Since 2006, Benchmark Business Group has worked extensively with insurance agents, financial advisors, field leaders and professionals in the financial services industry. Our newsletter Optimal Outcome Insights provides additional value to financial services professionals in short and thought-provoking articles with practical insights. Delivered to your inbox on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of each month, these insights will challenge you to design your Agency to achieve optimal results. You can sign up here or read published Optimal Outcome Insights below.
When the conversation turns into a venting session A team member approaches you and is unloading about a billing dispute, an underwriting decline, or a company’s turnaround time. Sound familiar? Frustration is human. It happens in every agency. The question isn’t whether it shows up, it’s whether you let it...
Agencies often believe that meetings are a waste of time. Common excuses for not holding meetings include: We're too small for formal meetings. Clients come first. We talk every day anyway. Meetings get off track and waste valuable production time. However, when agencies don't meet, there are real consequences. Information...
It's easy to get excited about a new marketing campaign. You put time and money into it, it looks professional, and it represents your agency well. But looking good and achieving productive results are two different things. Before you launch your next campaign, or evaluate the one already running, step...
Handing someone a business card and hoping they call for a quote is not prospecting. It is wishful thinking. Most agency owners understand this. The bigger question is whether your team actually operates this way. Your sales associates, agents, and service team interact with people every single day. At events,...
If the departure of one key person for a two-week vacation causes your agency’s gears to grind, you aren't facing a lack of talent. You are facing a flaw in design. Most Agency owners don't intentionally design their Agency to have this fragility; it happens by accident. You take a...
The average person has 150 people in their social circle. How many of them know your name? Most Agencies fall into one of two camps. They either skip asking for referrals at all, or they take a passive approach such as handing over a business card with the hope that...
In any agency, the team members answering the phones carry more responsibility than they may realize. While we often focus on service and client experience, your front line is actually protecting your agency’s most valuable asset: time. High-quality service requires focused blocks of time. When hours are spent in the...
We’ve all been there. You give your AI a simple instruction: Fix the typo in paragraph two, but don’t change the tone. It hands you back a sterilized, robotic version of your original thought. Even worse? It validates a marketing strategy you know is a reach, simply because it’s programmed...
People buy solutions for problems they have, but they often rely on emotions to make the final decision. They like to say they use logic, and to some degree logical elements such as budget play a role in their decision making. Yet if you think of all the brands out...
By: Gerry Herbison, Optimal Outcome Coach Advisors often serve hundreds of customers. Keeping track of relationships can become overwhelming. Emails get buried and follow-ups fall through the cracks. Team members need to access the same files at the same time, and it’s hard to assist a client if the person...
