an individual or family do business with your agency instead of another one within a 20-minute driving radius? Are your products and services wildly different from your local or internet competitors? For many professional insurance agents, differentiation has been difficult to achieve as commoditization of offerings has become more commonplace.
Increase Your Business Through Partnerships
Your role, as independent agents, is to apply risk management principles to each situation, explain potential exposure and loss, and offer different techniques to help insureds mitigate exposure. You know insurance is a people-centric business. You prepare your insureds with the proper tools and reduce stressors for them. Part of your reward is the satisfaction from helping people and making that human connection.
Is Good Customer Service Alien to Your Clients?
Organizations that don't see customer loyalty as a point of strategic differentiation may be looking at their business through the lens of short-term focus. Knowing and communicating the lifetime value of a typical customer to the staff can provide them a framework for maintaining customer relationships, rather than looking at them from a transactional basis.
Build Your Agency
When we work with professional, independent insurance professionals who want to build their agencies, we meet partners and owners who want to grow their agencies in specific ways. One practice-development tactic that can be successful is to build a niche. This is a good way to grow your book of business when you do it in the right way.
Agencies Should Look at Employee Engagement
Some frightening possibilities follow: According to research, it is estimated that American businesses may only be operating at one-third of their capacity because of the lack of a true connection with their employees.
The Complex-Sales Method May Not Be Best Option
Today a number of selling and business development tools are available to independent agents that make it is easy to lose sight of the big picture: a personal connection.
Manage Yourself While You Lead Others
Today's best managers and agency owners are leaders focused on bringing out the best thinking and commitment of all employees in order to develop and sustain the most effective work processes and the highest quality products and services.
Understanding the Strategic Planning Process
Baseball legend Yogi Berra once said, "If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else." What a simple statement, yet really quite profound.
Client Loyalty
While we have just come through one of the biggest financial meltdowns in U.S. history, almost every industry has been forced to rethink its position in the marketplace and how its "go-to-market" strategies have been affected.
Are You Maximizing Your Present?
In many cases, the often-used phase, "It is not what we know that hurts us; but, rather, it is what we think we know that we do not, that gets in our way," still is appropriate.
Satisfying Clients Isn't Good Enough
Suspend your disbelief for a moment and imagine an agency that never seems to lose many clients.
An Enterpreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
Starting with the most basic premise, entrepreneurs can face either the initial challenges surrounding creating a new venture from scratch, or building up a recent acquisition.
Part 1 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
An Enterpreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
In this issue we will identify and help you better understand the six key organizational development tasks.
Part 2 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
Surviving Major Changes
In this issue, we will identify and help you better understand the four major stages that an agency/organization must pass through on its way to greatness as well as the typical characteristics of those stages.
Part 3 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
Surviving Major Changes
In this installment, we discuss the tactical transitions that must be successfully executed.
Part 4 on An Entrepreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
Perpetuation Plan, Retirement Plan, Exit Strategy
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Build and Strengthen Your Agency-Carrier Relationships
What is reasonable for agencies and companies to expect from each other? What advice or requests do insurance industry executives and former industry executives have for the agency owners today?
How Come No One Ever Washes a Rental Car?
We all know the answer to the question in the title; we don't wash a rental car because we don't own it.
It's All About Fetting It Done
Having a solid strategy doesn't get "it" done in and of itself. In the current challenging business environment a solid execution plan rarely is a plan to do "it" faster, better and cheaper.
Keep That Smile On Your Clients Face
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Why Have a Marketing Plan?
Simply put, it's everything a business does to attract customers, keep them coming back and refer others to your business.
An Enterpreneurship to a Professionally Managed Firm
In this issue we will identify and help you better understand the six key organizational development tasks.
New Products-Do They Expand Your Book or Dilute it?
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Why Would Anyone Want to Hire a Consultant
There is no doubt that we in the USA are being bombarded with new challenges on an ongoing basis. Failure to adapt will become a death sentence for many organizations.