3 Steps to Crush Your Monthly Sales Goals

As an insurance agent, the concept of setting goals is not foreign to you.  You have carrier premium goals and business goals that you would like to reach every single month to increase production and grow your book of business.

Working with thousands of agencies, we've seen the good the bad and ugly as far goal management.   What should be a process to help motivate team members and keep the agency on track is often turned into a dreadful and demotivating goal management process due one or many of the following issues

• Goals are not specific and/or not communicated accurately
• Goals are not tracked and progress is not measured on a regular bases
• Unrealistic goals

In this article, we will go over how to effectively set and communicate goals in order to motivate your team and increase production. There’s some impressive science to back up goal setting. And yet it’s something agents are never taught or encourage their teams to do. But the statistics don’t lie, and we're here to make a strong argument for having a good goal management process; and making a habit of it.

A Harvard Business Study found that the 3% of graduates from their MBA who had a plan and a process to manage their goals, ended up earning ten times as much as the other 97% put together, just ten years after graduation.

Whether or not the Harvard MBA Business School study on goal setting applies to you, it does help to highlight something very important: to achieve your goals, they need to be clearly communicated, tracked and progress needs to be constantly measured.

Setting Goals the Right Way

If you want to achieve your goals for your Agency and want to increase your team's chance of achieving theres, then you simply must have a way to communicate goals, track goals and measure progress towards goal in REAL-TIME.

It's critical to emphasis the importance of having real-time metrics, if you're using an AMS system to track your sales and have to wait 24hrs to 48hrs to see where you for the month then you'll always be behind.  Each business day is approximately 5% of your monthly goal (based on a 20 business day month), for that reason, you have to ensure that we keep track of our sales in real-time to give your team the chance to react should you fall behind your monthly goal pace.

Below is a 3 step guide on how to better manage sales goals for your Insurance Agency and you sales producers. If you don't have AgencyZoom to automate the following, then it may seem like a lot of work to keep track of your sales via spreadsheets. However, the result is motivated salespeople who have the support they need to succeed.  But if you are currently spending time managing spreadsheets to track your sales, then you should really consider an easier way to automate that process so that you and your team can focus less on working in the business and more on growing the business.

Step 1- Calculate Your Sales Goals

The total sum of your sales producers' sales goals should align with annual sales goals. Figure out your monthly sales goal by working backward from your Agency's annual target. Once that target is defined, calculate how much your individual sales producers need to sell to meet that goal.

Be sure to take seasonal or staffing fluctuations into account. If you’re onboarding new sales producers in Q3, it may be hard to meet aggressive goals during Q4.

Don't forget to budget for ramp-up time when you’re implementing new goals and onboarding new sales producers. If your sales team is currently doing 50 policies a month and you want to increase that to 100, don’t immediately double the monthly sales goals. Instead, raise the goal to 60 next month, 70 the following month, and so on.

This approach is better for morale because missing goals can increase fear and kill motivation. The waterfall approach also produces higher quality work and better numbers. Your team won’t experience burnout from the increase in work, and you’ll give them time to ramp up quality.

Finally, break down your monthly sales goals into smaller daily and weekly goals.  Smaller goals let your sales producers build confidence with incremental wins and help track your team's progress towards larger goals. This gives you more time to work with struggling sales producers and help them get back on track.

Pro tips

 Set activity goals:

If your sales producer needs to sell 30 policies this month, convert that target into activity goals. Use your salesperson’s historical performance to figure out how many touchpoints, and quotes they need to make one sale.

Example: Let's say that you look up John Doe's call log and quoting metrics and you saw that he made 200 phone calls, quoted 40 leads and sold 20 policies.  That means if you want to increase John's monthly goal to 30 policies, you'll need to set an activity based goal for 300 calls a month or 60 quotes.

Working backward lets you turn a (potentially intimidating) revenue goal into manageable metrics.

Set specific goals:

Before you set a producer's goal, you first must have an idea of what their average production is like.  If they are a producer that sells on average $20,000 in premium a month, then it's completely pointless and counterproductive to give them a goal of $50,000 a month.

Instead, you need to keep 3 metrics in mind as you set their goals and align these metrics with their compensation plan.

• What does below average month look like for each producer?
• What does an average month look like for each producer?
• Where do you want them to be at?

The recommended approach is to set a baseline that helps you understand their average performance then add 10% - 20% increase to their monthly goal until you have a new baseline and keep moving that needle forward.  This approach is to ensure that you're not overwhelming your team by setting realistic goals that are achievable.

Step 2: Communicate Your Sales Goals

Set a process to have a monthly sales goal review with each of your sales producers to discuss progress during active month's goals, and more importantly to discuss next month's goals.  Be sure to set the right expectations and show a daily breakdown of the set monthly goal.

It's also highly recommended that you document each goal discussion to make sure that you and your sales producers are on the same page.  You can use tools like AgencyHR to log each discussion and request acknowledgment from the sales producers.

This is an excellent way to hold each of your sales producers accountable and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Finally, consider what motivates your sales producers and promise a bonus or a type of incentive. If you don't have the ability to give monetary rewards, you can do things like giving free time off or even a free lunch.

Step 3: Monitor Sales Goals

Goals are of no use if they’re not being monitored. Track progress via a sales dashboard like the one in AgencyZoom or have your sales producers manually enter their numbers in an Excel sheet. (We don't recommend this but it's better than not doing it).

If someone on your team isn’t hitting their daily numbers, talk to them before it becomes an impediment to meeting their monthly quota. Monitoring these small goals makes them worth the extra implementation time, so don’t skimp here -- even if it’s tempting.

Why is this so important? The average month has 21 working days, that means each working day makes up for 5% of your monthly goal.

If you have a goal of 60 policies a month, then you need to sell at least 3 policies a day to hit that goal. On the days that you don't sell 3 policies, the balance needs to roll over to the next and so on.

As you can see, this can easily snowball out of control and before you know it, the month will end and goals are missed.

If you're using AgencyZoom as your sales tracker, then it'll automatically calculate daily goals and show progress towards monthly goals.  All you have to do is monitor your dashboard and have discussions with your team as needed.

AgencyZoom sales dashboard and goal tracker showing progress towards a monthly goal of $47,000. This agency is trending to only hit $44,393 for the month.  That means a goal of $2,380 is needed by end of the day to get back on pace.

Finally, as you’re setting new goals or adjusting old ones, check in with your sales producers and ask how they’re feeling. Make sure goals remain realistic, challenging, and attainable. That’s the recipe for a happy, successful sales team.