The Right Relationship Chemistry Can Increase Sales, Create Succession Plan

As John Lennon and Paul McCartney could tell you, sometimes you just need a little help from your friends. And in the insurance agency business – where building relationships are key to success – that friend often is more than just a trusted colleague, the person is also a more experienced advisor or mentor.

Some companies have formalized mentorship programs, especially to develop their producers’ skills and book of sales. But Roy Little, president and CEO of the Insurance Educational Association, said mentorships don’t always need to be formalized educational programs. He has witnessed mentorships take many forms: the natural or unconscious relationship; the deliberate relationship; and the formal program. In all instances, however, the key to finding or serving as a good mentor is to have a natural rapport with the other person, according to industry experts.

A Natural Chemistry

In the unconscious relationship, Little said early in his career a senior person in the company at which he was working took an interest in him, and encouraged him to keep striving. “Instead of following the sort of obvious, step-by-step program to establishing myself, becoming part of the team, and waiting until the next promotional opportunity might come along, this particular person said, ‘Why don’t you take on this particular project?’ He basically got a chance to see whether I was going to be a clear thinker and good communicator, and I got the chance to sort of say, ‘OK, I wonder where this thought is going to take me.'”

As the mentee, Little said this mentorship provided a significant growth and startup experience without being tied to a performance review. Moreover, the mentorship was particularly successful because Little said it formed as the outgrowth of a natural relationship, in which he and the mentor had a natural chemistry and genuine interest in seeing each other succeed.

“If the [mentorship] really works, the mentor is also listening to himself talk and saying, ‘Hmm, I could improve this myself,” so it should work on both sides,” Little said.

Deliberately Seek Feedback

In the deliberate mentorship, Little said he personally sought advice from someone mid-career, so the relationship was a little more structured than a natural relationship. When the company he was working at merged with another firm, Little said he felt like the influx of new personnel meant it might take him longer to realize his career ambitions. As a result, he asked the advice of a senior person outside of his department to provide a clear assessment of his performance and how he was viewed by others.

“I chose this person thinking about who knows me in this company at the level that I’d like to get to, but is just outside my line of sight. It was a situation where I classically said, ‘Got a minute?'” Little said. But in that short visit, Little said he learned what others in the company thought of his performance from somebody who didn’t have to sign off on his performance. Additionally, he learned that oftentimes, climbing the corporate ladder is about politics as much as skill.

Forming a Formal Program

In the formal mentorship program, Little said his former company’s human resources department designed a program to spot and develop future managers. As the mentor in this relationship, HR paired Little with someone aiming for a similar career path. He and the mentee had regularly scheduled meetings – and sometimes specific agendas for their meetings.

Little said unfortunately this relationship was not as beneficial, in part because the mentee did not have clear expectations of what he would gain from the relationship, and also because the relationship between the mentor and mentee felt forced.

“I really don’t know if there was any discussion about whether the mentor and mentee might be an appropriate match,” Little said. “What I took out of that experience was the encouragement of mentorship is something that I would espouse loudly, but in order to work, the relationship has to be completely voluntary on both sides. Unless there’s a naturalness or chemistry, and the sort of genuine interest in each other as people as opposed to players within an organization, it kind of becomes an imposed requirement, as opposed to something that would be of value to both.”

Nurturing a Newbie

Paul Saich, CEO of Thoits Insurance in San Jose, Calif., said he has seen formal mentorship programs work, but agrees that chemistry between the mentor and mentee are essential.

Thoits has developed a three- to three-and-a-half-year mentorship program to train recent college graduates to become successful producers. The first year, the “newbie” learns about the agency, working in personal lines, accounting, benefits and commercial lines to learn how the agency works and what people do within the agency. After the first six to 12 months, the newbie is paired with a more seasoned producer.

Formalized sales training with this producer lasts two to three years, during which time the newbie and seasoned producer are “joined at the hip.” The newbie learns to prospect calls and write business together with his or her mentor. And when the mentor and mentee have produced about $250,000 in commission, that is handed over to the newbie, who then can go out on his own to start his or her own book of business.

Throughout the mentoring program, newbies also attend classes and have book study to learn the policy forms and work their way up to a Chartered Property and Casualty Underwriter (CPCU) designation.

Given that the mentorship program lasts about three years, the rapport between the mentor and mentee are essential, Saich said.

“I will not hire a newbie unless I have a good fit for them with a mentor,” he said. “These guys have to live with each other for at least a three-year period, and if they don’t live with each other, it fails. So they’ve got to get along.

“We’ve had a situation where it wasn’t a good chemistry,” Saich continued. “The mentor wasn’t doing his job, and I ended it and assigned the newbie to somebody else.”

Saich relies on the newbie mentorship program to work – in fact shelling out about $100,000 per year for each newbie – as part of his succession plan. “We stopped the program for a couple of years, and realized we have to keep going because we’ve got to have capable producers to transition the business to,” he said. “As people retire or grow their book of business, they need to have other producers to step in to help them with that book of business. That’s why you see a lot of brokers fail today, or have to sell today, because they don’t have that transition plan.”

