📹 High-Performing Insurance Team Members and Their Top Traits

I want to share the experience I had as a participant in an agent panel discussing high-performing insurance team members.

They put together an agent from 3 major insurance companies to talk about what makes high-performing insurance team members tick.

What do they do that’s different? 

It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. It doesn’t matter what product or service you offer. It doesn’t matter which company you represent.

Take high-performing insurance team members out of their current environment and put them in any other setting. I can guarantee you that they will become high performers in that environment because they understand that there are common denominators to success.

They do many of the little things that other people won’t, and other people don’t. 

Below are five common denominators that make high-performers in the insurance industry tick.

If you are a team member, do a little self-check, a little self-inventory of how many of these are you consistently doing?

If you’re an agent, I encourage you to have this conversation with them.

Here are things that I jotted down from the forum that make the top performers successful.

Have a Plan

How many people go into the day reactive or wait for the day to come to them? Not the best of the best.

The best go in proactive. They have a plan. They have specific actions and activities they know they have to do. They quantify that with specific numbers, and they work like crazy to get to where they need to be using the plan they established the night before. 

Know the Score

High-performers know the score, and they are obsessed with the score. At no point during a day will you ask a high-performing team member, “where are you at?” They will always answer and know exactly where they are with their daily goals and what their plan is. There’s no guesswork involved.

If they’re behind, they know they’ve got to catch up. If they’re ahead, they want to put their pedal to the metal and crush that day and widen that gap.

Play to Win

They are obsessed with winning. When they have this clearly defined ‘winning day,’ they become very intentional with their actions and activities. That includes things that will not move them closer to winning that day. They have a laser-like focus on getting the main thing done throughout the day because they hate to lose. [Utilize the IAO’s Win Every Day Playbook to keep tabs on your productivity.]

Simplicity and Consistency

Too often, our brains get in the way of our productivity. When we overthink things, or we try to reinvent the wheel, so to speak, that’s when we get slowed down and held back.

The ‘best of the best’ have a way of keeping things very simple.

They consistently follow through on whatever their process is, whatever their system is, and try not to create all-new programs or word tracks.

Successful team members hone in on what they know works, and they do it more than everybody else.

I wrote a book and named it Opportunity Optimization because I believe it should be # 1 on this list. It separates good to great, great to exceptional, exceptional to the true elite in this industry.

They do not have tunnel vision. They do not look at a transaction and see it as just a surface transaction, something to get done and move on. They are looking for opportunities in every single transaction, every interaction, every conversation.

Think about, “where can I go beyond what I think I see on the surface?”

Ordinary people see things on the surface, so they do those things, check those boxes, feel accomplished, and move on. They complete surface transaction after surface transaction and think to themselves that they took care of everything, but they did not get any closer to the goals they have for themselves.

This is because they didn’t go beyond that transaction, and that’s what the ‘best of the best’ do.

They go beyond; they’re opportunity optimizers. They’re great listeners. They’re always looking for cues. They’re always looking for different angles. They’re always looking to be a contrarian,

If you want to be in the top 10%, you can’t do what those in the 90% are doing. If you want to be top 10%, you have to be different, and being different will make you better a lot of times.

You have to go beyond the transaction. You have to optimize every opportunity you have because you may not get that opportunity again.

We don’t get to see our best customers as often as we’d like to, almost never in fact, so when we finally do have someone on the phone, in front of us, or even engaged in email or text, we have to move into something meaningful beyond that basic service transaction. 

The five I jotted down:

1. Have a plan. Be proactive with your day.
2. Know the score at every minute throughout the day. Keep tracking everything you’re doing.
3. Play to win.
4. Simplicity
5. Consistency

Be the person who hates to lose, don’t overthink things, keep things simple, be consistent with your execution of the things you do and finally be an opportunity optimizer.

What will you do with every conversation, every interaction, every transaction to find just one thing where you can go above and beyond and move it into an opportunity?

I know you have it in you to be the best of the best. You have to believe that about yourself, and you have to start being consistently intentional with the way you structure your days and carry yourself through the day.