As 2021 comes to a close, it brings an opportunity to catch up on work around the office and reflect upon the year. It’s also a great time to review how much progress you made towards your goals and begin to set new year goals for 2022.
You shouldn’t be discouraged if you didn’t meet every goal you set out to achieve at the beginning of the year—depending on how lofty they were, making any progress towards achieving your goals is a success.
When beginning the process of planning new year goals, it is important to keep a few things in mind. While it might feel good to set a goal to double your insurance agency revenue within a year, you want to make sure it is possible to do so. Many insurance agents fall into the trap of setting unattainable goals.
Here are some strategies to help you set goals for 2022:
As an insurance agency owner, setting goals is a great way to track success and provide structure for your organization. Without concrete, measurable goals, it can be difficult to tell whether you are making progress year over year.
Goals are also helpful when it comes to the growth of your insurance agents. Without setting individual goals, you may notice that your staff and even yourself will eventually hit a point where growth stops. Providing goals and incentives in these situations is a great way to break through these plateaus.
One of the biggest mistakes an insurance agency makes is focusing on the wrong goals. Instead of setting goals that drive growth and revenue, they focus more on vanity metrics.
The four main goals every insurance agency should be setting for 2022 include:
Overall business goals can vary from agency to agency but they should ultimately set the direction you want your business to go in 2022.
These goals also help lay the framework for the other three types of goals. If your business goal is to write a specific number of policies throughout the year, your sales and marketing goals should support that. Likewise, if you have a business goal to grow your team by a specific number, you will need operations goals to support it.
Below are a few of the most common business goals to consider:
It’s crucial when setting business goals that you keep them realistic. Even though we would all love to grow revenue by 100 percent year over year, that isn’t feasible for most agencies.
Instead, you’ll want to look back at your agency’s historical data. If your revenue has grown by ten percent each year for the past five years, then a good goal might be to try and increase revenue by 15 percent in 2022.
Since an insurance agency’s success is primarily tied to the number of policies they write, it’s important to have sales goals in place. The sales goals you establish should also support your overall business goals.
For instance, if your annual goal is to increase total revenue by 15 percent, you should know how many policies it would take to reach this goal. From there, you can break the number of policies needed into a quarterly number and track your progress.
If you need to write an additional 200 policies throughout the year, your quarterly goal should be to add 50 policies. Keeping track of how you’re doing each month will indicate whether you need to change your sales strategy to meet your overall business goals.
One of the most overlooked goals for an insurance agency involves operations. Even though sales are important, you need to have goals that focus on other aspects of your company. For example, you can set goals that concentrate on any of the following areas:
Having these goals will help improve other aspects of your business and can lead to more referral business in the future.
Many agencies rely on the tried and true techniques of cold calling, seminars, and word of mouth to drum up business. However, as the marketplace has shifted to a digital environment, consumers are expecting to have the ability to take care of their insurance needs online.
As an insurance agency, it’s important to take advantage of this digital shift and provide an online platform for your customers. Having a website with resources, articles, and additional information can be a great way to connect online.
To help you identify how well your website performs, you can utilize marketing goals to determine how many leads are coming in through contact forms and converting to actual policies.
Once you have outlined your goals, you will need a way to track your progress. Often the easiest way to monitor how well you’re performing is to break down your goals into smaller monthly or quarterly goals.
If you plan on hiring four new team members for the year, then set a smaller goal to hire one new person a quarter. Likewise, if you want to improve your customer retention or customer service numbers, sending out a monthly survey can be a great way to track progress.
Thanks for reading our educational resource! Any above reference to a specific company, method, or product is meant for educational purposes only and is not specifically endorsed by Pie.
