How Life & Health Insurance Agents Can Keep Themselves Accountable

Are you accountable?

You can set all the goals you want for your insurance agency, but if you don’t have a way to actually reach them, then it’s all for naught. Goal setting is a crucial part of owning, growing, and maintaining a business—but the part many don’t talk about is the steps it takes to achieving them.

We often talk about how to measure your work to ensure you’re on track to achieving your goal, but there’s another side to it. It’s accountability.

It sounds easy enough. You’re surely doing that, right?

But are you really?

Keeping yourself accountable is a conscious effort. It’s something you have to think about and make sure to set time aside for. You must also have a process around it. Without a repeatable process in place, your accountability could fall to the wayside when your desk gets swamped.

Goals

It all starts with your goals. What are your near-future goals for your agency and how are you planning to achieve them? If you want to grow your book of business in the next year by 10%, what steps are you going to take to achieve that?

Near-future goals would include:

• Quarterly goals—what you want to achieve in the next 3 months
• Half year goals—what you want to achieve in the next 6 months
• Full year goals—what you want to achieve by this time next year

Anything beyond a year would start falling to your future goals.

I cannot stress enough how important it is that you set realistic goals and have realistic steps to achieve them.

Performance Monitoring

After you’ve set your goals and put in place the steps you want to take to reach them, you need to ensure you’re on track. To do this successfully, you need to monitor your performance and progress towards your goals.

What you monitor will depend on your goals. If growing your client base is one of your goals, then you’ll want to monitor your monthly adds and drops and keep tabs on your most profitable lead sources. However, to do any of this, you need to have your data organized in an efficient, easily accessible system. For many agencies, this means an industry-specific agency management system (AMS) like AgencyBloc.

Trying to monitor performance metrics for your agency via spreadsheets or paper files is not only daunting but also draining. It’s not cost-effective, efficient, or fun for that matter.

With an AMS, you can pull specific reports that show you exactly what you’re looking for. In AgencyBloc, you can build these custom reports once, then save them and share them with your team so each person can monitor their own success metrics. For more insight on what all you can (and what you should) track, check out our blog: The 5 Key Performance Indicators Life & Health Agencies Must Be Tracking.

Keeping a close eye on what you’re doing and the success rate of your endeavors is crucial to helping you achieve your goals. Plus, it gives you invaluable insight into your book of business and the health of your agency. Using this information, you can make more informed decisions about hiring needs, resource allotment, future forecasts, and other essential business-related decisions.

Roping in Accountability

Setting goals is a great start, and taking the initiative to track your progress is even better! But, you’re not going to get anywhere if you’re not putting in the effort, too.

This is where accountability comes in. You can say you’re going to do all of these great things and that they’ll translate into great things for your business, but are you really doing them?

It’s like the idea of New Year’s Resolutions. People set goals to lose weight, work out, or maybe even run a marathon, but the accountability sometimes just isn’t there. In fact, 80% of those resolutions usually fail. People can have a plan and create a timeline, but if they don’t actually adopt a healthy diet change, get up to go to the gym, or put those miles in, then they will not succeed.

The same holds true in business. If your goal is to grow, then what are you doing each day to achieve that growth? What are your week goals or month goals that you’re striving towards?

There are a few ways to keep yourself accountable that are easy to adopt into your current process:

• Writing. Fun fact, you’re 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you start by writing them down. This could be on a community whiteboard or a personal journal where you can jot down the goals and detail what you’re doing each and every day to achieve them.
• Find an accountability buddy. This is a mutually beneficial partnership where you can work together to ensure you’re both achieving the goals you set out for yourselves. Set aside time (weekly or monthly) to come together and discuss what you’re each doing that is helping you achieve  your goals. THEN MAKE SURE YOU MEET. This is like a workout buddy; they push you to exercise regularly and achieve your goals because you don’t want to feel like you’re letting them down.
• Leverage your KPIs. Use the performance metrics you’re tracking to gain insight into the success of your endeavors. What’s working? What isn’t working? What do you need to tweak or change completely? These reports are an invaluable asset to helping you achieve your goals. It’s impossible to hold yourself accountable if you don’t have the data to measure your efforts.

If you have a team, then use them as your accountability buddies so you can all lean on each other to help you all achieve your goals. Then, when you’re in the tough times, you can brainstorm ways to get through and find those greener pastures.

Whichever you decide (or you mix the two and use both!) just make sure you’re accountable about being accountable. Goals are great things to have, but without a plan or the drive to achieve them, then they are just far away dreams.

So. What are your goals? How are you tracking them? And what are you doing each and every day to achieve them?

It’s never too late to start, so why not start today?