ULTIMATE LSP TEAM

6 S T E P S T O B U I L D I N G Y O U R

SA LE SG R O WT H IN C .C O M

T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

S T E P 0 1

Your Talent Is Your Competitive Advantage

S T E P 0 2

Always Be Recruiting

S T E P 0 3

Increase Your Effectiveness And Skyrocket Results By Leveraging Talent Assessments

S T E P 0 4

Make The Best Decision Possible

S T E P 0 5

Train To Retain

S T E P 0 6

Engage For Profit

C O N C L U S I O N

In today’s fast-paced and competitive sales and sales recruitment environments, Agencies can no longer rely on their instincts to identify those who will excel in sales. They must be metrics-driven and maximize those specific attributes that produce results in their unique LSP environments. Engaging in high-leverage and profit-producing activities maximizes an agency owner’s time.

Built from our most critical result-producing breakthroughs learned from years of delivering significant revenue increases to our clients, this Special Report will provide you with an effective, six step framework for building Your Ultimate LSP Team.

I N T R O D U C T I O N

Six Steps To Building Your Ultimate LSP Team

“If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?”

—JO H N WO O D EN [L E G E N D A R Y U C L A H E A D B A S K E T B A L L C O A C H ]

• 97% of CEOs believe access to, and retention of, key talent is critical to competitive advantage.

• Almost 40% of salespeople miss their quotas.

• 77% of companies are currently changing their talent strategy. Sadly, most agencies do not apply Jim Collins’ concept because they employ losers and fail to retain their superstars. Superstar employees generate significantly more revenue than you might expect. For example, the average revenue per employee at software companies is $287,0001.

The average “decent” LSP (not homerun hitter) for Allstate writes $12k in premium monthly. If that same person were replaced by a superstar who did the average of 67% more premium volume (more activity and better closing %) than their “average” counterpart, he or she would be writing $20k in premium monthly.

This difference equates to $8000 in additional premium monthly, or $96,000 per LSP annually. Factor in ITEM difference of ~20 per month (average item amount of $400) the agency would see a net increase of 240 items per year. This could equate to 10s of thousands of increased bonus dollars.

Hiring smart costs substantially less than hiring poorly. Does the top performer earn considerably more? Get better benefits? Take more vacations?

Miss more work? No. The cost is pretty much the same. In fact, topperformers tend to miss less work than poor performers. That $96,000immediatelydrops to thebottom line. If anagencyhasa teamof five reps,justhiringbetterwouldaddahalfofamilliondollarsinnewpremium!

1 Inc. Magazine. Software Companies More Profitable. 3/20/13.

S T E P 0 1

Your Talent Is Your Competitive Advantage

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” —J IM CO LLI N S [G O O D T O G R E A T ]

“Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act.

There is no other route to success.” —P A B L O P I C A S S O

One of the differentiating factors between producing agencies and non-producing agencies involves LSP turnover. Turnover can have negative consequences for any company:

• Potential lost knowledge as the people who know how to do things leave.

• Potential lost revenue as the people who know how to sell or know clients leave.

• Increased costs as agency owners have to source, interview, and hire and train new LSP staff.

• Potential reduction in LSP morale and productivity as people see their colleagues leave.

Research from Jorgen Sundberg tells us just how much money a bad mid-level manager costs a company before someone finally wakes up and fires him or her. Assuming that employee’s annual salary is $65,000, the cost to the company is $840,000.2 An Allstate LSP may be less annually, but the costs are proportionate. A bad LSP who is a $12/per hour employer costs an Agency Owner well over $100k in lost revenue in annual cash flow and bonus because of the unrecoverable training costs, lost sales, wasted time, and lost bonus. Just think how much more your bonus would be if you had 240 more items for the year! This can be achieved by obtaining a sales superstar and retaining them. Though nearly a million dollars sounds unfathomable, consider the lost opportunities of employing a bad manager. How many customers were not upsold? How many new clients were not landed? How many good employees left? How much would they have earned the company had they stayed? The hard costs – salary and benefits – don’t amount to much. It’s the soft costs, the lost opportunities that drive the costs of a bad hire so high.Agency owners must develop a culture where they only hire “sales-killers” who always give them a superstar lineup. Winning LSP teams are always looking for the next stone cold “sales-killer.” Always Be Recruiting ensures an all-star sales lineup.

