It is very easy when you bring on a new team member to fall in love with them.

Make sure you are falling in love with the actual person you hired and not the person you FEEL like you THINK you hired.

The honeymoon stage in an employer / employee relationship is as real as it is in a romantic one.  That hot and steamy first few months where the new staff member is trying to impress their new boss generally wears off. 

It is easy to get caught up in the idea of "potential" or production numbers boasted from previous offices.

By the end of the first two months you should be seeing more than just a glimmer of the person you thought you hired.

If you do not... you should begin thinking about cutting bait.

Slow to hire.

Quick to fire.

Do NOT fall in love with the person you INTERVIEWED....

or the person you THINK you are getting...

Examine the body of work they show you once they start, independently.

Fall in love with the results; when they deliver as advertised and ARE the person you believed to be hiring. 

Many of your hires are the product of being in a great or poor system with good or bad leadership. 

The environment and culture created in YOUR office will also be a determining factor in your hires' success. 

Make sure you are providing them absolutely everything they need to be successful and watch your new hires soar. 

If you are not already a part of Insurance Soup we would love for you to join the family!

www.facebook.com/groups/insurancesoup

If you follow along in our free group, Insurance Soup, you know that I like to poll the audience of 17,000 Agents, Brokers, and Team Members that hang out with us daily.  The broad range of industry experience and carrier representation in conjunction with our efforts to keep corporate suits and vendors out of the group generally gives us some good and honest feedback when we ask tough questions. 

We recently asked our group to rate the training they receive from their carrier partners in 3 different areas. 

Product Training... Sales.... Marketing

The results from this impromptu poll sadly did not phase me. It did however make me a little sad. 

One of the hardest decisions we are forced to make in this business is when to stay open and when to close during inclement weather and national disasters. 

One one hand our business is our baby. Closing our business means not feeding our baby and a hungry baby is not a happy baby. 

Before we even jump into this article did you know we are giving away a CRUISE on New Years Day, 2018 to a licensed agent? 

​Yes, seriously!

Anyway on to a controversial conversation! Who doesn't love disagreeing with someone on the internet!

Recently we asked two questions in our public Facebook group, The Insurance Soup with a little hidden agenda. One thing we have learned is that when you pose questions separately that sometimes you can better gauge how an audience really feels than when you pose them together. 

The first question we asked was, "Do you believe that Insurance is still a relationship based industry?"

146 comments on the post... Most of them resounding YES!!  

The every day agency is in a state of chaos almost all the time. 

Sales are up and down. Staffing turns over a bit. The marketing and leads are inconsistent. There are so many variables in the every day life of an Agency that things are both tough to manage and unpredictable. 

We speak with a LOT of Agents both privately and within the FREE INSURANCE SOUP Facebook group and the perspective we have from having conversations with hundreds of agents a week and thousands a month is relatively unique. 

There is a spectrum that Agencies fall on with regards to how they operate. 

I like to call it the Latch Key - Turn Key Spectrum

We hear it in The Insurance Soup Facebook group literally every single day. There is always an agent in our 14000 member FREE group that is wondering who the best company to purchase leads from is.

We totally get it. You need opportunity. Clients are not just walking through the door or calling the office like they did when the dinosaurs in your districts, territories, and towns were young and spry.​

Before we jump into the article lets just get the shameless plug out of the way.
Join Insurance Soup – the #1 FREE Group on social media for Insurance Agents and Brokers (OVER 12,000 active members!!) looking to talk about sales, marketing, social media, office culture, compensation, policies, industry rumors, claims, and wacky clients!
Shameless plug over! On to the show!

​You all have heard it from your district managers, corporate training, or other sources that you need to use social media in your agency but no one ever shows you how. It’s one of those “do as I say not as I do” situations because the ones telling you that you need to use it has no clue 99% of the time how to use it themselves.
After closely working with over 200+ agents and loosely with over 10,000+, we’ve put together the top 3 basic mistakes we see agents making on social media.

​Lets get the shameless plug out of the way… we all know you don’t go to some blog post without some kind of agenda so here’s ours – Join Insurance Soup – the #1 FREE group on all of Social Media for Insurance Agents and Brokers interested in discussing Sales, marketing, lead generation, social media, vendors, crazy clients, comp plans, staffing issues and more.
Did we mention it’s FREE?
Good.On to the show!


Weathering the storm of dwindling finances in the early stages of owning an Agency is no easy task. It’s even more difficult if you are a captive agent trying to “earn” a contract as an “Independent Contractor”
It can be downright impossible to get ahead of the mounting bills, expenses, and costs of a new Agency. Keeping the Agency in the black, growing your book of business, AND taking home a paycheck are three tasks that typically do not align for 18-24 months.. but they can if you take heed the advice in this article.
Today we talk about how you can avoid being Agent 0…. Dollars.
Here are 5 ways you can avoid being the broke agent.

​Let’s get the shameless plug out of the way – Join Career Agent Concepts and the almost 1800 awesome and engaged Insurance Agents and Brokers talking sales, marketing, social media, staffing, compensation, crazy clients and more here >>> JOIN INSURANCE SOUP
Now – On to the show!

Life Insurance is often times the bane of the captive P&C Agents existence. Contracts are held in the balance of your production. Subsidy percentages are dangled in the balance. Bonuses are highly contingent in your ability to sell the coverage.

Companies host focused call nights where everyone stays late to solicit it.  The suits host tons of rah rah sessions and training around it that generally lead to very little lift in your personal production… but if they can get a 3-5% lift across the enterprise that is big money! For them.

So what about you?
When is someone going to actually sit down and SHOW you how to increase your life production with some legit strategies that work?
We’re going to try and get the ball rolling for you today.