The investment in mentees pays off, Saich said, because when the mentorship program succeeds, the company reaps dividends. “When the chemistry hits right, you do the [training] correctly, and you have an aggressive, motivated mentor mentoring a newbie, and if they’re able to utilize a newbie correctly, there’s a huge windfall of business that can take place,” he said. “One of our newbies is a very established producer today, and we were able to write anywhere from four to five hundred thousand dollars of commission each year that myself and him were paired up. That was because he was pushing me because he wanted to get to the point where he was a producer, and it’s kind of infectious.”

Keeping It in House

Mark Bridges and Bry Ewan believe that friendship is key to a good mentorship as well. They got the idea for creating a producer development program within the Combined Agents of America (CAA) while attending a producer school in Florida.

Bridges explained that during his first year in the insurance business he went to the producer training program in Florida, spending a week there every quarter. It was there that he met Ewan.

“We struck up a friendship. As part of the insurance training school we went to there was some insurance training, some sales training, but a lot of what we did was just exchange some ideas, swap war stories, talk about what was working, what they were doing, what wasn’t working,” Bridges said.

Bridges’ agency, Duncan Fraser Bridges in Amarillo, Texas, and Ewan’s agency, Evans, Ewan & Brady Insurance Agency in Georgetown, Texas, are both members of CAA, a partnership of 44 independent agencies in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.

One night over dinner the two hatched the idea of developing a training program just for CAA partners. “We calculated that within the agencies that we had at that time we had somewhere between 50 and 100 agency principals and producers that we could bring together several times a year to do the same thing that we were doing in Florida,” Bridges said.

He said the producers at the Florida school were friendly while there, but hailing from diverse areas around the country they were unlikely to keep in touch. By developing a program within CAA, “not only are we partners when we come to the producer program but we are partners when we walk away,” Bridges said. “So we naturally stay in each others lives.”

The first session of the producer development program was in 2005 and the program is still going strong.

“We have a solid group of about 50 agency principals and producers that meet two times a year. I think we’ve probably met 15 times now in the last five to six years,” Bridges said.

Tony McAlister, a producer with BRIA Insurance & Risk Consultants in Austin, Texas, appreciates the benefits the program has provided him. He entered the insurance business while in his late 20s, about five years ago, and found it rough going at first.

“My first year was particularly difficult. I figured I would just walk into it and it would be a piece of cake but I quickly found out that it wasn’t,” McAlister said. “Being a part of CAA and the producer program has been very positive for me in terms of bouncing ideas off of agents that have more experience than I do. It was always an encouraging thing to realize that other agents were experiencing the same things that I was.”

McAlister said not only was it reassuring to hear that other agents had had the same kinds of trials that he had, the specific training he’s received has been a “game changer in terms of building relationships and getting clients, team selling, things like that.”

Don Jones, president of Crockett Insurance Service in Crockett, Texas, and president of CAA, has been in the insurance business for 43 years but still remembers the tough times in the beginning.

“I don’t care how long you’ve been in the business you never forget the difficulties of those first few years and how to survive it,” Jones said. Even so, Jones and other members of the CAA management were skeptical at first of the idea of starting a producer development program.

“A lot of us old hands have been around a long time, spent a lot of money on training sessions, motivation and sales, and not had good results. So we were a little concerned. But we wanted to support these young guys and to see what they could come up with,” Jones said.

“After about a year of this group forming, I attended the first meeting. And I’ve got to tell you when I walked in the room I knew they had something you don’t find in other groups. And they’re partners – they’re not just people they’re never going to see again. They’re people they’re going to do business with for possibly the rest of their lives. There’s a bond. There’s a trust. There’s just a real desire to help each other succeed.”

On the last day of the twice yearly program, the group has an agency principal panel. It’s “probably the best example of how a mentor-mentee relationship is demonstrated within CAA,” Bridges said.

A rotating panel of four to five agency principals is asked the same questions at each session. Typically, the questions run something like: How did you get started in business? Tell us about your agency. What challenges have you faced along the way?

“What’s interesting for us is that for those that are on the front side of their career, as opposed to the back side of their career, is that the same story is pretty much told every time from the perspective of: It was tough for them. Even though life’s good and life’s been good for years, they faced the same challenges that we did, or are still facing today,” Bridges said.

What Didn’t Work

Bridges said not everything has worked as originally planned as the program has evolved. For example, the intention at first was that the participants would meet for a week once per quarter. It was difficult to get the whole group together that often for that much time, however, and the low turnouts were disappointing and counter productive. The group now meets twice a year, which has worked out well and attracted bigger groups, Bridges said.

“Another thing we did is we used to pick different venues every time,” he said. “We tried to pick some cool downtown hotel where there were lots of good restaurants, and what we found was when the meeting was over it seemed like everybody just kind of dispersed and went their own way.

The program now meets at a dude ranch, in a secluded location, where the cost of the stay includes hotel rooms, meals and all the dude ranch activities. “What we found is it kept all of us together the whole time, and that made us solidify our relationships even more,” Bridges said.

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