2 The Real Cost of Hiring the Wrong Employee. Inc. Magazine. 9/30/13.

S T E P 0 2

Always Be Recruiting

“My favorite things in life don’t cost any money. It’s really clear that the most precious resource we all have is time.”

—S TEV E JO B S

The need for control often holds Agency Owners back. When juggling a job opening, most agencies place an ad on a job board (Monster, Career Builder, Indeed, etc.) or run a classified ad on Craigslist or a in a local newspaper. Where they fall down is not in the placement, but in understanding what personality characteristics and specific sales attributes produce results in a given environment. Have you ever interviewed a candidate who crushed their interview and sold you, only to have that new hire whither and fail, once you bring them on board? How much did that cost? A properly implemented Talent Assessment System (TAS) can reduce the resources it takes to manually process applications by 50%3. Many agency owners hate posting new jobs because of the deluge of unqualified applicants that send in resumes. With an effective Talent Assessment System, those applicants can be reviewed and prequalified on your timeline instead of filling up your calendar with worthless interviews. Combine a TAS with a tool that helps narrow the number of applicants so you only see those who might actually do well in the position and the return on your time can be enormous. Large companies have been implementing Talent Assessment Systems since HR budgets began to be reduced during the great recession. Today, those companies spend about 7% of their recruiting budgets on these tools. They obviously see the return on that investment in the form of better applicants and reduced staff required to manage the recruitment process. When you examine your recruiting process, consider the following: • Look for a unified solution that will help you identify quality applicants, while reducing the

total recruiting time.

• Make sure you are budgeting your investment in recruiting and limit your spend to about 7% of your budget.

• Train yourself and your team to fully leverage any investment in recruiting tools. Not

using 100% of the features that are available to you will cause you to leave value on the table.

3 OnREC Magazine. Applicant Tracking Systems: All You Wanted to Know And Didn’t Dare Ask. 2011.

S T E P 0 3

Increase Your Effectiveness And Skyrocket Results By Leveraging Talent Assessments

Hiring Vault incorporates an in-depth candidate assessment that not only incorporates a sophisticated DISC test matrix to determine if someone is a sales killer, but also integrates a proprietary Sales Profiler that details a candidates strengths and weaknesses with a list of sales attributes.

Agencies who incorporated these employee recruitment and qualification strategies in the past saw significant increases in the effectiveness and results of their sales teams.

First hand, when I incorporated a hiring process that yielded better employees, my monthly written premium per producer nearly doubled and is continuing on trend to triple per producer by leveraging the next few steps.

S T E P 0 3

Increase Your Effectiveness and Skyrocket Results by Leveraging Technology (continued)

Why are agencies relying on false statements to drive all of their recruiting efforts?!?! Agencies today are overrun with facts. Companies have brought numbers to every element of American business culture. They rely on data mining to uncover big data to help make important decisions with data. The modern office vernacular is overrun with references to data, measurement, and accuracy, except when recruiting. Yet when recruiting, agencies rely on a sheet of paper full of self-reported quasi-information from a candidate whose sole motivation is to get hired. They proceed as though these resumes are accurate enough to justify wasting countless hours interviewing the candidates who either spent enough money on a resume writing service or happened to include the phrases our recruiters – or resume checking software programs – are looking for. During interviews, agencies ask a myriad of questions. Yet, most of those asking the questions would say, in privacy, they have absolutely no idea what they are looking for or how to judge a good candidate from a good liar. Do not use a resume to determine qualifications and then interview to determine fit.

S T E P 0 4

Make The Best Decision Possible

“Everyone that has researched resumes agrees…as many as 80% contain misleading statements and 53% contain actual

lies.” —D R. JO H N SU L LIV A N

This antiquated process is precisely why agencies refuse to always be recruiting, when recruiting is exactly what they should be doing! Done the old-fashioned way, recruiting is a tremendous waste of time. It would almost be more efficient to post an ad and say, “The first person to show up has the job!” According to the Society for Human Resources Management, 71% of HR professionals agree that pre-employment assessments predict employee behavior4. Follow these four steps to revamp your entire recruiting and onboarding process and save yourself countless hours while increasing the quality of your new-hires: 1. Evaluate current staff and determine the profiles of those doing well in their

roles.

