Here are three areas where agents and agencies are most frequently out of alignment.

1. “Perfect Client” Alignment

What does a good account look like? Ask that question within your agency and you're likely to get several different answers. For some agents, a good account is any that's willing to do business with them. For others, there are more definitive characteristics. Whether your perfect client is simple or complex, requiring frequent or infrequent touches, within a particular niche, or over a certain revenue size, it is critical that your definition of the right-fit client match the prospects in your agency's pipeline.

Here are a few steps that you can take to help create alignment:

• Evaluate where your agency has created the greatest impact with your existing clients. There are a number of areas of focus you can assess. Do you experience greater success in a particular industry or class of business? Do you have unique capabilities that allow you to be effective in a particular line of insurance? For example, your agency may have capabilities in workers' compensation that reduce the cost and duration of employee injuries thereby improving your client's opportunities, profitability and risk profile. You're likely to find that there are a number of perfect client types within your agency. You'll also find that there are risks you just shouldn't work with, and knowing that is just as important.
• Talk to your service team. Agents are likely to say they can handle a particular kind of risk, even if they don't have experience in managing it. Your service teams will give you valuable insight into the challenges they face as well as the potential for an E&O claim.
• Educate yourself. If a marketplace is teeming with opportunity within a particular class of business, identify the right person in your organization who can become the champion. Set clear goals for them around education, marketing and identifying right-fit prospects. As their knowledge base increases be sure to have them align with their service colleagues so new clients are on-boarded and serviced appropriately.

2. Pipeline Alignment

Pipelines reflect the quality of lifestyle an agent envisions for him or herself. So it only makes sense that an agency's pipeline reflects the type of agency the principals and leadership team want to build. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.

If pipelines are an indication of revenue predictability and future success for both the producer and the agency, why don't producers and agency leadership work more closely to develop ones that are robust, researched and “right fits”?

We suspect it has to do with the intrapreneurial (entrepreneurs within a structured setting) nature of insurance. Commission splits, autonomy and a sales culture often means that agency owners leave pipeline development up to individual producers. In doing so, they put one of their greatest assets at risk: the names, emails, and contact information of hundreds or thousands of prospects, not to mention potential lost opportunity costs.

On the flip side, producers are often asked to do work that is not in alignment with how most are typically wired. Leads must be nurtured and campaigns built for leads to become sales ready. Spending time creating marketing campaigns and well-scripted messages may not be the best use of a producer's time or abilities.

With so much at risk, it is essential that producers and agency owners align their pipeline development and management strategies. Here are ideas to consider:

• Identify how much revenue is needed within producers' pipelines based on their annual revenue goals.
• Gain agreements around who is responsible for lead development versus lead nurturing activities. We suggest that producers identify prospects and conduct the research to secure emails and multiple contacts, then turn the lead over to an inside business development person who is responsible for messaging the prospect to a point of “sales readiness.”
• Utilize an agency-customer relationship management tool. Maintaining ownership of leads should be non-negotiable. If one producer isn't actively pursuing a prospect, it should be fair game for someone else in the agency to try.

3. Sales and Service Alignment

Getting internal agreement on the agency's perfect client type and how to develop and nurture qualified leads are just the start. The next step is for producers and agency leaders to agree on how and when resources will be provided to an account once it is written.

Without an effective sales process, service teams can become overworked, overrun and overstressed by being poorly positioned by their sales counterparts. It's not uncommon to hear, “I wrote the account, now it's time to give them everything we've got!” That's great, as long as you're not the one trying to manage implementation.

Unless you've forged a consensus in the sales process or specific objectives identified, service will not know where to start. Without direction they will find themselves confused and frustrated, and so will your clients.

Clients that aren't prepared to engage with your service team around specific goals and objectives will resist, leading to frustration and missed opportunities for all parties.

Of all the recommendations we've shared, these may prove to be the most difficult to implement because they require a thorough examination of how you engage with prospective clients. Forging agreements and developing action plans in the sales process are necessary steps when trying to improve implementation. If you think you have a service issue, you likely have a sales process issue.

Producers must do a better job in setting the table for service. This must be an agency expectation; if not, it most likely won't happen.

Creating alignments around these strategies and others will help foster a client-focused environment and improve outcomes for all stakeholders.