If you've been paying attention, and we're sure you have been, you've noticed the "HELP WANTED" signs on office doors all over the country. From the family-owned diner on the corner to fast food chains to doctor's offices and beyond, no one wants to work. And while you may have open positions in your agency that you're trying to fill, there's no guarantee that you're going to even be able to attract an employee who REALLY WANTS TO WORK.
Below, Mike shares his thoughts on one very simple thing you can be doing in your agency to help out your understaffed and overworked agency at this very moment, without risking a hefty salary on someone who may not even show up when you need them. Check it out!
"Right now you have an over the top abundance of people who NEED - past WANT - to save some money on their insurance.
Right now many of you are struggling to find the MANPOWER necessary to drive the numbers you are trying to hit.
And yet, with automation, you could have each and every person in your office so flush with opportunity they would not even have to pick up the phone to make an outbound dial to get a quote. But for some reason that's not a conversation many of you are willing to have.
Sitting in your office, day after day, smiling and dialing, some days making 100 dials with 10 people picking up and 2 or 3 allowing you to quote.
Some days with the best of intentions on making the hundred dials but only getting around to 30 with no quotes, because office stuff.
Yet, you could have a program dropping hundreds if not THOUSANDS of enticing messages, timed out throughout the day. 25 messages going out every 15 minutes for 8 hours. 800 messages going out. Bump it to 50 / 1600 if you're a bigger office. Bump it to 100 / 3200 if you're huge and simply have your phone ringing... or your calendar registering with person.... after person.... after person saying "I just got a message from you about my insurance.... let's talk."
But instead the conversation is about how we're struggling to bring on new people. How about getting your EXISTING people working for the full 8-10 hours they're there? MOST of us have people sitting around twiddling their thumbs or forcing themselves to use ineffective and exhausting prospecting methods when they COULD be QUOTING AND SELLING ALLLLLL DAYYYYY ERRRRRYYYY DAYYY.
But instead you're trying to figure out how you can put some fancy job offer and compensation/benefit package for people who are going to ghost your interviews and potentially not show up for their first day.
You're looking to OVERPAY a PERSON to do the exact same thing as the other people in your office right now. Smile and Dial 5-6 hours out of the 8 and hopefully pick up an hour or two of productive activity as the result.
You COULD have those people wasting those 5-6 hours dialing every day just quoting, selling, and binding. Can I ask you why you're doing this?
We are a year and a half into this pandemic. We are not seeing signs of improvement, in fact, many would argue that this employment situation is going to continue to get worse.
There are over 10 million open jobs right now in our country. 10 million.
They ain't coming to work for you unless you get super creative and overpay, and at that point it's a crap shoot if you're even getting anyone worth the pay.
OR, you could have a machine get those calls and messages done for you for LESS than the price of a VA and have the opportunity land in the lap of the people in your office that you already employ and know can close the business.
Unless your people suck. I've got no solution for you if your team sucks.
You're stuck with suck right now, but at least you can give the suck more at bats..
A broken clock is right two times a day and more at bats will help a weak team close more business too."