2. Test every applicant and determine how closely their profiles match those of your top performers.

3. Interview those candidates.

4. Hire only the candidates with strong profiles and demonstrable, relevant

experience.

Like any new process or change, adhering to this process will be difficult. Nevertheless, this process MUST become part of your agency’s culture. Once implemented, you will see incredible results not only in your team’s performance, but in how much easier it is for you to attain your goals.

4 Society of Human Resources Management. Personality Tests for the Hiring and Promotion of Employees SHRM Poll. 2011.

S T E P 0 4

Make The Best Decision Possible (continued)

Research by the American Society for Training and Development has proven that training gives the highest return on investment of any transaction in business, including investments in equipment, buildings, and even technology.

Other studies show that effective training:

• Has led to an ROI of 7000% • Can increase employee productivity by as much as 230% • Contributes to a world-class customer experience • Can reduce turnover by 70% 5

Agencies that consistently achieve the highest profits have a specific and proven training strategy. An agency’s training strategy must be documented, ongoing, repeatable, and backed-up by continually updated support materials. Conditioning, reinforcement, and consistent repetition of desired skills and behavior must be integrated and reinforced over time. Ongoing training, skills and drills, along with role-playing, all play an integral role in a company’s execution strategy.

Companies must leverage the data from the Hiring Vault Platform to customize training for their sales staffs. Focusing specifically on those areas identified for continual improvement will raise core competencies across their teams. The Hiring Vault Platform allows users to drill deep beneath the six components of the LSP process: prospecting, greeting, qualifying, demonstrating, influencing, and closing.

5 As aggregated by Howard Community College

S T E P 0 5

Train To Retain

“What’s worse than training your workers and losing them? Not training them and keeping them.”

—ZIG ZI G LA R

“Nothing we do is more important than hiring and developing people. At the end of the day you bet on people, not on strategies.”

— LA WR EN C E B O S SID Y [G E E X E C U T I V E , F O R M E R C E O O F H O N E Y W E L L ]

Agencies with highly engaged employees:

• are 2.7 times more profitable

• are 22% more productive

• have 65% lower turnover 6

Agency owners who are relying on a monthly pot luck to try and keep their staff engaged are flying without radar. Leveraging a solution to maximize an employee’s specific engagement, effectiveness, and motivation make-up is a critical component to running a successful agency. It is not enough to simply match the profile for proven success with an ideal candidate. Agency owners must have specific strategies for keeping staff members engaged and connected to the greater vision -- a vision comprised of maximized revenue-generating activities. If agency owners are not engaging their staff in a way most meaningful to them, they will lose their ideal candidates regardless of money.

One of our current top-performing sales producers in the insurance industry was averaging between $15,000 and $20,000 in monthly sales. By utilizing two reports (Preferred Learning Style and Key Motivators), the agency owner was able to identify specific engagement techniques that elevated this producer’s monthly sales to between $30,000 and $42,000. A few simple tweaks DOUBLED her production!

6 Towers Watson. Global Workplace Study. 2012

S T E P 0 6

Engage For Profit

DRIV E REV EN UE Increase your revenue

per sales producer, while lowering your cost

of acquisition

RETAI N TOP TAL EN T Improve your retention and

engagement of top sales LSPs, resulting in higher

margin policies and stronger client satisfaction

INCREASE EFFI CIEN CY Make data-driven

decisions to optimize your LSP evaluation process

and automate your recruiting process

CUT COSTS Leverage talent

intelligence to significantly reduce the

time and money you waste interviewing and hiring bad candidates

Take YOUR Next Step Visit www.agencyvault.com to learn more and sign up!

• UNLIMITED ASSESSMENTS! • Valuable and Implementable Content for ALL Six Steps • Tools, Videos, worksheets, and training ALLSTATE specific

Hiring Vault is your ongoing solution to hiring AND onboarding efficiency

If you want to build your Ultimate LSP Team, you must take massive action

and pivot how you look for LSPs. With your Hiring Vault Subscription you will

have the tools to train and hire top-producing LSPs

Following the steps laid out here, you should find yourself better equipped to

build your Ultimate LSP Team. You should now have the foundation to hiring the

best people, understand that talent is your competitive advantage, and have the

right strategies and tactics, to train and engage your top producers to create

significant revenue increase by improving performance, while reducing sales costs.