Agency sales and marketing support has traditionally been structured to help an agency win new business by competing on three fundamentalsprice, product and service.

Chances are that your agency in your sales and marketing messages talks about your competitive prices and your range of coverages to reduce the major financial risks that your prospects worry about. You also likely point to your reliable, friendly and responsive service.

But how effective can your agencys sales and marketing effort be if it focuses exclusively on these traditional messages? Marginal price differences among comparable products make price competition an anemic strategy for growing your agency rapidly. Similarly, the insurance products that your agency and others offer tend not to vary dramatically from one agency to the nextfor reasons ranging from the standardization of policy forms to the fact that similar customers have similar needs.

It is a new day for agencies, especially commercial agencies, in the wake of 9/11. Your agency needs to be more than a “source” of coverage. Rather, you need to be a “resource”advising and guiding your clients in a markedly more uncertain world than the one that existed on Sept. 10, 2001. In short, you need to raise the bar on what your prospects can expect of you.

In this new environment, service matters more than ever, but Im not talking about service in the traditional sense. I dont mean reactive servicehow promptly you handle phone calls, the fact that you are there for your clients when needed, and so forth. Im talking about proactive servicethe things you do without being asked. This is where your agency today can find its strongest competitive advantage.

Let me give you a mantra to remember. Its something I tell all of my clients and professional colleagues to take to heart. Its a statement that I advise anyone in sales to utter, repeat, memorize and personify, and here it is:

“My job as an insurance agent is to proactively control the experiences of my clients, making their future more predictable.”

What do I mean? I mean that your jobwhether you are selling to a prospect or dealing with a clientis to focus on the specific things they really care about and can understand, the areas where they are most likely to feel anxiety or frustration, the specific actions you can take to keep them out of trouble and to benefit from future events, and the peace of mind that you can give them by ensuring that things dont fall through the cracks. That is the essence of proactive service.

What exactly are these things? Basically, they fall into three categories: (1) things that only you do; (2) things that you and other agencies do, but that you do better; and (3) things that you and other agencies do, but your compelling way of describing them motivates prospects to prefer to do business with you.

If you can identify theseespecially the strengths of your agency that match up against weaknesses of your competitorsyou will have found a competitive edge that you can translate into a winning difference. The proactive things you do dont have to be ingenious service breakthroughs. They can be as mundane as the way you do claims reviews, how often you visit your clients in person, your diligence in doing payroll audits, and so forth.

Often, you can identify them from what your prospects tell you about their current service. Do they complain about not seeing their rep, not having calls returned quickly, getting unexpected or inaccurate invoices, receiving things at the last minute, and so on? Most agencies have 12-to-18 specific proactive services that address these typical client issues. If you can break yours down into concrete chunks that clearly describe how your prospects benefit, you will have a powerful tool for garnering new accounts.

Competing on proactive services also enables your agency to overcome the classic prospect view of insurance that makes it tough to sell new coverage, let alone win business away from a competitor. Prospects tend not to focus on the day-to-day details of service, except for the assurance that any claims will be handled with dispatch and paid fully.

Since 9/11, to be sure, prospects are more mindful of the need for more sophisticated services, but their bottom line orientation tends to be on premiums and claims, not on the manner of service. Many agencies merely respond to this prospect predilection. Thus, the agency that differentiates itself on proactive service has the greatest potential to break from the pack and become a market leader.

The evolution of traditional price/product/reactive service competition into the contemporary emphasis on proactive service has set the stage for another round of agency competition in the months and years ahead. Its an unfolding story, much as high-jumping was an evolving story at the time of the 1936 Olympics. After those games, you see, a new technique called the “straddle” enabled American and Russian jumpers to dominate the field for four decades, pushing the world record to seven feet, five-and-three-quarter inches.

Then, in the 1960s, Dick Fosbury of the University of Oregon came up with the Fosbury Flop. After Mr. Fosbury himself won the 1968 Olympic gold medal using his own innovation, Cuban jumper Javier Sotomayor relied on it to become, in 1989, the first person to clear eight feet (and to set the current world record of eight feet, on-half inch in 1993).

In similar fashion, successful and growing agencies have risen to the occasion each time as the character and content of marketplace competition have changed. How high can your agency jump? As high as you let your proactive serviceyour strongest potential competitive advantagetake you.

Randy Schwantz is president and CEO of The Wedge Group, a sales training and performance consulting firm headquartered near Dallas, Texas. He is author of “The Wedge: How to Stop Selling and Start Winning” and “Breaking The Sales Barrier: How To Develop Million-Dollar Producers,” published by The National Underwriter Company. For more information, visit www.thewedge.net or www.NationalUnderwriter.com/nucatalog/, or call toll-free 1-877-999-9334.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Edition, February 18, 2005. Copyright 2005 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.